For most of history the person who decided how a thing should be and the person who made it were the same person. A chairmaker held the whole object. Proportion, joint, finish, the feel of it under a hand. There was no drawing to hand over, because there was nobody to hand it to.
Then the drawing arrived. Once an object had to be made a thousand times by people who would never meet its author, the specification became the work. The designer drew, somebody else built, and a gap opened between deciding and making that has defined the profession ever since.
Software widened the gap. A designer produced screens, an engineer produced the product, and the distance between the two was where most of the argument lived. We built whole disciplines to manage that distance. Specs, redlines, design systems, handoff tools, tickets. My own best work at scale was a component library, which is to say a very careful set of instructions for people who were not me.
The translation was never neutral. An engineer reading a spec fills the gaps with judgement, and a good one silently repairs a great deal of vagueness. Ask any designer who has shipped at scale, and they will tell you their work arrived better than they drew it at least as often as it arrived worse.
What is happening now is that the gap is closing again. A designer who can describe a system precisely can have it built, adjust it, and put it in front of someone the same afternoon. I do this on my own site. The specification and the artefact have started to be the same document.
That returns us to something like the chairmaker, with one difference worth naming. The chairmaker’s constraint was the hand. Ours is the description. You can only get back what you were able to say, and most people cannot say a system.
Where this goes in ten years is speculation, so treat it as such. My guess is that the job title splits. Some designers will move toward the substrate, the model of what a thing is and how its parts relate, because that is what everything downstream is generated from. Others will move toward taste, because when producing an option costs nothing, the scarce skill is refusing the wrong ones.
Both of those are older jobs than the profession we have now. We are not inventing them. We are returning to them with better tools.