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- [00:00]
Pietro Scurano
If you're a designer that the role is to work into AI tools, AI application, any sort of AI thing, your role has fundamentally changed.
- [00:11]
Rid
What have you learned about tinkering with these models that you think designers could benefit from?
- [00:15]
Pietro Scurano
It's not just about the visual, it's not just about the interaction. It's really about the ideas and the partners and the different things. And using this as a brainstorming partner versus just make this landing page pretty.
- [00:29]
Rid
It would almost be a bad look internally to not share a prototype. You know, like, we're entering that kind of a world where if you share a static mock, it's like, what are we doing here?
- [00:39]
Pietro Scurano
If you can just like take that and use that as part of your workflow in a comp, you are unstoppable.
- [00:44]
Rid
Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid. And this is where designers never stop learning.
- [00:50]
Unknown
This week's episode is with Pietro Scurano, who's the co founder of the new design tool Magic Path and one of.
- [00:56]
Rid
The true forward thinkers when it comes to AI. So we're going to do a deep.
- [01:00]
Unknown
Dive into the future of design workflows and what it takes takes to master the model.
- [01:05]
Rid
So without further ado, let's dive in.
- [01:08]
Pietro Scurano
I've been a designer in tech for what feels like a really long time. I moved from Italy to the US, started my career OpenTable, was one of the first product designer there, built the OpenTable that is like, known and loved. Then I moved to Facebook, Uber and Brex. And Brex. I sort of had my first break, sort of like with AI. But I think, like, more importantly, looking back, what really sort of like took the stage for me to build something like this was when I was at Facebook. We made a big deal about prototyping and Facebook actually had this really good philosophy around nothing is real until it's in people's hands. And at the time we used to use this tool called origami. And actually I was so good at origami that Facebook made me do classes for designers to learn how to use origami so they could prototype their interactions and applications.
- [01:57]
Rid
So it's like the ultimate designer single, by the way. Like the ultimate designer signal.
- [02:01]
Pietro Scurano
Yeah, because for me it's like, you know, like, I don't like when designers live in this, like a static world. Right. You need to see how things feels to make sure the experience is correct. And so when I was at Brex, basically we got access to the GPT3 API and we were like, probably one of the first companies this is before the chatgpt craziness, the LLM friendness. And I built a demo of what a CFO at Brex could look like using this API. And I made things like returning graphs using SQL as an output. Those are all things like I just try and it worked. It was kind of like mind blowing. So we launched Brex. AI was pretty successful. And then I was like, you know what, Like I think I have a pretty good hint how this AI thing works. And actually since the early days, my biggest experience like up to four years ago was actually like things about how can we make beautiful website using AI. And when the GPT market OpenAI, I launched this GPT called Designer GPT which to this day is like one of the most popular GPT using on the platform. It has like 5 million chats. This is something insane. And that's just like a GPT to make website landing page. And so as I was like getting really comfortable with this idea of like AI used as a collaborator, what I noticed is that, you know, I was working on Tropic for a while, working on different product and I was like, what's going on here? Like why I have an open Figma? Like why for a year, me a designer, having opened this tool that I use my entire life almost, right? And so what happened was I realized like instead of going to a figma, I would just start AI prototyping that might be cursor or might be something that I build on my own, like some sort of script. I built this thing called Cloud Engineer which was like kind of like the very first agentic terminal coding agent way before all those agents. Kind of like it was actually the inspiration for cloud code, which is really cool. That's why I went to work on Anthropic. Eventually what I realized, it was like, you know what's going on here? And I tweet at the end of January, I tweet there is no reason to use Figma anymore. And that we remember, went so viral. I mean, I'm talking about like 5 million people reacting. It was just insane. But then a lot of people started attacking me because they saw that as an attack to the design field versus saying, hey look, there's a better way of doing things today and you're missing out if you don't do that. Even Figma people like the VP started attack me in the comment, I was like, what's going on here? Instead of, hey, maybe this guy has something to say. He definitely has shown there's some power with this AI tool. Why don't we hear what he has to say? And so at that point, I was like, you know what? I'm just going to show you. And basically, out of this sort of, like, contrast between what people believe was possible and what I believe was possible, I found the magic path. And we've been out for less than two months. So it's our week seven. We have 50,000 active users. We grow like crazy every week. And designers love it because we really engineer a way to make those models kind of like amazing middle level to senior level designers, basically.
- [04:57]
Unknown
Real quick message and then we can.
- [04:58]
Rid
Jump back into it.
- [04:59]
Unknown
All right, Framer just released two killer AI features that I have to tell you about. The first is Wireframer. You can chat with AI to skip the blank canvas and spark all kinds of ideas. There's no easier way to spin up a responsive page with structure and starter content that's ready to edit now. The second feature is Workshop. It's a way to create advanced components using natural language so you can spin up all types of new visual effects, no coding required. It's just another reason why I recommend Framer to absolutely everyone. And you can start using these features today. Just head to Dive Dot Club slash Framer. I've been designing for a long time, but somehow I only signed up for Mobin this year. And honestly, I can't believe that it's taken me this long. Like, it's literally a cheat code. Being able to find inspiration for basically any pattern, any product, any flow. It's fast, it's beautiful. And I already cannot imagine designing without Mobin. It's the first place that I look at for inspiration and I can't recommend it enough. So head to Dive Club Mobin to get started today. That's M O B I N. Okay.
- [06:12]
Rid
Now on to the episode. Well, I want to get all the way into the details of Magic Path. Before I do, I want to tap into your perspective as somebody that's thinking a lot about the broader ecosystem for tooling and this potential separation between the way that things have been versus where things are going. So when you kind of even look out at the landscape for design tooling and the different workflows and disparity between what those workflows might be, what do you see? Like, what's your perspective on the state of the world today and some of the inertia that's happening behind the scenes?
- [06:45]
Pietro Scurano
Totally. So basically, the interesting thing that we did with Magic Path, we kind of took a step back compared to a lot of those tools. You see in the market, right, when you see things like lovable bolt V0, right, they're kind of promising this idea of like the text to app. It's like, oh, you write this something and you're going to get an app. And unfortunately, as you know, I'm the most AI peeled person on the planet. I don't think that reality is actually close. It might actually take a few years to get there because to this day you still need an engineer to bring your product home. And there might be things like authentication, your backend, all this kind of stuff, right? So we're basically selling a lie to people, right? We did a different thing. We say, wait a second, it's not about replacing the role. We're not saying like you're going to use a tool to get rid of your PMs, your designers, your engineers. It's actually about enhancing existing workflow, right? And so my motto has been like, the next Instagram might not be build or lovable, but we might be build a Magic path because we're building the workflows enhance by AI to allow to do that. And so that's why I think we were able to sort of like make it to the zeitgeist and resonate across different kind of tools. Because when you come to Magic Path, it's basically like, you know, this infinite canvas, it's a creative space. You actually have all the things that you will expect from a pro tool, but you also have all the advantage of using AI so like as a starter kit or for edit and so on. And so I think what we're going to start seeing more and more is that those tools will get more specialized. We are truly the first design agent tool, right? Basically Magic Hive is a design agent masquerade as a tool, right, that you can use and all the other two are taking a different approach. And if you do that, what happen is that you're not focusing on the things that designers need, right? Because Lovable is not focusing on making the most beautiful thing as a one shot or it's not focused on how do I build the flow, right? Or is not focusing on what does it mean to be a designer, what does it mean to build a product, right? And we were focusing on this stuff. And so as convoluted and polluted the market is, I think we're going to start seeing more and more of these enter this sort of like specialized tool and I think magic power sort of represent the first one of this kind for design, basically.
- [08:56]
Rid
It's interesting to hear you talk about the word workflow. So intentionally, like, what do you believe about the way that the future practice of design and that workflow is evolving, that's then influencing how you think about where Magic Pack fits into the stack and ultimately what the product strategy is?
- [09:12]
Pietro Scurano
Totally. So, you know a question that we get a lot is like, you know, how you guys gonna replace in Figma? That's like a question you get a lot, right? And my answer to that, it's like, this is not about copying and doing what Figma does one to one. It's about understanding what are the things that people are doing today in figma. They represent something important from them from a work perspective that you can enhance or translate into the data of AI. And so when you look at what we're doing, we're really focused on interface design. Why? Because I have no interest in going into brand or illustration or drawing, which is all things you can do in figma today. And so when you think about workflow, for instance, one of the things that we launched recently that was really good for us, it created a huge uptick in subscription was design systems, right? So when you look at AI today, AI is just like, you never know what you're gonna get. That's a black box. You just put something, you get something. We actually able to contain that generation via our feature, which is design system. And so a lot of companies are loving Magic Path because they come to the platform, they define design center, and then they can just generate things that looks like they're made from their team. And that's like a huge thing, right? And so because when you look at, when you look back at all those tools like Sketch and Photoshop before and Figma after, they're just source of truth at the end of the day, there's nothing that figma is doing special that no other tool can do. They're just a really great source of source of truth. And so it's like the question is like, how do you take that belief that being a good source of truth and make it AI first? And that's what we were doing.
- [10:47]
Rid
How much does it even matter to be the source of truth? And that's a question I've been asking myself a lot recently as someone who's working on a new product that's very AI heavy. So I'm building things in ways that are a little bit more engineering led. And for context, I am the ultimate source of truth designer. I mean, my Figma files are pristine. I have all of my libraries, my layers, like everything's perfect. And I've kind of been relaxing my grip on that a little bit recently. So how do you think about that? Like, should a design tool still try to be the source of truth, or is it purely what are the right workflows that we should abstract and optimize for?
- [11:21]
Pietro Scurano
The funny thing is that in this era, it's actually even more important to be the source of truth. And what I mean by that is, like, if you look at the past, designers would go into Figma, to your point, make things spec perfectly down to the pixel and whatnot. But then there's always been this sort of loss in translation where the engineer will go and implement that. And I could not tell you the amount of time that I would spend nights at Facebook specking out all the margin, all the size, and then I will go and see the product shipped and it would be like this, 5 pixels to the left. And I was like, how does this even happen?
- [11:54]
Unknown
Right?
- [11:55]
Pietro Scurano
And that's because it's just like human nature, we made mistake, right? And things can kind of like slip to the track, to the cracks, right? But with Magic Path, sort of like the end, sort of like the long term vision is like, this is the perfect endoff between design engineers. Like, so if you have your source of truth, the idea is like, in the future, not so far from here, designer can go into magic path, say, like, update something, and then as they update that, it gets pushed into production. So in a way you are doing engineering work without even looking at the code, which to me it's very exciting because once again it goes back to those Facebook days where I will put origami on my phone, prototype, the interaction, feel the animations, like, you know, the vibration of the phone and like all this, like the optic feedback and all this stuff. And now we can do it. And I think it's beautiful. And I think, like, if I could go back to Pietro like 10 years ago and say, hey, you're going to make a tool that's going to allow all your dreams come true, I would be ecstatic, right? And it's so cool that we live in this era.
- [12:52]
Rid
It's really cool. It really is. Because I'm someone who's now really come to terms with the fact that it's valuable for me to be in cursor, it's valuable for me to play in code, it's valuable for me to get really close to the outputs, especially when you're working with AI. And yet it's still a little bit slow for me to explore in that arena. And so I still explore in figma, but then when I get to the point where I'm like, okay, this is interesting, now I'm basically starting from scratch, either in like a lovable or cursor. And yeah, there's like MCP and everything, but it's not amazing. You know, it's like there's a lot of manual work, it feels slow, it doesn't feel creative. But that's the price of making something that is inherently functional. Whereas you're jumping right to functionality, but then also making it so that, okay, I've explored just at the front end layer, but now I can hook it up quickly without having to do redundant work. That value proposition makes a lot of sense to me.
- [13:49]
Pietro Scurano
Right, because we want to be the place, we want to be the starting journey of your gen AI experience, right? You come here and only once you're ready, only once you define your end to end and you're happy with your result, you're happy with your edits, you're happy with your manual edits, whatever you're doing. Are we going to add Layer View next week, which I'm very excited. I mean, we're going to turn this into like, truly a tool that anybody can use. And that's actually the beauty of MagicPad is you build something, you know, 10 years ago, it's really clean and beautiful, but you lost the implementation of that because your team might not be around anymore. You lost the connection with the team, whatever the case may be. Put that screenshot there, make it work. It's awesome.
- [14:26]
Rid
Okay, so zooming out. Given what you have, but also given your vision for where you kind of want to take this, how do you think this new functionality, technology, all these possibilities that you're bringing to the table, how do you think that's going to impact the way that designers function as a unit of a larger software team and the way that teams collaborate?
- [14:45]
Pietro Scurano
My biggest recommendation for anybody that is either entering the world of design, approaching to be a designer, but even people that have been doing this for a while, is that you need to learn AI. And the reason is because, as you can see, this is here already. Like, it's very real. People are building stuff with AI, they can move, you know, 10x faster than you can move in the past. And it's very important because your FIGMA skills or other skills that you have might not translate well unless you learn how. You see some examples, some people, the community did learn how to use those skills because at the end of the day, what matters the most is ideas and taste. And an app like Magic Path, what it allows you to do, it's just like reducing the delta between your idea ideation and actually get to try something going even farther than that. I think like the figure of the designer is changing. It will change completely. I think designer, eventually the role is going to be even more important because they're going to be basically the keeper of the experience, the things that your app or product is supposed to accomplish. And in a way they're really going to merge into this. Like it's not even like the design engineer anymore. It's almost like what I would call the design architect, where you actually working with an intelligence that can do things for you, following your taste, follow your skills, follow your ability. And it allows you to have this prototyping, this idea for your company much faster than you would do in the past. For context, before I started Magic Path, I was working at Anthropic and I worked there for 10 months. And I was brought in as the guy in role to figure out experiences for those models because the models are really good, but experience is still lacking behind it.
- [16:24]
Unknown
Right.
- [16:25]
Pietro Scurano
And the one thing that I really push inside of the company that then was kind of like took a life of his own, if you want to, if you want to say that, was that I was really pushing for prototyping first. I was really pushing like the product cycle is fundamentally changing because of AI and we need to adapt. And it's kind of funny because you were expecting AI company to kind of have that figure out, but nobody has figured it out because all those things are new and all those things are just like as reason to us as they're to them, which is really cool, right? And so because of that, you now become this person that is in charge of the experience. But also show the prototype, show the end to end, show the demo, really get a sense of what the ideas are so that you can get your team aligned way before, way faster than you could do before. Because in the past you had this figma file. You have the first meeting with your design team, share the screen, okay, this screen is going to go there. This team is going to do this. Maybe some people will do a prototype, but the prototype is really not that great. It's tough to share, it's tough to feel it on the phone, like all these kind of things, right? And so you, a designer, are in control. And actually it's funny, people are afraid of AI. I'm like, what? Use magic path and 10x yourself you know what I mean?
- [17:33]
Rid
Given how easy you just made it look, it would almost be a bad look internally to not share a prototype. You know, like we're entering that kind of a world where if you share a static mock, it's like, ugh, what are we doing here?
- [17:45]
Pietro Scurano
That's actually the other, the other thing that I think is important touching here. The most successful designers that I've seen recently, talking to companies and you know, friends that I've known in this space for like 15 years, are the one that are adopting this like AI first approach. And that was like my approach a year before I started Magic Path. And that's what pushed me to make this product because I was like. Because to your point, like you can do this type of stuff separately in different tools, but it will be nice to have a unified place to do all the stuff. The variation, the creativity.
- [18:14]
Rid
You mentioned the word alignment earlier, which has kind of been the key word that's been bouncing around my brain the last few months, where it's like, where does all this head? What does it mean to be a designer in the future when you can literally just hit the button and see full flows and all of these variations? You almost have an infinite amount of artifacts that you can bring to the table on a daily basis. What does it mean to be a designer? And I keep coming back to that word alignment because it's like you're the one then that is not only owning a larger part of the puzzle, where it's all the way from the nugget of an idea to potentially the entire front end implementation. Yeah, but you're also the one who's making the recommendations and trying to steer the ship and helping people understand what are you actually playing with here? What levers are you pulling that are behind these decisions? What is the recommended direction? And that's kind of an exciting world to think about. Like that's not something to be scared of. That's a lot of, that's impact, you know, that's, that's pure impact.
- [19:13]
Pietro Scurano
Pure impact. One of my favorite quote is that the best idea I had was to have a lot of them. And I really, really believe that.
- [19:20]
Unknown
Right.
- [19:21]
Pietro Scurano
And this is basically, you know, it allows you to do that just try a lot of ideas. Because the problem with ideas is like until you actually, you know, test the thing, it's just really hard to know how things gonna perform.
- [19:32]
Unknown
Right.
- [19:33]
Pietro Scurano
And actually I'll give you even like even more interesting kind of anecdote. So one of the things that I can talk about this now because it's how I was working on Deep Research on Anthropic. I was trying sort of like the different kind of functionality. And this is like way before I even start to think about Magic Path. I always use Cloud as a collaborator. I never saw Cloud as just a tool. It was just a collaborator for me. And we were working on Deep Research and I was trying to come up with ideas around how can I visualize the searches before the model actually start visualizing the search in a way that makes me feel I still have control. As the person that asks a request versus a model, just go free and, you know, go crazy. I started brainstorming your cloud. I was like, well, just try something. You think like, what do you think about this? What do you think about this? And he comes out and he gives you this idea and he's like, what if when you ask your request, we show a preview cards of all the different possibilities that this research can branch off with, all the different way that this research could go through. And then we click on the one that we want and then we kind of go deeper into that field. And I was like, holy shit. Like, that's so good, right? And we build it together, right? Like, I, like, we didn't, we didn't use Cursor internally, of course, but we'll build whatever tool we're using. Like, we used that, use that powered by Cloud to this beautiful ui. And the team loved it. It was like, this is such a good idea. And so it's like you're most like, lose. This is I think the part I really, really, really want to stress out. It's not just about the visual, is not just about the interaction, is really about the ideas and the partners and the different things. And using this as a brainstorming partner versus just make this landing page pretty. It's funny because what was the main complaint is the designer have back in the days. I'm not just a pixel pusher. I'm not a monkey that sits here and push pixel. That was the meme, right? It's always been the meme. The CEO coming to you and say, make the logo bigger. And in a way that's what people are doing with these tools. And so a lot of the stuff that I'm trying to teach people via Magic Path is like, hey, in the chat, try to chat with it before a little bit, like, brainstorm with it, Bounce off some idea. Because you might find out that there's even more nuggets that you left even before you go and do the thing. And that's just a superpower, man. Like, if you can just like take that and use that as part of your workflow in a comp, you are unstoppable. You know, there's nothing's going to stop you because you become a reference and then you become important. And that's other things. You know, when I was on topic, I became quote, unquote important. It was like, okay, how are we doing this thing? Let's ask Pietro.
- [22:09]
Unknown
Right?
- [22:10]
Pietro Scurano
And it was always Pietro plus cloud my brain, plus that thing.
- [22:13]
Unknown
Right?
- [22:14]
Pietro Scurano
It's. It's the, the Q addition.
- [22:16]
Unknown
Right.
- [22:17]
Pietro Scurano
It's just really fun. It's just really fun.
- [22:19]
Rid
Okay, I'm gonna get really specific here because I think you're hitting on something that's super important. And I see so many people bash the output of AI when you have this infinitely wide spectrum of your ability to tap into AI and actually get something useful out of it. And so you've now twice made this distinction between tool and collaborator. Yes, I think I kind of have a sense of what the collaborator looks like. Maybe the interesting way to dig into this would be, can you talk a little bit about what it looks like to only use AI as a tool? What are some of the behaviors that you might see designers using? That in your mind would be a signal of like, hey, we got a problem. Broaden the horizons here. Like, there is so much more that you could be doing. So help people understand the different sides of that spectrum as a way to ideally get designers more comfortable using AI as a collaborator.
- [23:10]
Pietro Scurano
One big meme for a while was, AI slop. AI slop. It's not good. It's not as good as something that human can make, which is for some level. At some level is truth.
- [23:20]
Unknown
Right?
- [23:21]
Pietro Scurano
You take a super experienced designer and you make do something compared to a one shot, no whatever, pipeline on a model doing, of course, like the human design is going to perform. What I want designer to understand is that when you talk to those models, they have a compressed, literally a compressed zip file of the entire human knowledge.
- [23:42]
Unknown
Right.
- [23:43]
Pietro Scurano
If I was talking to you right now and I was just, we're talking about design right now, right? And then I go, and it's like, oh, what's your take on the protein for synthesizing this particular molecule? What?
- [23:55]
Unknown
Right?
- [23:56]
Pietro Scurano
Like it's like, whoa, let me look for it. Like, you know, so now basically I ask you to go from this design context to something else. And surprisingly, that's how AI works, right? You have all those contexts that are kind of like merged together. And in order for you to actually get the best result, you really need to dig deeper into basically those neuron activation that turn those models into, in my case, great designers or maybe if you're working on a financial product, great brokers or great stock trader or whatever, that's the thing I want people to understand. And when I say, like, use AI because you could like, you know, learn AI and understand how to talk to cloud in a way that you can get good results. Right? And so Magic Path basically does that in a way we remove all the friction where even if you ask something as simple as give me a signing car, it's just going to be beautiful. But that's because we've done a lot of work to surgically open the model brain and activate the neurons that are in charge of design.
- [24:59]
Unknown
Right?
- [25:00]
Pietro Scurano
And so that's the thing I want people to be play with. Don't get discouraged. I think when I see people be like, oh, AI slop. I feel like my take is like, you try it once, you didn't get what you wanted, and you define this was dumb. And funny enough, you get the same thing if you talk to a human. If I walk to my designer, Jacob, which is, he's incredible, and I say like, you just like redo this thing here on the app, he's gonna be like, what? Like, what's the goal? What are we trying to solve? Where our customer, where are users? Why are we doing this?
- [25:29]
Unknown
Right?
- [25:30]
Pietro Scurano
Those are the things that activate your brain in the same way that activate those, those models brain. And that's why it's tough to call them tools, but I want to call them collaborators. Anthropic actually a few months ago released this chart that was like, okay, first we were in the chatbot era. Now we are in the teammates collaborate kind of phase. And we're going to go in the pioneer era pretty soon, maybe like in a year or two where, meaning those models are going to do work that it's better than what we could have done by ourselves.
- [25:59]
Unknown
Right?
- [25:59]
Pietro Scurano
And so if you take the curve now and you take that rope, you're just gonna fly higher and higher, right? Because those models are just gonna get better. And also just like, you know, it's just good to explore because then once you understand how to activate some neurons, then you're also able to activate them for other things, like, oh, I have a family. Like, how make sure, you know, my, my, my kids feels respected or things like that. Like that. That's important too, right? And that can Help you for that as well.
- [26:24]
Rid
Can we talk about the models for a second? I've never asked anyone this question, but I see you tweeting all the time about tinkering with different models and you seem to have a decent grasp on pros and cons of each. And I think the majority of people listening right now, I'm going to go ahead and assume that their level of proficiency or understanding of the models is somewhere around like, I understand what deep research is and I understand that there's like a default when I start a new chat. And Maybe I know O3 is for thinking, but that's like it. What have you learned about tinkering with these models that you think designers could benefit from? And I'm very specifically interested in where's the line where it's like, okay, you probably should get to this point if you want to be able to effectively take advantage of AI not just in creating interfaces, but like in your career.
- [27:12]
Pietro Scurano
A funny thing. The reason why I push for people to play with every model. You can call yourself a model sommelier in a way. I can tell you what model is just by the response blind. I know if it's deep SEQ or if it's a GPT based model, or if it's an anthropic model. If it's a Gemini model, I just can't tell from the response. And that's because I spend so much time talking to the stool. Probably I spent more time talking to this tool than my girlfriend. And we live together, right? And which is crazy. And you accumulate this knowledge where you just kind of understand where those model taste is, right? So there's this first phase or like understand that's why people say model smell. It seems funny to say that, but there is a model smell. There's this model smell for small model. Like if I see, like if I talk to a 3 billion parameter, 7 billion parameter model, I know that's a small model smell. Because there's certain things that you say that it's like it most sounds like cartoonish in a way. Like the things that it say, there's like too excited. Then it was like, wait, why are you so excited? I just ask you what about the building, New York, whatever, right? And then you have the bigger model smell. It seems like this is a person that went to high school, degree, went to college, talking to somebody. And then so that's sort of like the first part, right? It's like understanding the inner insight and taste of the model. The second thing is like, okay, now what are those models good at? Right, because all of those models are trained on a large amount of data, but then fine tuned on a very specified subset. The reason why cloud basically took the word by storm with 3.5 is because it was a coding model. It's a general model, but it's really specialized into coding. And that's because anthropic secret sauce, right? And what we found is that when a model is good at coding, somehow it's a good designer.
- [28:59]
Unknown
Right?
- [29:00]
Pietro Scurano
And that doesn't happen all the time, because what happened, you might overfit the model for certain specific things. Like we look at Grok. I don't know if you saw it, but the denied the Grok was released. My first thing, what did I do? I took Grok, pull it into magic path pipeline. Let's see how it behave as a designer. It was horrible. Why was Grok 4 horrible? Well, because they really, really deepened it down on science and math and medicine and space. Funny enough, in real life, those also the kind of people that are not good designers. It kind of mirrors reality in a way. It's like, oh, are you a scientist? For sure you suck at making slides, right? But I bet you cook are like, you know, writing down, you know, interstellar relationships and black hole simulations and all that kind of stuff, which is Grok 4 is really good at. It's this just a skill that you can acquire unless you just like spend a lot of time. It's actually what's funny you asked me this because today I'm gonna publish this link. Do you know when you play video games sometimes and there's like this graph, it's almost like a star graph and you see like what the character is good at. Oh, this guy. A good attack, good defense. I'm doing that models because when you look sort of like the the ability that you look at a model, I summarize it in this way. You have thinking abilities. So, okay, how good is the model at the inner thinking? Like how good is going from his thoughts to do something? You have the quality of generation. So how good is that generation that you get from the model, even with or without thinking? And then the other thing is how good is our tool calling? And this is actually what we are realizing the community, what we are asking is this is more important than anything else. And the reason why this is more important than anything else is because if you are a good model, that's be to going good at tool calling. You can be employed in a lot of experiences. And so far Cloud 3.5 Sonnet and all the version after that. They were the king at tool calling. The reason why cloud code is possible is because Cloud, because of the way it's trained, can go into a loop of running tool that he knows AI's access and never lose itself. It's, oh, I want to know Peter Schirano deeply. Well, I have a search tool and then I have a fetch tool and then I also have a tool to open a page and read that. And also, and somehow for some reason Cloud can do that better or any other model on Average, better than O3, better than 04 Mini, better than Gemini. Gemini actually sucks to Connie. Like, I never use Gemini in production because it just gets lost. Actually what it does is say I'm going to use the web search tool and doesn't use that. And this is also the reason why there's this new model that came out from China. It's called Kimi K2. I don't know if you familiar with it.
- [31:50]
Rid
No, I'm not.
- [31:51]
Pietro Scurano
Took the word by storm, or at least my word, because it's incredible tool calling. I actually released a demo where it's just going crazy just to call it comparable to Cloud 4. So now for the first time ever, we have a model that is as good a Cloud 4 sonnet for free that you can install into a machine that of enough power, of course, because it's 1 trillion parameter model, but you have a lot of provider like open router, Groq and so those are kind of like the stuff there. Like, like really important. And what you realize if you're doing an application like Magic Path, you do need an anthropic model because they're great at tool calling.
- [32:27]
Unknown
Right.
- [32:27]
Pietro Scurano
And that's basically like all the things, all the pipeline the model needs to do to be a good designers.
- [32:32]
Unknown
Right.
- [32:32]
Pietro Scurano
And those are the things you kind of just need to like, just test and test. You build your own Python tool. I build all my tools. Basically my test of choice has been like, I ask for something, I let it loop for 10 minutes and see like how much time it gets lost, how much time it goes back, how much time actually does the thing. And then those are the model. You realize that they're really good at tool calling. So when I, when Kimi 2 came to the market, I tweeted this video that was Kimi going into this like tool loop and I was like, holy shit, we have Cloud four at home.
- [33:00]
Rid
Which is crazy.
- [33:01]
Unknown
Yeah.
- [33:01]
Rid
The stuff that you're talking about, how much do you think that designers are going to be responsible for some percentage of that knowledge? Or do you think that we move more into a world where the software that we use is just dynamically using what is best at all times and the only people that really have to understand how it works are the ones that want to build their own tools.
- [33:20]
Pietro Scurano
So I love this question and this is where I was going to go next. This was also one of the things that I really was involved at Anthropic.
- [33:28]
Unknown
Right.
- [33:28]
Pietro Scurano
If you're a designer that the role is to work into AI tools, AI application, any sort of AI things, your role has fundamentally changed. Meaning in the past, if you're working on a SaaS application, your entire focus and goal was like, oh, optimize the flow, making sure the customer clicked the right button, making sure the customer, they're not lost and all this stuff. Now the difference is that you're not only dealing with customers, but you actually employ someone for a task. You employ a quote unquote entity to do a task. So you, as a designer, your main job should be taking your design sensitive sensibility, take that sensibility that makes you different from anybody else and understand how to employ these. And so when I was working all this like experience at Anthropic, I did like a customer support agent, the deep search and all this stuff. 90% of my job was like, how can I make Cloud behave? In a way, there's not only a good experience, it fits with my vision, but it also makes sure that Cloud has everything needed to succeed. And that's a skill that if you can get that as a designer, your worth is. You just can estimate that. One funny thing that I never talked to anybody, at least publicly, was when I get the term she for my company, for Magic Path, the same week I got a full time offer on Tropic to lead the team called the Extra Experience Team. It was like a lab kind of team. And I cannot tell you I just couldn't sleep at night because I bet, you know, it's not like I'm going to Facebook versus Google, I'm going to Ontario versus OpenAI. No, this is like two different life.
- [35:09]
Rid
Fundamentally different lives, fundamentally different life path.
- [35:12]
Pietro Scurano
And I think the reason why I was able to get even a position is because eventually I became this person that was basically a model whisper, right? You have to have this sensitivity to understand how you employ this intelligence to do the right things. And that's why initially, when we first kind of started this conversation, I use a very specific word. I say your design architect, right? Because Almost like you're in the entire control of the blueprint. And there's that worker right there that for some reason is like drilling in the wrong position or he's like hitting the hammer in the wrong thing and you're like, why the heck are you doing this? Why are you hitting the hammer there? You should hit the hammer here. And only designers can do that. Because we have the sensibility and we have the obsession that no other people have. And I think that's what makes design special. And that's why design is going to stay and it's not going to go anywhere. And that's why it's also like, I was really hurt when people took my thing about don't use Figma as an attack of designer. Because I'm the biggest designer fanatic and designer fan and I truly believe in the future of the designer as somebody that can be empowered by this entity, not diminish.
- [36:18]
Rid
It's so good because architect as a word and concept comes up on this show, but it's very much so through the lens of understanding the materials, which obviously is very important. It's like the precursor for everything that we were talking about. But you're taking it one step further with this idea of like, no, no. As a designer, in order to be the most successful, you are going to be commanding employees and people doing things on your behalf. And wow, that exists outside of the box of drawing rectangles pretty far because.
- [36:47]
Pietro Scurano
Then that enables your head and your mind to thinking about things that you wouldn't even think about before. So we have a feature that's coming up soon for Magic Path. I know that once we release it, it is going to be the talk of the town because once you release it, everybody's going to be like, how the. And nobody's ever thought about this. And two, that only comes because I told, you know, this employee to just like, pee in this corner of the room. And Larry focusing on that, right? And, and, and that takes like, this, like, strategic mind. This, like architect mind is not just the Pixel. It's not just. Many times I see people, just designers being obsessed about the pixel, which is, it's good. But pixel is not what turns a product into a successful product. It's what makes it feel like a good product. But it's just one part of the story. All the other thing is, is this useful? Are people using. How are you changing people's life? Like, I get emails from people, like big companies, like, oh, my God, we are rethinking how our product pipeline and making and how we build product because of magic path, right? To me that's the impact. What are they saying?
- [37:54]
Rid
How is their process changing?
- [37:55]
Pietro Scurano
Well, so it's things like, you know, they don't have to open the figma file, they're just restarting in their UI and all the structure, the basic magic part becomes the source of truth and then the engineer just goes and copy the code. Right? Because basically the vision of the designers and sort of like the pixel perfection of the designer is already there. There's no loss in translation.
- [38:16]
Rid
Well, speaking of the code, I want to return to the threshold of understanding for the models question and kind of approach that similar idea from a different angle. Which is a question that I see a lot in the wild from designers right now is where is the just technical, more code driven threshold in general? Like do I need to learn how to code? Basically I see it all the time, every single time I open up Reddit. And I think a lot of people, even you know, guests in the show, we people are coming on and it's like the importance of cursor and you're more tinkering with code and we should start thinking of IDEs as design tools even. And you're doing a heck of a lot of things in code that feel like a canvas. And so I'm really interested in your perspective is like if I as a designer, maybe I'm mid career, maybe I've been doing this two, three years. If I want to future proof myself, I want to be successful two, three, five years from now. How far do I have to go exploring into this more of like a code based world. What is your opinion on that?
- [39:17]
Pietro Scurano
For me it's like, you know, the biggest meme has been code will disappear, right? Code will become obstruction. The English language, if you're English speaker, will become your main programming language. I am a huge believer of that. In fact, we are the only tool where you really do not see code unless you need it to. There's people that are on free planes, they just pull up, you know, they just go crazy. They just try designs, they go explore, right? Because they just like the exploration phase of it, the design inspiration phase of it, but also having the ability to actually interact with something which is huge. That's the biggest thing. I don't think you should learn how to code as a designer if you don't want to. I actually think because of how those tools are basically lowering the entry level for this space. And so initially when we were saying like, oh, the design engineer is going to merge in this design architect. That's why I believe it because basically coding will disappear. Being a language that we need to speak is just going to be the infrastructure of that blueprint.
- [40:18]
Unknown
Right.
- [40:18]
Pietro Scurano
But you don't have to care about that because somebody else, an employee, cloud or GPT or whatever model you use is set in the basement.
- [40:26]
Unknown
Right.
- [40:27]
Pietro Scurano
And eventually we're going to get so good where code is basically solved in a way. The crazy thing is that people, they're not talking about this front end is solved. Front end coding, it's solved. Of course there's things like states and optimizations and things that you want to when you load your app, what's reloading in the back, what is not kind of like optimization for a new framework. Those things are always going to exist.
- [40:54]
Rid
But it's not a role anymore. It's not a dedicated role.
- [40:56]
Pietro Scurano
A front end engineer on a medium to big size company used to be paid almost half a million, sometimes even half a million dollars a year if you can include the comp and the equity and all that. That role. It's solved. So me personally, I cannot tell designer to go learn how to use code. What I can tell them is understand AI because it allows you to build your idea without having to care about code. And that's why I think you don't see designers using Cursor or someone like Bolt and stuff. Because those tools are scary. I don't want to be in my creative mindset and see a ton of code. No classic designers that ever wanted to do that. And that's what Magic Path saw. It's a canvas. Everything is visual. You never see the code. Never see the code because we make it so that it builds all the time. It works all the time. You never get error. And then it's like do you want to see the code pop off? But you don't have to. That link that you share Formula Tool with Magic Path is enough to experience your vision and experience a first take and then maybe it's a. That itself is good enough for you to go talk to an investor and raise company for it is money for your company. But I will never say no mind telling people learn coding if you want to be a good designer. That's just not the fact. What I will tell people, it's like learn code if you want to understand actually what's happening in that basement. Like if you want to understand, like what are those fundamental that you build in your house on top of it. I think that's still a power in that right there's still power, understanding. Like, oh, you know, sometimes I code a lot with those tools, but I'm also a developer and so sometimes I see clouds just making these like stupid errors. It's like, why did you do this? Why did you use State here? You shouldn't have used use State in this case. Right, but would that stop you from making your idea come true? No.
- [42:52]
Unknown
Right.
- [42:52]
Pietro Scurano
And that's just more like the optimization level. And that's why I think you still need an engineer if you want to bring your product fully to fruition in terms of optimization and backend and all this kind of stuff. But teaching designers back end, that's crazy. That's actually crazy.
- [43:08]
Rid
It's making me think back to something. Emmett Connolly, who's the VP of design at Intercom, and he talked about how basically he thought design was going to swallow the front end. And I very much so agree. The current state of the world means that that kind of requires two tools though, right? Like you would make something in Vectorland and then you would hop into cursor and you'd implement it or do some of the polish fixes and kind of like land the plane on the pixels in code. I think why I'm interested in your approach is that it allows me as the designer to own not just the pixels, but the implementation of the front end. How does this feel? How does this work? How does this connect? What are all of the different states? I'm sure in the future it probably won't be hard to pipe in data and that kind of stuff. And I can do it all without having to split and leave my creative land and now move into more of my engineering minded execution land.
- [44:09]
Pietro Scurano
And guess what? Those are the workflow that have been working forever for us. You swap Magic pad with Photoshop. Kind of the same thing, right? Like what magic part allows you to do is just move 100x faster better true interaction, true like real time prototyping instead of just living in this image. But eventually that's what we've been doing since humanity. Like we are a specialized species. We like to be really good at something and then we help each other based on our skills. So why would that disappear? And this is why it's weird. And that's why I feel like designers have a lot of anxiety because you don't know where to go. And my dream and my hope is that, you know, that's what I want to do. I want to like easing up this anxiety and be like, no, like, you know, come design magic path. Don't be stressed out about code. Don't be stressed out about learning sub base. Actually, I want to share this. You're going to laugh. You know what's the biggest proof that Figma has lost the plot on AI? Let me show you this. So I'm going to go to Figma AI. What does this redirect? Let me do it again. Let me do it again for the, for the people in the back. Where does this go?
- [45:17]
Rid
Oh, you savage.
- [45:18]
Pietro Scurano
You know how much I paper that domain?
- [45:20]
Rid
How much?
- [45:21]
Pietro Scurano
$10,000. 10K. You know when I bought this domain a couple weeks before the config, you know what this tells you?
- [45:28]
Rid
Oh my gosh.
- [45:30]
Pietro Scurano
Config was the most rashed. I know. I don't want to sound crazy, but I can tell you, I can promise you if I never tweet that if I never tweet that there was no reason to use Figma, they will have not redo the entire like ideation of the config about AI. And there's actually another proof about this. If you watch the video video the, the announcement that you know there's, it's on YouTube. Like when they present like Figma make, the PM goes on. Ollie says, I think was it a guest of your Sparkas may or may.
- [45:58]
Rid
Not be releasing around the same time.
- [46:01]
Pietro Scurano
She goes on the, on on the stage and says by the way, this is not, it's not an attack on her. Like I just want to make sure like I'm clear this is, she's great. Like I'm just saying, I'm just telling you the, the facts. She goes on stage and says I've only been at Figma for a month and we build all those AI tools. So you tell me a company like Figma, which is so well known for execution, precision, when you ship something works, will ship something as broken as Figma make unless they saw something that got a huge traction around not using their product a couple months before that app.
- [46:38]
Unknown
Right.
- [46:39]
Pietro Scurano
And that tells you. And the reason why I haven't been public about this figure, my I think is I don't want to get sued, but I haven't really publicized that.
- [46:46]
Unknown
Right.
- [46:47]
Pietro Scurano
But you know, they sent me a case in disease. I don't know but I did that. There's nothing illegal that I just bought Figma AI. It was available, it was 10k. Why should I buy that? It's crazy, right?
- [46:58]
Unknown
I'm a big believer in the power of video to explain my thinking as a designer.
- [47:02]
Rid
So when it's time to give feedback, I'll drop a loom link in Slack.
- [47:06]
Unknown
And another link to a Figma prototype.
- [47:08]
Rid
And feedback will be scattered everywhere.
- [47:10]
Unknown
And, I mean, it's a mess. So I'm building the product that I've always wanted to exist, and it's called Inflight. You can kind of think of it like an Async crit. It's an easy way to share a video walkthrough along with an interactive prototype or whatever you're designing, and then AI interviews the people on your team to get you the feedback that you need and organize everything for you in a beautiful insights page. So right now I'm only giving access to Dive Club listeners.
- [47:37]
Rid
So if you want to be one.
- [47:38]
Unknown
Of the first to use Inflight, head to Dive Club, slash inflight to claim your spot.
- [47:44]
Rid
It literally feels like the ground that you're standing on is just kind of shifting a little bit. And I think it's so important to remember, I mean, both of us still exist at the absolute tip of the spear of all this technology, right? Like, the absolute tip of the spirit. I mean, I don't know what the transition for the rest of the industry looks like, how long it's going to take, but there are so many people that are just now getting the downwind effects of, like, my manager said I needed to be making interactive code prototypes. I don't know what to do. Does this mean that I'm not a designer anymore? What's happening? I'm scared about the future of my role. I see that sentiment every single day. And I like your approach. Like, I like how it kind of fits into this nice middle ground where it doesn't feel like you're having to make this existential jump as a designer in order to successfully navigate this transition into an AI world.
- [48:37]
Pietro Scurano
You know, to be fair, like, those are already things that people used to do. Like when, you know, when you were saying, like, oh, my manager is asking me for design, like, to be like, responsive or stuff, like, you have to do that. But now instead of, you know, spending hours on doing it, you can just say, make this responsive. Or you can just say like, oh, from this screen, go here and you get there. And then, of course, then you finesse. It's like, oh, from this screen you go to this part. But with this type of image, actually, this is also cool to show you, I think would be like, a cool thing to show before I talk about design systems.
- [49:08]
Unknown
Right.
- [49:09]
Pietro Scurano
And so the way you define design system, people come here, and in this case, I have a Reddit design system because I Was talking to somebody at Reddit a couple of days ago. So you build the design system, it's like your main color, your primary color, your accent, everything that is part of the design system.
- [49:22]
Rid
System.
- [49:22]
Unknown
Right.
- [49:23]
Pietro Scurano
Your typography, your scales. We're going to allow to add fonts here pretty soon, probably like in a couple days. And then effects like shadows and you can, in real time, you can actually preview what this theme might look like. If I want the border radius to be smaller or larger. Right. You can just see in real time how things change. But then we also have rules and in a way there's almost like the coarser rules, but it's for design. So here I can say things like, hey, my animation always has to be a buzzier curve of this transition. Every time an element comes into the page needs to have 0.4 milliseconds, but once it leaves the page is 0.6 milliseconds. Because of the stuff you learn as a designer doing interaction design, like the, the, the, the core of interaction design, you can just put them here. And then every time you use a design system to generate, you don't only get things that look like they're coming from the design system, but you also actually have the rules.
- [50:17]
Rid
How far have you seen people push this? I'm really curious. The custom design rules, I mean you could put anything in here. What are you noticing, what's working, what's maybe an interesting use case that you've seen?
- [50:26]
Pietro Scurano
Yeah, so people are using a lot for this animation. That's basically one of the main thing for accessibility. We have a lot of people going there and say the accessibility contrast, they go like, hey, the contrast never needs to be less than this or more than that, whatever. So there's a lot of like they're using this for precision basically, which is what's missing with AI, right. And we're basically solving this. And the other really cool thing we did, we make this in a way that it's basically it's like works with any standard global CSS that you will use in any company. So for example, there's this tool that's called twixcn that's very popular. So people come here and there's like a bunch of design systems, right. So for example, let's say there is this like, I don't know, cloud form is. Which is very interesting.
- [51:09]
Unknown
Right.
- [51:10]
Pietro Scurano
So the way we did that, it's like you can even just come to other website or getting other import your own global CSS from your company. You can just Copy this, go to Magic Path, do import here.
- [51:22]
Unknown
Boom.
- [51:22]
Pietro Scurano
Now the design system is here.
- [51:24]
Rid
That's cool. That was a question that I had, was like, how easily can I get from something that I have in cursor to very easy.
- [51:30]
Pietro Scurano
And on top of that, you can also preview dark mode mode right away. So you already know, because the way we build it is the dark mode and light mode is embedded together. So actually what happened is that you go into dark mode, like, sometimes you can see a dark mode design. If I make my app dark mode, the other thing I want to show you, go back to the whole idea, like, should I be scared of using code?
- [51:49]
Unknown
Right?
- [51:50]
Pietro Scurano
Like, how much? Because I think another thing, people are worried about code they think is going to limit their creativity, right? That's the fear. Oh, my God.
- [51:58]
Rid
It's rigid.
- [51:59]
Pietro Scurano
Yes. Good, good. So look, this was. So we recently did a Contra Akathon. We still have to announce the winner next week. But we did, you know, Contra is like this design social platform. And we did an Akathon with them. And this is the stuff that designers are making on Magic Path, right? Like, you tell me if this looks AI to you.
- [52:17]
Unknown
Yeah, right.
- [52:18]
Pietro Scurano
And that's what I'm saying. It's like, it's like, you know, you will pay an agency, like, I don't know, like, a considerable amount of money to make this website, right? And now this guy, he's just really good. And so if you look at his page, that's his aesthetic, right? So he was able to move that aesthetic back into magic. So, like, zoo you. Everything he does is like very clean and minimal and pretty.
- [52:41]
Unknown
Right.
- [52:42]
Pietro Scurano
And he's just a great designer. And he's a great designer. And he's using a tool that allows him to just 10x the output. Because now instead of having this screen is actually sending clients, like, things they can feel and try, and it's like, responsive and it's like all that kind of stuff. So that's also the interesting thing. Do not be afraid that this is going to limit your creativity. Your creativity is only limited by the amount of effort you're trying to put into these tools, which is really interesting.
- [53:10]
Rid
And even just what makes this design is that it's very alive. There's lots of motion, how things fade in. And I can see if maybe for web design, yeah, it's a little bit more realistic for someone to own all of that in a framer or a webflow. But if you're doing product design, it's very typical for actually that to not be part of the design deliverable and that's left up to the engineer. And so I think it's a great example of so much of what that design was, was how it felt. And now it's easy for the designer to own that part of the deliverable.
- [53:38]
Pietro Scurano
And code is the way to get there without you even see it.
- [53:41]
Rid
I want to make sure that we're covering our bases. We've talked about a lot of different things and I'm really still fascinated this idea of like a design architect and what that archetype of the role looks like in the future. So I just wanna make sure that we've talked about anything. Is there anything that we haven't talked about yet that you think will make for a successful design architect or help people go from where they're at today to moving into more of that type of role in the future?
- [54:07]
Pietro Scurano
Even if your job might get easier because you know you're moving faster, your job actually your responsibility go higher. Because as a design architect now, you're not just in charge of like in the past, oh, this looks good, let's go home, let's relax. I'm done now. You're not sending that to an engineer, to somebody else, a front end person to work on the animation, the transition, like how the things fade, where the side panel goes, how it moves in, how it moves out. You are in full control. And if you are in full control, there is so much more detail that you took care about. And so that's why in a way I want to stress that you have more power now than before because you were living into this very isolated stuff. It's almost like AI just gave you a promotion. I mean that's a really good way to see it. I like that AI just promoted you from a pixel pusher, maybe experienced, a very experienced product designer, somebody that's really strategic to actually now be the keeper, the architect of the experience. Because now you are actually for the very, for the very first time in the history of product development, you are in charge of everything that comes in and that comes out from that experience. And that's never happened before. I mean it has happened, but it will take you like months of refinement, working with the team, chat and conversation and meetings and yelling.
- [55:33]
Rid
It's a unicorn skill set too. Like not that many people can be spike on both of those.
- [55:37]
Pietro Scurano
How many hats the product of Figma exist? You know, how many had the product of Google exist? It's very, is a very rare role.
- [55:44]
Unknown
Right.
- [55:44]
Pietro Scurano
And so that's the the, the interesting part to me, it's like, it's almost like you can rest. It's not like, oh, I have AI now so I can just chill. No, your responsibility as a Designer is just 10x overnight and if you can control that, you can get the offer at Entropic, you can get the offer at Google, you can get the offer your dream job and they can pay you really well because guess what? Nobody can do that right now. There's no one that is as good at this stuff as you could be. And it's a very high demand role. The product designer that becomes a product architect, design architect, and also has this sensibility in talking to the model. I think that's going to be the biggest, most expensive role for all those companies. And I can promise you that that's going to be the highest pay role on any company.
- [56:28]
Rid
I think I agree. And, and maybe a year and a half, two years ago even I felt a little bit nervous. It was when we first had the UI generation stuff and code was actually lagging a little bit, where it was kind of like, oh man, what's, what's about to ha. What's about to happen, you know, and, and then all of a sudden, overnight it was like, Whoa, AI's pretty good at code actually. Like, I feel like I can code and maybe some of the design stuff was, you know, now I'm like kind of asterisks by this statement because I think some of the stuff you just shared was pretty good. But there was this moment where I was like, whoa, actually now, now UI is lagging and code is really good. And it was like, I'm pretty grateful to have this skill of a designer because I can own so much more of this equation. And like, what are the core fundamental skills and vantage points that people bring into that equation? Yeah, when software is largely democratized, at least front end and up, I'm pretty grateful to be a designer.
- [57:26]
Pietro Scurano
Totally. And what's interesting about this is like the entry level for that is also going lower and lower because if you don't move fast enough, there might be that PM on the team that because they have agency. Agency is a really important thing in the age of AI. That person in the weekend might spend the entire end to end using AI and might get product approval and might even cut you out if you don't like understand how fast, how quickly you can move with those tools. But then if you can move that quickly, you can embed your vision as a designer, which is fundamentally, could be better on average. Than a pm then it's where the true magic happen. And that's when you become irreplaceable, basically.
- [58:10]
Rid
And you can use that exact same logic for different levels of seniority and career position too. Like if I'm a very senior designer and I'm still hand assembling noodles of static mocks and spending three days on a prototype and you just graduated from college and you just crank out something that's interactive and drop it in Slack and I'm on screen three.
- [58:30]
Pietro Scurano
It's funny you mentioned that. You know what's one of the biggest requests I get over email is college discounts.
- [58:36]
Unknown
Wow.
- [58:37]
Pietro Scurano
I think this new generation of designers are going to come up from college that use AI first as part of their flow. They are going to crush it. You just can't compete.
- [58:49]
Unknown
Compete, Right.
- [58:50]
Pietro Scurano
It's just, you just can't compete. It's almost like print and web.
- [58:54]
Unknown
Right?
- [58:54]
Pietro Scurano
It's how you compete.
- [58:56]
Rid
We've seen that across every single industry vertical for decades. Like ever since we became a technological society. You can see the clear generational lines between who grew up with what level of native technology. And we're about to see the AI native cohort enter the workforce and it's going to get crazy.
- [59:14]
Pietro Scurano
What's off the Gen Z, Gen Alpha? I don't know.
- [59:16]
Rid
I don't. I never can keep track of these. I. I didn't say it intentionally.
- [59:20]
Pietro Scurano
Whatever.
- [59:20]
Rid
Jen is up to something. The gen kids, the gen kids are gonna smoke us. That's the reality.
- [59:26]
Pietro Scurano
They're gonna cook.
- [59:27]
Rid
This has been super fun, man. I'm really, really inspired by what you're doing, how you're thinking about things, just your general take on the type of future that you want to bring into the now and what that all means for designers. Really aligned with it. It's really exciting. So thank you for coming on today and sharing it with us.
- [59:46]
Pietro Scurano
Thank you so much for having me.
- [59:47]
Unknown
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. 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. Marvin is how I find design inspiration. Paper is how I design like a creator, Native. 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.