Flora Guo - How to accelerate your design career with AI

Summary

Dive Club 🤿 — Flora Guo: How to Accelerate Your Design Career with AI

Host: Ridd | Guest: Flora Guo (Founding Design Engineer, Paradigm)
Date: March 25, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features Flora Guo, an accomplished design engineer who has rapidly ascended through the design world, now shaping the experience at AI-native startup Paradigm. Flora shares her personal journey from self-taught maker to prominent design engineer, her approach to learning and applying AI in design, and actionable strategies for designers to accelerate their careers in the era of AI. Along the way, she highlights her unique note-taking and sharing practices, dives into the specifics of her workflow, and offers a fresh perspective on cultivating serendipity, building community, technical upskilling, and leveraging AI as a learning partner.

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Key Topics & Takeaways

1. Opening Metaphor: AI as a Map Maker for Designers

• Flora’s Core Analogy:
  “What AI is really great at is giving us a map of the territory. It’s like when you’re playing a video game and you see that there’s, like, clouds surrounding areas of the map that you haven’t unlocked yet. AI is really good at blowing those clouds away. Basically, now you have a very clear idea of what is possible, but it’s still up to us to walk the terrain.” (00:00, 23:20)

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2. Craft, Conferences, & Community: Lessons from Tokyo (01:11–05:24)

• Flora recaps the Tokyo Design Conference (“Brian Beniot basically brought 50 of the most interesting designers in the space...”) and the impact of sharing detailed notes and "stamps" on social media.
• Notable Talks:
  • Brian Levin on AI in Design at Notion – How AI enables designers to move beyond static artifacts to rich, interactive prototypes.
  • Rio’s Philosophy at Cursor – The importance of exposing user intent in AI tools, contrasting black box versus transparent interfaces.
  • Soleo’s “Geometry of Luck” – “Luck isn’t...just something that falls in your lap, but it has a specific shape and a geometry...we can invite more of into our lives.” (05:24)

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3. Building "Surface Area" for Serendipity (06:49–11:41)

• On Sharing & Community:
  “The role of a designer is that of a very good host.” Flora cites Roy/Charles Eames, encouraging designers to focus on what they can offer as they show up online or in person. (07:21)
• Flora’s professional breakthroughs—like being recruited via Twitter DMs for roles at Vercel and Paradigm—stem from “putting artifacts of what you love online.”
• Actionable Tips:
  • Share excitement and learnings publicly, even if your following is small.
  • Reach out with specific gratitude and feedback to makers you admire (10:58).
  • Host or co-host events to bring community into your orbit.

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4. Demystifying Fast-Track Career Growth: From Projects to Paradigm (11:41–17:31)

• Flora shares her early experiments:
  • Made a digital gift box in V0, which led to DM conversations with Vercel's CEO (“...in January, G DM’d me on Twitter and was like, have you ever thought about working at Vercel?” 13:58)
  • “The fact that you DM’d the CEO of Vercel just to say thank you says so much about you and how you like...That’s a big deal.” — Ridd (14:10)
• Key reflections:
  • Serendipity favored the prepared—and proactive—mind.
  • Technical curiosity and project-sharing can short-circuit traditional application channels.

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5. Learning by Building: Technical Upskilling & Use of AI (17:58–25:34)

• Flora’s learning approach:
  • Self-directed: HTML/CSS/JavaScript basics → REACT docs → personal projects.
  • “There’s always a minimum viable amount of learning that you need to get you to the next step, and then you backfill a lot.” (21:13)
• AI as Scaffolding:
  • Great for quickly prototyping and exploring the “map,” but, “The moment you need to debug something...you’re like, ‘Oh man, I don’t even know where to start.’” (23:20)
  • Advocates balancing deep understanding with leveraging abstraction.

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6. Practical Techniques: Note-Taking, Externalizing, and Harnessing AI (26:31–28:53)

• Personal Artifacts:
  “After I feel like I’ve tried something new or I learned something that I didn’t know before, I’ll quickly write up a markdown file and just save that for next time for my own reference.” (26:31)
• Publishes annotated notes and processes to her website—a living artifact.
• Uses AI as an “infinitely patient tutor”:
  “I can ask any question and I can ask it to break it down into as fine of a fidelity as I need.” (28:53)

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7. Collaboration & Ownership: Working in AI-Native Teams (29:31–35:42)

• Flora on being the design engineer at Paradigm:
  • Straddles design + substantial front-end engineering responsibilities (30:29).
  • Decides on ownership boundaries: when to own details vs. enable other engineers.
• Workflows & Process:
  • Prioritizes upfront team alignment on mental models and object definitions (“what are the primitives of a workflow?”) before visual design.
  • Prototypes rapidly in Figma, Variant, and code—choosing fidelity based on stage and need (34:04).

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8. Designing for Scale & Ambiguity in AI Tools (35:42–39:39)

• Paradigm’s product: trigger thousands of AI agents within a spreadsheet-like interface—demands new paradigms for interaction at scale.
• “How can we bring this to an interaction that feels good when you have 200 agents versus just 20 running at once?” (36:00)
• Looks to structured data paradigms and established models, but adapts for the new AI context.

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9. Staying Ahead: Healthy Consumption, Sharing, and Demo Culture (39:45–43:31)

• Staying Updated:
  • Twitter is a signal-rich landscape, but in-person events and peer discussions help filter for signal over noise.
  • “A really great filter is just chatting with my designer friends or design engineer friends... makes it a much more fun experience to just do it together as a collective or as a community.” (39:45)
• Demo Rituals:
  • Participates in events like Socratic App co-working sessions—building and demoing for curiosity’s sake, which accelerates collective learning.

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10. Mindset & Motivation: The Power of Curiosity-Driven Making (43:31–End)

• “Doing things for the fun of it is probably the most powerful thing. And just always keeping that curiosity alive and building.” (43:31)
• Challenges listeners to use AI for building mental models, not just quick fixes:
  “What is the minimum viable level of knowledge I need to make something, but then what is the level of knowledge I need to become someone who actually feels well versed in this specific technology or this specific tool?” (43:31–45:11)
• Final Takeaway: Embrace AI as your tutor, design as a journey, and curiosity as your superpower.

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Memorable Quotes

• On luck and opportunity:
  “People who just perceive themselves to be lucky are also able to identify the opportunities as they come to them. They're creating a greater surface area of this luck.” — Flora (05:24)

• On sharing:
  “Share artifacts of what you love and what you’re passionate about and put it online.” — Flora (09:52)

• On the role of AI:
  “AI is really good at blowing those clouds away. Basically, now you have a very clear idea of what is possible, but it’s still up to us to walk the terrain.” — Flora (00:00, 23:20)

• On cultivating learning:
  "I love to think of websites as living artifacts." — Flora (28:28)

• Empowering others:
  “Building for the fun of it is probably the most powerful thing. And just always keeping that curiosity alive and building.” — Flora (43:31)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:00 – AI as a map for designers, not a path walker
• 01:11 – Recap of Tokyo Design conference learnings
• 05:24 – The geometry of luck and cultivating serendipity
• 09:52 – Using Twitter intentionally to build career opportunities
• 13:58 – Getting recruited to Vercel via shared projects and DMs
• 23:20 – The tension between deep technical knowledge and AI-assisted abstraction
• 26:31 – Practical use of explainers, notes, and personalized learning artifacts
• 36:00 – The challenges and design possibilities when scaling agent-based AI products
• 39:45 – Staying up to date: filtering the firehose and leveraging community demos
• 43:31 – Mindsets for maximizing learning, sharing, and embracing the rapid evolution of design in the AI age

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Final Reflections

Flora's journey exemplifies how sharing, curiosity, and community-building—supercharged by strategic use of AI—can open doors, accelerate growth, and keep designers at the vanguard of their craft. Her practical approach to learning, prototyping, collaborating, and managing ambiguity offers listeners a replicable, inspiring blueprint for professional development in today's AI-transformed creative landscape.

Transcript

[A]

How can we use AI to just really supercharge our own process as learners and thinkers and designers? What AI is really great at is giving us a map of the territory. It's like when you're playing a video game and you see that there's, like, clouds surrounding areas of the map that you haven't unlocked yet. AI is really good at blowing those clouds away. Basically, now you have a very clear idea of what is possible, but it's still up to us to walk the terrain.

[B]

Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid, and this is where designers never stop learning. Today's episode is with Flora Guo, who's had one of the more impressive career trajectories of anybody that I've interviewed on this show. She's currently the founding design engineer at Paradigm, and before that, Guillermo, the Vercel CEO, personally DMed her to get her to join the team. So we're going to do a deep dive into career growth, design, engineering, what it's like being the founding designer at an AI native startup, and a lot more. But I wanted to start this episode a little differently, so I asked Flora to share some of her favorite takeaways from the recent Tokyo Design conference.

[A]

Brian Beniot basically brought 50 of the most interesting designers in the space. So people like Rio Liu, Brian Lovin, Gabriel Valdemia, a lot of your guests. And it was just such an incredible opportunity to learn from everyone across those two days. I'm someone who's always taking notes, whether it's online on my website or physically in my notebook. And I just really wanted to create a place for these notes to live. And recently stamps have been living in my head rent free thanks to some incredible projects. And I was also really inspired by one of my friends, Josephine Ong, who, who just shipped such a cool portfolio with this infinite grid interaction, the same one that you would see maybe on, like, inspired by Cosmos, like public.org, and I just knew I had to, like, sit down and build something out for myself just to scratch that creative itch. So this is ultimately what came out of it.

[B]

I was totally someone who wanted to go, couldn't make it, had incredible fomo. And then you released all of your notes like this, and I was like, oh, thank you.

[A]

I made these little stamps for each talk that I had notes for. And three that really resonate with me are if I go into, like this view where I can see the Morris pages. Brian Levin did this incredible session about building software with AI and I think it was just so incredible to hear about How AI has been empowering his team at Notion with Prototype Playground. And just the way that we're moving as an industry, it's going from creating pretty images and artifacts that are just for show to designers being able to showcase interactions and really get into the nitty gritty of how things will display and be experienced by the end user. One that really stood out was Rio's talk on building the next Cursor. Cursor is a tool that we all use, but just getting to see the philosophies that underlie what he's driving with the team. So this idea of black box AI interfaces versus class interfaces, how can we really surface the intent that the user has? Also, when we look back at the history of software with folks like Bill Atkinson and Alan Kay, in the very early days, the people who were creating the designs and bringing it to life in code were one in the same. And because of that, we just had such a tight integration of their original intention that people actually got to see an experience.

[B]

Real quick message, and then we can jump back into it. One thing that Dive Club has made abundantly clear to me over the last year is that the practice of design is changing, and the whole process of getting feedback just doesn't quite cut it in today's world. That's why I'm excited to announce that Inflight is officially an open beta. It's the feedback tool that I've always wanted, and it's built for a world that moves at the speed of AI, so I can share my prototypes, give context and video walkthroughs. And Inflight makes it easy to get the exact feedback that I need to move forward, whether it's voting on directions or maybe even getting the green light to ship a new idea. And all of this is available in a single link that I can drop into Slack or maybe even share with Power users to test out a new prototype. I use Inflight every day, and it's totally transformed the way that I share work. So I'm excited for you to try the product and if you ever want to jam about it, just email me at ridflight Co if you've been listening to this show for a bit, then you've heard me profess my love for Raycast multiple times by now. So I want to highlight a couple people who started using Raycast after hearing about it on the Dive Club. The first is Rex Harris. He says Raycast is the tool that most shapes how he uses his computer and keeps him in flow. The next is Greg Hunton. He called It a life changing product and says every time he pulls a thread on something in Raycast, it wildly deepens the power and experience of using his computer. I couldn't agree more and I can't recommend Raycast enough. It's totally free to start. Just head to dive club Raycast to check it out. Now on to the episode. So there's one talk that really brought the FOMO for me, which is Saleo's geometry of luck. And he was teasing on Twitter and I just wish I was in the room. So what was your experience with that one? And maybe you could share a little bit of your notes there.

[A]

I think this is definitely a talk that really resonated with me because Soleo proposed that luck isn't, you know, something that you're born with or just falls in your lap, but it has a specific shape and a geometry. And what that means is that like any other skill, it's something that we can, you know, just learn about and invite more of into our lives. So he walked us through a few different examples, people like John Chapman or Johnny Appleseed. So someone who, from the outside looking in, you're like, oh, wow. He had so much prescience in like scattering these apple seeds and planting these orchids before, you know, Sellers came into the States. But he was actually someone who just studied the maps of where, you know, where the river is going, what seasons will people will be coming in. And then just being so aware of like everything that was happening around him. Kind of like for us, you know, we see this constant deluge of content coming in from X. Just being liminally aware of what the possibilities are so that you're well positioned as someone to just really jump in and start exploring with these tools. People who just perceive themselves to be lucky are also able to identify the opportunities as they come to them. They're creating a greater surface area of this luck. Whether it's being in rooms or creating those rooms where serendipity can happen. I think it's oftentimes just like one moment that can completely change your trajectory.

[B]

This project in itself is almost an inception of that very idea. Because you've shared this thing that you enjoyed, you put it out on the Internet. I don't remember how many impressions it got on Twitter, but it was a lot like, it was like almost like a hundred thousand or something. People obviously enjoyed your work. This resonated with them and that makes me wonder how intentionally you are stewarding your own surface area for luck. And maybe you could talk a little bit about, like, the role that sharing online has played in your own career journey.

[A]

There's this quote that I often return to by, I think, either Roy or Charles Eames, which is that the role of a designer is that of a very good host. And I think showing up in today's world where you, you know, like you said, it is ultra competitive, and there is, like, a lot of stuff going on all the time with all these new tools. I think just really asking, like, what can we give? Whether it's holding space for an event or creating an artifact about something that we're excited about and want to share, really flipping the script of, like, instead, what can I ask of this person? But, like, what can I offer them? I think has been just something that I want to keep returning to in the ways that we show up online or in person, for that matter. Especially when we host events, you know, inviting people into a space, thinking about, like, what can I gather them around? What is the intention that I can set around this? The ways that we host space online is very similar. Whether it's gathering people around a common interest, like we're going to screen a design film, or whether we're inviting them to show off their own work. I think it's really figuring out what are the threads that connect all of us together, what is the reason for us to be together in this space, and then figuring out how can I pull this out of others as well. I am just incredibly grateful to the people that I've gotten to meet online. People who start off, maybe you're just, like, seeing each other's projects. You're like, wow, this is really cool. Then you send them a DM and it kicks off maybe a conversation IRL over coffee or a phone call. And then it sparks either collaboration over projects or even roles. When I was working as an independent designer for a couple of years, I would say the vast majority of my clients came in from Twitter. And as someone who's just always loved experimenting, you know, trying things out for the heck of it, it's been such a great way to meet people with similar interests. And even my current role, it just felt very serendipitous with how Anna, my CEO, found me online on Twitter. And when I was at Vercel as well, it was just through conversations that started off in DMs. So I think any designer who's building projects, it's just such an incredible time that we live in to get to share online.

[B]

Can you go a little bit deeper into how intentionally are you nurturing that community that you've built for yourself on Twitter. Because I think a lot of people look at where you're at and it's really inspiring, but also a bit of a black box in terms of how to even get to that point where all of a sudden Twitter really is a very big deal for your career.

[A]

I remember way back in March of 2022, that's when I first got onto Twitter and it was just me sharing things that I was really excited about. You know, going to events, IRL and being like, oh, wow, like I just learned about X thing in design. Like, here are my takeaways. And just showing up, being excited and really down to have conversations, I think just led one thing to another. Like different roles that I think started off from a DM would evolve into in person. Things like hosting an event together or eventually working together. People can really feel the excitement that you have, whether it's through a project or through notes or something that you're hosting. So just creating things that are artifacts of what you love and what you're passionate about and putting it online.

[B]

There's putting things out there on the Internet and being a magnet for people who care. And then there's also proactively messaging others and being the one that initiates how much are you doing the latter? Because I think that's like something that's so valuable and yet a little bit scary probably for a lot of people listening.

[A]

Whenever there's a designer whose work you really admire, I love just like dropping a quick note of saying like, hey, I loved what you shipped here in particular is what really resonated with me. So I think whenever I get those in my inbox, it really makes my day. I would say that hosting events is also a really great way to reach out to people and to have them reach out to you as well. Whether it's hosting like a design film night or a design engineering PowerPoint night, or something about agentic interfaces. I think creating like very specific things that you can offer people. So like, oh, come into my home or come into my office, I'd love to host you. Or, you know, sending something that you think they'd enjoy just creates moments where it feels so much more natural. You're just talking to a new friend on the Internet.

[B]

I think the reason why I've had so many follow up questions on this category of topics is I look at your journey and I see an incredibly steep trajectory, like how fast you've been able to really insert yourself and build momentum in this space. And you know, now you're at Paradigm and working this high profile role. It's really cool, right? And so like a goal of mine in this conversation is to help people find little pieces of that equation that they can use to reverse engineer your trajectory. So maybe we could even just talk a little bit more about what that journey has looked like, starting with the design engineering internship at Vercel.

[A]

Vercel is a company that I've looked up to for many, many years. Even before what I knew and what a deployment was. I remember being on the homepage and thinking, wow, this is just so beautifully built out. I actually started this design engineering journey with V0. I remember back in 2024, I was looking around and seeing such incredible projects popping up in my timeline and having no idea where to start. I think the incredible thing about these tools is that you can go on with just an idea and start noodling out what does the path look like to creating something that I'm really proud of? So I started off with making shaders, you know, things that look like sunrise, and then moving on to personal projects in V0 as well. One that I really had a lot of fun making was this idea of a digital gift box. And I feel like this was the first project that I just sat down and was like, okay, today I'm going to make something. I really love the idea of software as a gift. And I think V0 was just such an incredible way for me to translate that intention of creating like a space on the Internet where I could package things up for my friends, whether that's images, links, and then send it over to them and sharing it online. This basically found its way to the V0 team and we would just like have these one off conversations and eventually about a month later. So in January, G DM'd me on Twitter and was like, have you ever thought about working at Vercel?

[B]

No way.

[A]

And that was really crazy. I had, you know, messaged him in the past, I think just saying like, hey, really appreciate thank you for building V0. Like, I'm having so much fun using it.

[B]

Okay, that's really cool. I'm just going to underline that for everybody listening. The fact that you DMed the CEO of Vercel just to say thank you says so much about you and how you like. This is kind of what I was getting at earlier, right? Like that's a big deal. And then, you know what probably happened? I bet he forgot. There's no way that he actually remembered. There's no way. But then he saw the project or maybe somebody sent it to him. He clicked in, said, okay, maybe I'll reach out to this person. And then at the top of that page was your thank you message. And it was like, oh, wow, now I really want to talk to that person. So that's amazing. I just shining a light on it. I think it's amazing just the way that you are positioning yourself in this community.

[A]

I think G is also someone who's just incredibly proactive with reaching out to people online. So many of our hires at Vercel were just people that he saw, like on the Internet, and it was like, we need to talk to this person. He has a panel called, like, Rash G or like G Brain, where he just like puts all these little notes and then it's like, okay, now it's recruiting. Let's follow up. Just being the type of person that he is, he creates, like, so much serendipity both at Vercel and in the world as well.

[B]

I'm sure you're freaking out. You get this dm. It's like, unbelievable, right? You end up joining the team, you spend this chunk of time earlier in your career surrounded by some of the best makers on the planet. And my assumption is you're probably thinking a little bit about who you even want to become in the space. So how did that experience shape your mental model for the type of designer that you wanted to grow into?

[A]

I think it was such a surreal experience to get to work alongside people. James Clements, Matul Shah and Rono. I think just seeing the level of care that they put into their work, whether it's crafting interactions for a marketing site or really diving into the performance of the app. It really shows you that design engineering goes much deeper than the surface of how something looks. It's really having the context and the ability to take an intention and translate it into what the user is actually experiencing. At Paradigm as well, it's something we're always thinking about, like, how can we make sure that the vision that we have is what people actually get to play with and prod. And I think there's just so much to learn from the designers who are always picking up new technologies and tools as well, people who are just doing it because they're really curious. I think something that really stood out to me about Rano is how he's always cooking on side projects, whether it's devouring details or his personal websites. I think it's so inspiring to be surrounded by people who make for the love of making, not because you're looking to wrap a specific project or, you know, just get something done because that's the finish line. It's really appreciating design as this journey and this practice that never ends. And I think there's a lot of beauty in just walking that path.

[B]

I was clicking through Toronto's website randomly the other day, and it was different again. You know, just a completely different everything. And, you know, the joke as designers is we can never find the time to update our portfolio. And this dude has a new personal website that is dripping in craft every six months. And you can tell it's like, it's not even about the end output for him. Like, it is that act of creating, which, I don't know, has always been something that I aspire to grow into as a designer, is just being somebody who creates because it is life giving for my very soul, you know?

[A]

And I think, especially when we're, like, just testing things out, just having people online that we can look towards as, like, oh, wow, they built this really cool project. They're talking about how they built it here. The stack that they use, the tools that they're playing with, it just gives us that extra nudge to be like, okay, today I'm going to sit down and figure out how exactly this paper MCP works. Or like, today I'm going to sit down and set up my cloud code files. Just having, you know, role models like that, I think has been incredibly powerful for me.

[B]

Before we move on, just take us through a few of your favorite experiments as an example of what it looks like to just create for the sake of creating and putting it out there on the Internet, just because I think your Twitter feed is beautiful. So I don't want to move on quite yet.

[A]

One that I thought was really silly was my friend's favorite movie is Wallace and Gromit, and I wanted to make him just a little artifact that he could play with on his home screen, which was, you know, his favorite character, which is Feathers McGraw, and, you know, having little things of the plot details. This is just something that more of, like a visual artifact that you can hook up, you know, create like a 3D model and then create like a 3D model viewer and just give something to people as a gift. I think that's an idea that resonated with me. This is a project from way back when, where basically when I was starting off with making projects, I wouldn't really know how to approach it. So just a very simple web app that you take any idea and it breaks it down for you in terms of, like, here are things that you might want to think about in the front end, like here, what you can learn about for the back end, just to serve as more of a map maker. For me, I think this was a project that I really enjoyed. Just returning again to this idea of software as a gift. Like, what are ways that we can create things that feel tactile and create things that you can send to people on to say, hey, this made me think of you. Recently, what I really love as well has been, like, what are ways that I can play with things like animations? Whether it's in a product or the Tokyo project, it was really figuring out, like, what are cool effects. I can play with this one. I really have to shout out Daniel Pizzo. He put out this CSS little snippet of how can we create these 3D moving, I guess, 3D infinite canvas to explore things coming at you. And when I was playing with the 2D canvas as well, I think just experimenting with performance. Maxim Heckel is a friend who's just incredible design engineer and I sent it over to him. He's like, oh, by the way, if you change the CSS class to transform, it'll be a lot more performant. So I think just always playing around with what are new things that had been sitting in my cache and I now want to translate into project I'm actually working on.

[B]

It's clear that you're learning a ton about even just front end, you know, like, just the more you build your ideas, I'm seeing a lot of examples of, like, little technologies or you had that 3D render for walls and grommet kind of thing. Like, I have no idea how that works, you know, but you're figuring it out for each individual project and it's obvious that those are helping you reach that next ladder of learning. Which then kind of makes me wonder, like, where was the starting point for all of this? Like, how much technical understanding did you have when you first opened V0? And then maybe we can use that as a launching point to understand what some of those mile markers of understanding have been for you.

[A]

I remember when I first started ticking around with V0, I had like a very basic grasp of HTML, CSS, JavaScript. I'm also someone who loves picking up Internet courses. One was UI Engineering 101 by Mariana Castillo.

[B]

Oh, cool. Yeah, I went through that.

[A]

I loved how they walked me through, like, here's a component, here's how you translate it with just HTML and CSS and a little bit of JavaScript. And eventually along the way I was reading a lot of REACT documentation, trying to figure out, like, what are REACT frameworks, what's next, Jas? And the way that I think about it is that there's always a minimum viable amount of learning that you need to get you to the next step and then you backfill a lot. I think what AI is really good at doing is giving us artifacts, but they're not necessarily grounded in understanding of the system, which I think can be really great with making prototypes, little one app experiments. But the moment you need to debug something, you're like, oh man, I don't even know where to start. And I think that's when it's really helpful to push yourself to feel like you don't have a complete grasp of these tools and then step back, like, okay, what do I need to zoom out in? Or what do I need to zoom out on and really deepen my understanding of now. For me, I know when I started off playing around with these different tools, I just didn't grasp how components should be structured. Like, when should we break things down into modules or when can we pass down props versus, like sharing context? And I think just learning by building and like learning by asking has been such an incredible way, both, like looking up reference material online and just, you know, asking your friends who might be good engineers or people who have done it before.

[B]

There's a tension that I think a lot of people experience that hits on some of the things that you're talking about, where it's like, how much do I actually invest in my own knowledge that like, exists in my brain? Maybe some of that is like syntax, you know, like code level knowledge versus just improving the way that I work with AI. And maybe I abstract a lot of the details, but I'm going to focus all my attention on that front. And with everything changing, you know, that's like an interesting spectrum to think about, like how you view learning and where you want to concentrate your efforts. How do you think about where you want to fall on that spectrum?

[A]

For me, I think this is something that I experienced very acutely last year because I was making a bunch of personal projects, I'm like, oh, cool. Like, look, it's a demo. But when it actually came down to debugging something, if I was playing like with a map API and all of a sudden it wasn't loading well or everything's crashing, I just felt like I didn't have the necessary foundational knowledge to like actually hone in and dive deep into the levels of implementation. What AI is really great at is giving us a map of the territory. It's like when you're playing a video game and you see that there's like clouds surrounding areas of the map that you haven't unlocked yet. AI is really good at blowing those clouds away. Basically, now you have a very clear idea of what is possible, but it's still up to us to walk the terrain. It's one thing to see what we can make and another thing to understand it in its full entirety. And I think with AI, we're also moving up the layers of abstraction so we're not writing every function by hand. No one's doing that. But the more context that you do have about how it works under the hood, so how react works, how are props being passed through? We're much better equipped to actually debug and build things that are resilient. It depends on the level of abstraction that we're working at. So if we're, say, someone who's working with a very strong team of engineers, what's most helpful for them is maybe like, here is a prototype in code of exactly how I want it and the engineer is hooking up all of the data layer for you. Maybe they start off with PR that's just like the skeleton of all the API calls and how the back end talks to the front end. And then as a designer, you can go in and polish everything using cloud code and make sure that it's just exactly how you want it in terms of the micro interactions and the animations. Or if you're someone who wants to be deeper down in terms of implementation, like understanding how should this component be structured to be the most performant. I think really just going back to the basics and studying has been like something that I've returned to much more lately as well.

[B]

There's one question that I can't stop asking myself. What if companies applied to talk to you rather than the other way around? And that question is the foundation for the all new Dive Talent network. And it's working. Like right now I'm helping many of the most exciting startups that I know to to hire the designers and builders who listen to this show. So if you're curious what might be out there and maybe you want to get on my list, or maybe you're even looking for your next design hire, head to Dive Club Talent to join today. You're someone that takes learning seriously. Just listening to your talk, that is something that's very clear to me. So I want to ask a little bit of in the weeds question here, which is if you would throw up how you work with AI on a daily basis when coding and you look at the version of yourself six months ago versus the version today, where do the biggest deltas exist?

[A]

I think one of the biggest differences has been creating explainers as I go with cloud. For example, in the past when I was learning about how React works with React hooks, I would be building a deployment and think like, oh wait, like this is totally something that can be abstracted out into its own custom hook. So then I would pull up some documentation, have a conversation with Claude and then at the end say like, okay, what are the key points that we should remember for next time? Or even just for my own learning? Because with skill files you can give Claude context. But I also think about how as we work with AI, these mental models that we're building up, like Skill md, full md, it really encourages us to think about what are ways that we can build up our own context or what are ways that we can define our own invariant. So something I really love doing is after I feel like I've tried something new or I learned something that I didn't know before, I'll quickly write up a markdown file and just save that for next time for my own reference. And sometimes I'll post these notes to my website, but just creating artifacts that I can continually return to, I think that's one of the biggest unlocks.

[B]

Is there an example that you posted to your website that we could look

[A]

at if we go into notes? I remember Monorepos is something that we use a lot at Vercel. Like everything that you see from the Vercel marketing website to the app, to all those ship comfort websites is hosted in this like massive repository called Front. And I remember, you know, poking in for the first time and I was like, wow, there's so many subdirectories. And for my own personal website, it's hosted on a Next JS app. But I wanted to create like a shared component system that could use across projects. Figuring out like, how do I do that with TurboRepo? Like how do I set this up? And then debugging things and just writing down notes for next time as well I think has been really helpful.

[B]

I think the part of this that actually is the coolest is just the timestamps, like how often you are contributing notes from your own learnings to your own website.

[A]

I love to think of websites as like Living artifacts, you know, being able to just jot things down if there's a cool link that you saw something that you want to save for next time. I think just creating things that you can return to has been like such a theme that I love.

[B]

Any other mental models that influence the way that you collaborate with AI, that you feel like you've refined over the last year or so that you think might inspire other people.

[A]

I really love thinking about AI as this infinitely patient tutor. I think it's one thing to ask for it to do something for me and not question anything about how it works or what assumptions it's building off of, but really adopting this posture of now we live in a time where I can ask any question and I can ask it to break it down into as fine of a fidelity as I need. I would really encourage, encourage people to just think about ways that they can use AI to scaffold their own learning and then to flesh it out by building projects, trying to understand, like, what are ways that we can prompt ourselves to become better at learning.

[B]

One of the ways that that inspires me is just looking at your own role right now. Like, you are a design engineer and yet, correct me if I'm wrong, there's not like a traditional designer at Paradigm, right? Like you are kind of the designer, but you're also owning a lot of the front end. It's a journey that in theory, a lot of people that listening to this could go on. I actually think that I'm going on it myself. Maybe not as quickly on some of the engineering concepts, but like, I'm the designer, but I'm just owning more and more of the front end. It can be scary, you know, for people who have had a code aversion historically and yet the blueprint and some of the ways that you are leaning on the AI and leaning into your own curiosity, I think is ultimately like, that's the scaffolding that allows people to progress in this direction. Which even just from, you know, the comments from people listening to the show, I can tell is inspiring. Like, it's a journey that a lot of people want to go on, but they're like trying to figure out, like, what are the right footholds to grab

[A]

on my own journey at Paradigm, I'm very, very lucky to work alongside some extremely experienced and just knowledgeable engineers like Rakesh, our lead front end engineer, and Jun, our cto. I think I'm always learning from them. And as someone who still feels relatively much earlier in my engineering journey, I think a Lot of it has been figuring out as someone who's feeling out this design role at Paradigm, what does it look like for me to enable engineers who are working across all layers of the stack versus what are PRs that make the most sense for me to make myself? I think it's really figuring out what is the right level of abstraction and boundary to straddle for some designers. They really just want to tunnel deep into how things work. And I think some designers are incredibly skilled at just specking out this exact vision that they have and then working closely with engineers or whoever they're working with, they're bringing exactly to life.

[B]

Can we talk a little bit about your practice? Then maybe we could even look at, I don't know, recent release or even just hypothetically how you work on something that feels a little bit meatier, more ambiguous, like, how much are you exploring in code, how much are you owning all of the front end implementation details and what are the steps, steps in between, like, for somebody that can reach for really any type of tool, how do you think about the way that you work? And maybe if there are certain ways that that has evolved over the last six months even.

[A]

I think something that we are in the process of figuring out are what are the intermediate artifacts that you can collapse and what are the things that you should spend your time, like really figuring out higher fidelity versions of. And sometimes that doesn't even look like a strain. It's like sitting down with the team and having a conversation of like, what is the right mental model. So for example, at Paradigm, we recently shipped a workflows feature, and for us it's figuring out how do we define the primitives of a workflow. It's zooming all the way back out to asking what are the objects that we're concerned with here? What defines a workflow? What are the workflows that users are building out? And then from there, what are the integrations that we want to have, what are the actions that we want to have have? And I think it's so important to really be aligned at a conceptual level before we even start moving to like visual experiments and prototypes. Because I think one trap that we can fall into as designers is coming up with like a bunch of options and then picking one too early. I think it's figuring out like, what is the right thing to create when. So, yeah, Paradigm, once we're aligned on like what exactly to make, then we can hop into tools like cloud code or Figma. And I've recently been playing around with taper a little bit as well to just like put down a bunch of screens, sometimes in varying levels of fidelity. Like, sometimes all you need for a meeting is to like draw things even as rectangles, to be like, conceptually, like, here's the dialogue that I want, and then progressively getting just like more alignment as a team before you move into like a coded up prototype. Something we recently played with was what are ways that we can show this like, like one specific workflow and then working with our engineers to put up like prototype PRs, playing around, testing them, and then eventually converging into what we

[B]

seem prod for something like the workflows. I'm just going to ask you to even go more specific into what were the main types of artifacts that you were exploring like, once you were aligned with the team, what were those first few visual artifacts that you made and why?

[A]

For me, I still like to use Sigma to, you know, visualize what are the different ways that we could display this interaction? And then sometimes what I like to do as well is like, take a few of the versions I'm working with and then put them into Variant UI and to see like, oh, what are some other ways that I could explore this? And what I really love about Variant's product is that it works as a scrolling feed. So once we've defined here are the constraints of what we need to see in this interaction, there might be a pattern that I completely did not have in my realm of understanding. And then just thinking like, oh, okay, that's interesting. What might be a fitting use case for this? Because I think it's understanding what should the user be doing and then what are the different form factors that we can serve this on up in the interaction now. So after we play around with some kind of like static shots of like, okay, I want this button to open up like this entry point into a workflow dialogue. Then it's playing with a prototype that can either be in cloud code directly in a repository, or sometimes we have people on the team who are more product focused and like to play around with other tools like directly in cloud to just show the interaction that they're thinking about app. And we'll take little screen recordings and little snippets and give each other GitHub PR links to just test on staging and then see what feels right before eventually we're like, okay, working backwards. This is how we want it to feel in the final, final version. And now we have this little graveyard of PR links prototype.

[B]

Let's talk a little bit more about your role as the designer startup, very AI native product. A lot of unique challenges there. So talk to us a little bit about how even the nature of the product has shaped your design practice.

[A]

So at Paradigm, we work on a way for you to prompt basically a thousand agents at once. There is this interface of the spreadsheet which people are so familiar with as knowledge workers. But it's just a completely different model of thinking where in the past you define a formula and the spreadsheet fills it out for you, but now we see it as a way of interaction with just a swarm of agents. So how can you define a set of steps in your workflow once and then have these columns? Each column has a prompt executed now across tens or hundreds or thousands of rows. So for us, something that we're always thinking about is, is scale. And how can we bring this to an interaction that feels good when you have 200 agents versus just 20 running at once? And I think a really great way that we've been dogfruiting it as well is just thinking about what are things to parallelize. For me, I love building lists, I love collecting lists. Whether it's resources I love or learnings that I have, I'll put them in one column and then I'll create prompts to say like, oh, what are other ideas I can pull up related to this? Or what are other resources that you would recommend? For example, if I'm trying to learn animation, let's first build up a list of animation resources and then what are threads I can keep pulling? And really using the AI tool as a way to prompt myself to figure out, okay, where do I want to move next?

[B]

I want to double click on the scale piece for a second. What are some of the design possibilities that you find yourself exploring or reaching for to solve that type of problem? Problem?

[A]

One thing that we really hone on is what are ways that you can represent things at scale in a very structured manner. And when we return to this idea of grids, rows and columns, it makes a lot of sense because this is a paradigm that people are already familiar with. So for us, it's figuring out if I want to have something at scale, what does it mean to first generate that list of items? So using an agent to scrape the web and help me build this list. And then from there it's like, what do I even need to extract or what is the most optimal way of interacting with this body of knowledge now? So for us, something we're referencing is looking at other very data heavy products so what are ways that we've represented match swaths of data in the past, whether it's in a spreadsheet or, you know, maybe at some point looking at graphs and documents and things like that. I think it's identifying with structured data, like what are the invariants, what are ways that you can pull out something that is constant across all of them, whether it's like a field that you want to have or a shape of the data that you can define so that the AI can really help you build it out as you scaffold it.

[B]

You're working on very cutting edge tech workflows, mental models, like just the way that you are. Empowering humans to work is so different than what we're used to. Even as a society where my assumption is given your role as a designer at a startup, you're having to keep a bit of a pulse on like what else is happening around and how do we think about the ways that this shapes our own product roadmap and patterns to pull from. I know the answer is scroll Twitter, but like go a little bit deeper into what you're doing as a designer to healthily stay up to date with everything that's happening in the world and hopefully being able to like identify the signal from the noise, you know, Twitter

[A]

can definitely get very overwhelming. But I think taking a pulse check on here's like what everyone's been talking about, putting it on my list of things to explore. And then for me, a really great filter is just chatting with my designer friends or design engineer friends. Like I have a backlog of products and tools I want to try and just comparing notes with each other I think makes it a much more fun experience to just do it together as a collective or as a community. I really love in person events for this, whether it's hosting them myself or going to ones that my friends put together, it just creates places for people to share little snippets of their curiosity and demo to each other as well. Like, here's something that makes me really excited and that I've been diving down this rabbit hole lately. I think sometimes it's a matter of picking one thing that you want to dive down into for a weekend or two and just trying to block things out for that period while you choose to go deep. So staying broad, keeping all this context, and then when something really got to your attention, you're like, okay, now I have to build it, now I have to try it out. And then it's just continuing to return to like go broad and Then go deep and repeating that process.

[B]

I did that yesterday with a friend, just kind of catching up. We hadn't talked in, I don't know, 612 months or something. It's another designer, and he was sharing his workflow with pencil and I was sharing my workflow with paper. And it was so interesting to just see the different things that he was tinkering with and experimenting with. And both of us had arrived at this similar point where it's like, gosh, in the last two months, how I'm exploring on a campus is fundamentally different than it's ever been at any point in our career. And we were both, like, so excited about it. And then he's like, have you tried this? Like, no. I'm like, oh, have you tried conductor? He's like, no. And it's just so valuable to have those little sessions with people because I feel like we're kind of all just blazing our own trail and figuring it out right now.

[A]

Absolutely, yeah. I think getting to share your, like, personal workflows with friends is just such a fun thing to do because you can dive into, like, wow, like, this project that you made recently. Like, how did you do that? Like, what are the tools that you're playing with? And continuing to have this demo culture, I think, is so powerful as well. Like in Canada and I guess worldwide now we have something called Socratic App, where basically people get together every Sunday, they co work for three hours, and then at the end, people demo what they've been working on. And I think just green spaces where you can foster that curiosity to make things, like, not necessarily for work or for a specific project, just having dedicated space where you're carving out to be like, okay, today I'm going to learn something new. Today I'm going to make something new. And having that just because you love the process, I think is such a powerful thing to do.

[B]

When it connects back to a lot of the things that you were talking about earlier, where, like, when you were scrolling your Twitter feed, it's so much of you just saying, I learned something new. Here's what it is, you know, and people really like, that really resonates with people. And there's totally this moment in time, like, gosh, if you're listening and you're inspired by your journey on social media and putting yourself out there in the community, this is the moment where you can do something similar, where you just explore and tinker and try different tools and try different workflows and like, what if I did this instead? Or what if I use this as a starting point and then just dumping your takeaways and your experience, like people are hungry for that right now. Even my own journey, like, that's kind of how I started was back in, like, 2019, when Figma was a little bit newer and it was becoming a much more technical product and a lot of more powerful, like, functionality, component props. And I would just explore, I would just get up and I would just do weird things with components and then make a, you know, tweet about it. And I would just do it again and again and again. It was fun. And I think that same opportunity is definitely present in today's world. Just because everything's changing so quickly, doing

[A]

things for the fun of it is probably the most powerful thing. And just always keeping that curiosity alive and building. How does the shape of our tools shape us as the users of them? Like, what are the interactions that they're affording or the ways of thinking that are really becoming embedded in our psyche? Something I really love is the cloud code like Ask User Tool, where basically you can use AI as an interviewer to really help you personalize your own thoughts. So I think with AI, there's like two paths that you can go down, one in which you're kind of like, okay, just do this for me. Please fix, please fix, please fix. And you're caught in this infinite loop where you feel like you're really breaking new ground or you're hitting the same bugs again and again. But I'd really encourage us to flip it in and be like, ask, how can we use AI to help us build the right mental models that we need to first figure out what is the level of abstraction that I should exist at and what is the necessary context that I need to acquire in order to be effective here, Whether it's actually going into react and understanding. How does this component work? How should components be structured? How should I be writing these prompts and the way passing them down to if I'm working with a shader or something, how much math do I really need to know? I think with AI, we're getting much better at figuring out what is the minimum viable level of knowledge I need to make something, but then what is the level of knowledge I need to become someone who actually feels well versed in this specific technology or this specific tool? And I think for everyone, it really depends on the context of whether you just want to create a fun demo or a prototype, or whether this is a product that you want to sustain over time.

[B]

Yeah, it goes back to what you're talking about in terms of viewing AI as the ultimate personalized tutor.

[A]

Yeah, exactly.

[B]

Actively finding ways to lean into that rather than just to accomplish your next goal and then your next goal.

[A]

Absolutely. It's like, how can we use AI to just really supercharge our own process as learners and thinkers and designers, I

[B]

feel confident in saying that you have supercharged a lot of people's process. Us listening, because the way that you think about these tools, but also just the way that you approach your own journey and your hunger for learning and experimentation, it's super inspiring for us. So I really, really appreciate you coming on and sharing it with us today. Yeah.

[A]

Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure.

[B]

Before I let you go, I want to take just one minute to run you through my favorite products because I'm constantly asked what's in my stack. 3 framer is how I build websites. Genway is how I do research. Granola is how I take notes during crit. Jitter is how I animate my designs. Lovable is how I build my ideas in code. Mobin is how I find design inspiration. Paper is how I design like a creative. And Raycast is my shortcut every step of the way. Now, I've hand selected these companies so that I can do these episodes full time. So by far the number one way to support the show is to check them out. You can find the full list at Dive Club Partners.