01 / The answer
No, but it has already changed what the job is
Anyone telling you designers are finished is selling something, and so is anyone telling you nothing has changed. Both are wrong in the same way: they are talking about the tools rather than the work.
Here is what has actually moved, from someone shipping sites with these tools every week.
02 / What got easier
The parts that were never the hard bit
Producing a competent-looking layout is now close to free. So is a first draft of copy, a set of icons, a placeholder image, forty variations on a hero section. If your value was “I can make a nice-looking page”, that value has collapsed, and pretending otherwise does not help anyone.
The same is true of the mechanical half of front-end work. Turning an agreed design into markup is faster than it was, by a lot.
03 / What did not
Four things still entirely human
Knowing what the page is for. Somebody has to decide what a visitor should do, what to leave out, and which of the client’s six priorities is actually the priority. That is a conversation with a person who has a business, not a prompt.
Saying no. Most of design is refusing things: the extra section, the fourth call to action, the carousel. A tool that generates on request has no interest in restraint.
Being accountable. When the enquiry rate drops, someone has to own it and fix it. You cannot escalate to a model.
Judgement about your particular customers. A clinic’s patients and a contractor’s clients want different things from the same layout. That comes from having watched real people fail to find a phone number.
04 / What it means for you as a buyer
The floor has risen and the ceiling has not moved
Bad work is now less obviously bad. A generated site looks fine in a screenshot. It will still have no point of view, no answer to the question a buyer actually has, and every state nobody thought about: the empty search, the error, the long product name.
So judge differently. Do not ask whether it looks modern; that is free now. Ask whether it says something specific, whether it makes one action obvious, and whether the person who built it can explain why each decision is there.
05 / Honestly
The designers at risk are the ones who only executed
If the work was taking instructions and producing screens, that work is being automated, and quickly. If the work is deciding what should exist and defending it, demand for that has gone up, because there is now far more plausible material that nobody has thought about.
We use these tools daily. They have made us faster at the parts we were never paid for and changed nothing about the parts we were.
Tell us what you are trying to build, and you will get a person’s opinion about it, which is still the part worth paying for.