Most confusion about the future of software design stems from a confusion in terminology. My view: production design will increasingly be automated. The economic logic is self-evident — training machines to mimic and refine existing production practices is cheaper, faster, and more reliable than training humans to do the same. Strategic design, or “what at are we doing and why,” will look very different. The mediums will broaden: from pencil and paper all the way to automated experiments running in production, iterated on by agents while we sleep. The inputs and systems we create to find opportunities will reward the most intrepid problem-finders. Design stops being a method of sitting and ruminating on possible forms or solution spaces. Design becomes active, research-based, and built around speed of discovery and expression. Exploratory design will undergo the greatest shifts. Historically this has been the domain of the artist and the inventor. What existed in the world sprung from the imaginations of people with waking hours to spare and the technical chops to give form to their ideas. But soon agents will join the mix. Humans and machines alike will generate novel ideas and expressions, building on a vast combinatorial space of possibility. Humans and machines alike will be capable of bringing these forms to market. The key difference? Humans sleep and have finite, socially agreed upon vocabulary. We may be intuitively suited to know the desires of our fellow man. But machines will have a vaster set of references to draw from, and methods to choose what's most effective in the wild — using taste/selection criteria no human operator alone can summon. These forces are not mutually exclusive. But they DO operate on a common landscape of global demand—of Desire in the grandest sense. No matter how much we might wish otherwise, human designers and creatives are not divorced from the logic of desire — nor from unit economics, opportunity costs, or the ever-evolving ways we probe and understand an open-ended set of markets made up of humans and agents alike. Creativity has no bounds. But desire underpins it all. Design itself will not be recognizable from what exists today. Imagine describing NYC to an ancient cave dweller. Agents today are like the most primitive forms of seafaring trade. Instead it will be defined by the designers who build new systems and methods for understanding, channeling, and feeding desire in all its forms.