UI execution is being outsourced, teams are shrinking. The industry is more of a mess than it looks. In uncertain times, shrinking the team and increasing efficiency through AI is precisely what will get applause across board & management teams.
With output commoditized, judgement about what actually is good becomes the scarce thing. But here's the catch: non-designers also have a notion of what's good. The real battle is less about producing (better?) work, and more about proving that your judgement is the better one. The market will shrink, but the demand for talent up the chain will grow.
When mediocre (yet solid) work is cheap and everywhere, beating precisely that is what will separate products. That is what will require strategic judgement, not more screens. Hence the current shift you're seeing from Figma to more code is, in my humble opinion, not what will save the profession. It's a different flavor of output.
So how do you become the trusted signal for what's superb versus merely good? The AI will suggest UI confidently. The right designer will cross-check whether actual well-written UX copy was used, or whether it's consistent with another flow, or whether this might be the area where you do want to break the consistency paradigm of the design system. Or whether this feature was supposed to be built in the first place, looking at the research.
That's my Friday-in-a-heatwave take: output, even if it's code, will not save design.