The rise of AI is prompting questions about the role of designers, as AI can now perform tasks previously done by human designers. This trend is not entirely unexpected, as a significant portion of design work over the past decade involved creating visually appealing interfaces, which AI can now generate quickly and affordably. Design leaders, including the author, acknowledge that the profession inadvertently built the conditions for its own displacement by prioritizing speed and delivery velocity. The focus shifted towards producing screens rapidly to keep engineering teams unblocked, leading to the neglect of deeper strategic thinking and judgment. This emphasis on velocity meant that skills beyond interface production, such as critical assessment of project viability and systemic impact, atrophied due to disuse. AI automates predictable and repeatable tasks first, and for design, that primarily meant user interface creation due to its learnable and describable nature. The industry's consistent message that design is about "how something works" rather than just "how it looks" was difficult to prove without visual representations. AI has now made this visual representation cheap, revealing that for many, the interface itself was the primary skill developed. The author emphasizes that this is not to devalue UI design craft, but to highlight that UI is a translation layer, not the core of design. The core of design lies in judgment, ambiguity tolerance, systems thinking, risk interpretation, and organizational alignment. These are the skills that cannot be automated and will provide leverage in the future. Instead of viewing AI as a job threat, designers should see it as an opportunity to reclaim time for higher-value, strategic work. The author urges designers to ask what they can build with the reclaimed time rather than lamenting what has been automated, as competing on efficiency against AI is a losing strategy.