This year my main focus at Bonfire is building a new product on a very small team. I spend a lot of time actually coding, and it feels good.
Being able to quickly deploy something without having to bother a fellow engineer has been a very liberating experience. More often than not, the amount of time to deploy the fix is less than it takes to document it, make a task, prioritize, and add to the backlog.
I'm also not just talking about copy changes, or fixing padding values. Designers usually have a solid understanding of how the app is engineered, plus a deep knowledge of the the customer needs. Pair them with a LLM, and you can have a very powerful asset on your hands.
For example, every week we have a design & UX review. A paint point came up last week—it wasn't clear how big the artwork should be when uploading it to a specific location on a product. Not knowing that info was a major paint point, since it was hard to prep a design file.
I built a prototype an hour later. The right endpoint was already there, so all we needed was a function to calculate the right dimensions, and a new React component to display the guidelines. The next day it got merged to master and deployed. In a regular development cycle, this would have taken at least a week, and that's if you're lucky!
If you're a designer, and you feel comfortable with frontend development, there's no reason to not have access to the production code of whatever app you're working on. I don't think it's a must on a bigger teams, since designers already have to wear many hats; but on smaller teams it can be a game-changer. It allows everyone to move faster; iterating and delivering new ideas quickly.
It's 2025—let's normalize designers coding (and pushing to production).