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- [00:00]
A
AI fluency is going to eventually just become like an ambient thing. I don't think we're going to like highlight that language forever, but I think right now it is important language because a lot of companies are like, yeah, we want this designer who can come in and think. We want someone who knows what to do with the question, what if In a way that doesn't feel like it's from 2012, 2015, you know, 2018. That question seems to be being answered by like, what are you showing that you're sharing? Like, social media is the new discovery engine right now. Like, that is the way to. For better or worse, that is the way to prove that you are someone who is. Is experimenting.
- [00:33]
B
Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid. And this is where designers never stop learning. This week's episode is with Tommy Gioccco, who just finished visiting some of today's leading design teams like Vercel Perplexity Ramp. And we're going to go deep into everything that he's seeing around AI workflows and where design is headed next. And to start, I wanted to dig into his recent state of prototyping survey to figure out what details stood out the most.
- [01:03]
A
The number one thing that stood out to me was that designers who are currently Vibe coding are more satisfied with their workflows. I hear a lot of no. And we both hear a lot of noise, man. And I did not expect that. I was very curious to see because I was like, I know this is happening a lot. How much? And are people happy with it? Because I assumed, I mean, we hear the stories like meta incentivizing tokens, leaderboards, you know, and this like, just like being crammed down the throats of employees. People seem to dig it in these, in this survey. And I thought that was really unique. I also thought, and I wish I had parsed this a little different, but it's the people who are currently doing the majority, like. So if the majority of their workflow is spent on Vibe coding activities, it's design engineers. That makes sense. Lead principals. Okay, but then it's like non designer roles, which might be students, students and researchers, then it's managers and then it's like your general junior mid level ic. And that part was fascinating, that managers are doing more than junior and mid level ICs either things are trickling down and people are experimenting and then they're going to pass it, you know, they're going to pass learnings down, which is kind of what we've seen on location. But it also might Mean that, like, some managers or teams haven't yet made room for the rest of the team.
- [02:22]
B
I'm looking at a bunch of junior and mid designers that are getting cut out of the process is what that data says.
- [02:28]
A
Yeah, yeah. And that to me, it's like, you know, I'm trying to give a little benefit of the doubt, but ultimately it's like, yeah, we need to make more room at ad companies. I don't know if it's trending in that way, but I'm starting to see more and more of that at certain types of companies. Anyway, I think it's interesting to think
- [02:43]
B
about the types of Vibe coding too, because the experience of somebody who is building all of these crazy processes or systems or files to get a tool like Figma make or even B0 to look and feel like their design system versus somebody who's just every day they open up the production code base and just start exploring and shipping. That is a pretty big chasm too, where I get a lot of people coming to me that are frustrated because they're trying to bend these tools to their will. And then there's another class of designer who really is. I mean, what's a design engineer? And what's a designer if all you do is ship designs in code that ultimately make it into the product itself? That line, like, we don't even have the right language to talk about these different types of roles now.
- [03:24]
A
I feel like there's a group of designers who aren't aware of just how common. I guess I wasn't either. It is for designers to roll their own tooling that they're using in their workflow and then either like, tossing it to the side or like starting to share it internally with other team members. 59% of designers have built their own, like, tool for their workflow. And sometimes when I say, oh, all these designers are creating internal tools, someone will respond and say, yeah, it's all AI slop. And I'm like, I think we're misunderstanding. What we're saying here is that you had some sort of visual asset, you needed some effect applied to it, and you rolled a tool to help you. And maybe you threw it away after. Or in the case, like when I went over to Vercel, they had this brand designer, I can't remember his name off the top, really talented guy, had never coded before. And now was Vibe coding a tool? Their marketing team would like, put out blog posts and they were like, why do. Why does the design team need to create, like the OG blog post? Cards for every page. Like, that's not a good use of time. So he built a tool that just allowed them to insert any sort of images. And it just like already had all of the branding and the sizing baked in. And they just roll these things out quickly. And I'm like. And that just became a tool, an internal tool. That's cool. And so because it was really interesting that they started referring to him as a brand engineer and I'm like, what is a brand engineer? And then, then he showed me that. I'm like, okay, that kind of qualifies it actually. That's really cool.
- [04:47]
B
I'm seeing way more people trying to hire brand engineers. I never even considered that as a, that is a thing. Brand engineers are on the rise.
- [04:55]
A
I think every blank engineer is going
- [04:57]
B
to be on the rise.
- [04:58]
A
Engineer marketing engine. You know, Like, I feel like everyone is compressing to, for better and worse, builders of some sort. I talked to Will King, design engineer at Snowflake yesterday. He's like, I get it. I love systems thinking. I like that it's all going towards this. You know, we're, we're building factories, we're industrializing this even further. But there is like a loss of the like freeform creative workflow. The exploration part that some people are just going to have to like reckon with. And it's like, where does that go? Does it just get eliminated or does it sprout up in a different area? Like, does everyone have to be a builder? And I just thought it was an interesting question. I love the building and design systems and just like systems thinking side a lot. But like, I recognize that part is that's something to reckon with. How much, how much time do you spend on that stuff?
- [05:45]
B
It's more that the nature of it has changed. Right. And I actually, I think about this a lot. Part of me is almost slightly self conscious about it, but I do the vast, vast majority of my, you know, messy explorations with AI. Now, like, I, I feel like I have made the jump to the quote unquote creative director, where I'm just working with AI to show me a certain thing 50 different ways and then I'm pulling the pieces that I like and then combining them again and finally I get to somewhere, I'm like, yep, that's good. And then I take that from like paper, run it through cloud code and now it exists on localhost and then I will sweat the details and actually do the like precision designing in code, which is, that's crazy, man. Like, that's A very, very different workflow than I've done at any point in my career. And sometimes I wonder, am I losing some of the critical thinking associated with doing things manually and hitting Command D and making tweaks myself? And yet I'm able to go through, you know, a spectrum of explorations that are so much larger than I could do in a day, and I can do it in minutes. And I always see things that I didn't plan on seeing. But that's different, right? Like, it's just a different thing that I'm bringing to the table. It's different muscles that I'm growing. It's maybe different muscles that I'm atrophying too. You know, I don't know. I, I, I'm kind of TBD on, I think, what the impact of that is for me, even as a professional yet real quick message and then we can jump back into it. People are getting answers from tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity a lot more than they're clicking on Google lately. So if your site isn't AI readable, then you're losing visibility that you can't see in your analytics. So Framer just launched a free AEO tool which shows you how these AI systems read and understand your website. So in 10 seconds it can scan your site, score it on AEO readiness surface. What's hurting your visibility? I ran it on the Dive Club website and I only got a 50 out of 100, but thankfully framer gives me the exact steps that I need to take to fix it. So definitely take a minute to use Framer's new AEO scanner on your website. You can head to framer.com aeo to get started. Okay, so get this. Jitter's latest release lets you build your own creative tools inside of Jitter to make custom animations and effects. Just describe anything you want and then Jitter will give you custom parameters that you can use to tune every single detail, whether it's 3D control, dithering, or even an old VHS filter. And then once you get the effect where you want it, you can save it, share it with your team, and easily reuse it across projects. It really is as simple as just typing out your ideas, which is perfect for someone like me that doesn't have this rich background in animation. And sometimes I even like to have Claude help me with the prompts. This feature has blown the roof off of my creativity and I cannot wait to see what you make. Just head to Dive Club Slash Jitter to get started. Now onto the episode.
- [08:46]
A
I started something two weeks ago where I'm. I'm forcing myself to have one day of no AI. Like, I know tasking because I've been building these, like, open clause systems. It's really nice to get the context inside of that, of, like, my intent. And there's, like, inputs everywhere. What am I thinking? What's. What am I working on? What did I vote was worth my attention on Twitter? This conversation? And. And so I'm trying to figure out all these ways to get, like, really meaningful Tommy's worldview context into this system. But then I'm like, okay, it's really nice because my outputs are really rich from this thing. And then I start to become a crutch. So no AI allows me to really think through things again. And then also I leave the day and I have, like, more context now. That was, like, truly authored by me and I can feed it back. So it, it kind of serves like two purposes. And I'm seeing how you definitely feel it. Like, when you don't have it. The productivity feels really different. I feel stunted at first, for sure.
- [09:47]
B
I think the biggest difference for me is I don't do near as much thinking from a blank canvas. My thinking would be enough thinking to give AI a pretty good set of guardrails for it to explore in the directions that I want it to go. But, like, sometimes if I'm going to design a new layout or component or section of a website, I will just run a prompt to get AI to go do a bunch of things on the canvas. And I won't think critically about that design until I see something. I'll see 20 things and then I'll be like, oh, that's interesting. Oh, that maybe we should do this instead. But, like, that's when my. My critical thinking starts at the point where I'm already looking at something rather than blank canvas. Maybe I'm typing words, drawing arrows, doing rough little sketches. Like, that doesn't currently have a role in my process, which is, you know, it's different. It's different.
- [10:39]
A
You have this, like, spectrum of probabilistic to deterministic design. And I really like working over here. Like, here's a question I have for you because I'm really interested. We see so much noise online, and what's been really nice is to just ask people, like, what's your actual workflow like right now? And you shared something recently that was. You had made, like, these buttons, but it was like the AI had made these buttons, but it was like, in the perfect design system of inflight. And so what was the process for you of, like, what inputs were collected to the point where, like, you completely were out of the process? And it just, like, spun those up.
- [11:12]
B
It actually ties back to a single Claude session that I had maybe a few months ago, where, like most cloud sessions, I started off saying, I have no idea what to do here. Like, I feel like I should be using markdown files and passing context through my code base more effectively. I feel like you should be reading rule sets and gathering context more effectively, given a prompt. And I wasn't doing anything. And I was like, what do I do? And I actually went out and I found a bunch of, like, Dan Shipper articles and a bunch of every stuff and tweets that I had bookmarked. And I just fed a bunch of stuff in here. I was like, consume this. Help me think about a plan. I have no idea what to do. And it created this chart of nested context CLAUDE MD files throughout the code base at different levels that would teach it how to achieve certain things. And one of those is a set of visual rules and how I like components to be built. And to be honest, I've never even opened the file. I don't actually know what's in there. I just regularly contribute to it. Like, if I get an output that I don't like, I'm like, yo, never do that again. This is what I want instead. And then it just goes. And it does something and it goes somewhere and I never look at it. But I've done that enough now where Claude will know, okay, like, if I'm gonna build a subtle interactive element, like, Red probably wants me to use this tertiary style with this hover overlay, like, blend that adds a little bit transparency on top of the gradient. And I just get that out of the box now. And I get all my little inner shadows out of the box now. I never get things with borders anymore. I only get things with, like, using inner shadows to simulate borders. And it just took one pretty dedicated session. Like, I worked with Claude for probably two hours on this set of files and just refining it and feeding context into the system. And then from there, it's just taking a beat to tell it that something sucked and explaining why and then say, never let this happen again. And I have done it, like, a hundred times.
- [13:08]
A
I really think that sort of black box, because I do the exact same thing. Like, I have not looked at much of my code in a long time, and my open claw setup is very much like, I Know it's matching the intent based on the outputs. I'm not gonna go read a markdown file. Who has time for that? But, I mean, it's. It's like a really fast, satisfying loop. And so when I hear people say GPT 5.5 is worse than Opus 4.7, and I'm like, what does that mean? You know, like, what are you comparing? Are you just saying, like, you. One shot at a thing, and that probabilistic output that you got from one versus the other on that given day was better or worse? Because that's not a very good way to evaluate it. Like, how does it drive? You know, like. Like there's this sense of, like, you have to drive them for a little while when you drive it with intent and you're just like, screwing into, like, that's wrong fix, that's wrong fix. And you do that a few iterations, I think then you have a good feel for, like, how it drives. So I never understood this, like, one shot mentality of, like, I compared three of the same prompts. It's like, you just shot, like, a bunch of probabilistic stuff, you know, like those tweets, man.
- [14:14]
B
Yeah, I hate those. It's like, that's not even design. I get how that would be really appealing for somebody who's not a designer. But the fact that so much of the discourse from professional designers exists around which models put things out of the box in a more pretty way or which models have less purple gradients. It's like, what are we doing here? AI gives me a level of precision that I've never had in my career. And yet we always are quick to say, like, well, AI slops. Like, what? This is an slop. I'm making micro decisions that I didn't have a grid for a year ago, and it's only because of the abilities that it gives me, it's really hard
- [14:46]
A
to talk about right now. You have to really talk to somebody about, like, how are you using it? How are you evaluating it? Oh, you've gone down a rabbit hole that, like, has, like, that's a dead end. Okay, let's pull you out of the rabbit hole first and, like, make sure we understand, like, here's how you drive. All right, now that we understand, like, what driving means, now let's talk about, like, some of the other things that, like, are tertiary to it that can inform. Because there is starting to emerge, I think, a right way to talk about. I know designers hate talking about, like, using tools, but, like, that's the. That's the moment we're in. How do you use these things? How do you install them? And so for me, it's like, how do I talk about agents right now? It's this, like, headless design concept. I think, I think everything that you just described on how you created that button, these documents, this intent. Like, I don't think there's the future where we're going from tool to tool and reinventing that over and over. All the hours spent just like screwing in our intent, the correct way is going to become just a briefcase you carry from one tool to the other. You know, like, like ramps, glass. They. They realized they needed it for their company, so they just built it internally, they shipped it this way. You know, someone who's, who. Who doesn't have this, like, baseline education on how any of these work, it's already on their computer and it just literally onboards them. Cool. You're now connected to workday. You're connected to whatever data sources you need in a secure environment. Now, just like you, you. You have your briefcase of context. Use it wherever you need to. I think that's going to be the same in, in so many contexts like design that that's gonna be true for design. I feel like actually inflight would be a, a great use case of this if you guys decide to go that way.
- [16:17]
B
Yeah, you're in my imessage conversation right now.
- [16:22]
A
Think also, I think, like, households eventually will have this. Right? Like I was talking to you, I think at one point about this idea I had, like, I don't know, you call a product like hearth or something. It's just the family's context layer. It's like your life360. For anyone who doesn't know, like, which tracks your children on their phone, because as parents, you want to make sure they are where they say they are. Or it tracks how fast they're driving. Because if you have a kid who's driving, you definitely want to make sure they're staying on the speed limit. You might have that data. You might have the family calendar. You might have like all these things. And so now a family member doesn't have to vibe code their own agentic setup, but they have a tool. They have this context layer that, like, when. When all these tools become consumer friendly, they can just like, connect it to it and it has context. I think that's going to be in every vertical, I've got to imagine.
- [17:05]
B
Yeah, I think about that a lot because, like, I have visual language context right now. And then there's context from the code architecture, some. There's some business logic in there. I also have some running brainstorm context from Claude. Like, Claude understands what inflight is. You know, it's not, it's not always amazing to, you know, hook in and pull in, get everything. Or maybe it's a little bit out of date. Or it's like talking about this idea that I thought was cool six months ago that I don't really think about that much more. I'm really interested in the idea of like, you teed up inflight. But gosh, whenever I'm riffing with Claude, I should be able to give it all of the feedback I've received as context. I. It should know that my co founder, Kyle, always hates on the lack of negative space in my designs. He always thinks it's too dense. You know, like that should exist, you know, that should exist there. Or it should. If I'm design designing a certain surface area, everything's gonna be going through Claude. Or, you know, Kodak's your tool of choice. It shouldn't matter. Right? Like, I love your briefcase analogy, but like, that model should be able to seamlessly tap into all of the decisions that were made about that area of the product a year ago.
- [18:11]
A
Right.
- [18:12]
B
And it shouldn't be no copying and pasting from you. It should just be able to get everything, you know, like the design brain. You know, like the. The brain YC tweet kind of went viral yesterday, actually. I have, you know, mixed opinions on the viability of that at a large scale. When you're looking at a single vertical, maybe it's a family, maybe it's design context that's going to be a huge part of how we work.
- [18:34]
A
Yeah, I think the general purpose tool might have a place eventually. I don't think that's the right answer right now. Maybe I won't just like outright say it's not the right answer, but it's not interesting to me. And one of the things I asked Diego at Ramp was like, why did you guys build glass? Like, why didn't you just use one of the general purpose tools that are out there that like cowork or something, you know? And he's like, because cowork is good at general purpose, glass is good at Ramp. And it's like that, that context, I think is a really important piece that a lot of people haven't experienced what that means. And so it's like I have my open clock and it's really good at Tommy. Like, it's very it's not like, oh, it talks in Tommy's voice. It's like, it's really good at everything, Tommy. And when you have that, it's. It's so different than just using ChatGPT or like Claude code for something. It's really like you said, like, if it could be like, hey, we did it this way, but you know, Kyle's not going to love this. And you had a customer call last week that, you know, they called out something kind of interesting. Might want to flag that. That's an edge case, you know, that's pretty wild. The other thing too is, you know, we talk about this and immediately I think people are so binary about this. It's either handcrafted, human authored, or fully automated. I don't think that that has to be the case. And I don't like when things are fully automated. There's people who talk about like, oh, I got my agents and I got these processes to run all night long. That's my nightmare. Like, don't do that. You know, like, I could see that being interesting if you have like a really specific, well outlined micro t that needs like to be iterated on. But I want the friction, like there is a preserved level of friction that I'm finding is kind of important to me so that I make sure, like, let me fact check intent. Let me like re steer, you know, you, you drove like I fell asleep. You drove in the wrong lane. Let's like get you back over here. I want to make sure I have the opportunity to do that more. And those lanes, like, it's a really fun process. Like, I, at least for me personally, I don't feel like I'm losing myself or like replacing myself. I feel like I'm very much steering and driving. And then the other piece with that briefcase anal is while it's there on demand, you have customer insights potentially and you don't have to like go in and find them. But who's to say you don't? That's not just like, you just open the briefcase, go. If you want to, like, go fact check some stuff, get in there, get your hands dirty. Just. This is just a progressive disclosure problem. Right? And I feel like there's this binary thinking that like, AI means fully automated. And it's like, no. In fact, I think some of the better workflows are the ones that aren't fully automated.
- [20:53]
B
Yeah, agreed.
- [20:54]
A
Are you using, like, what are the. What's your stack? Go ahead.
- [20:59]
B
That's not fair. I was gonna ask you. We'll trade really quick. We'll trade real quick. Okay, But I'm going to ask the question slightly differently and I want you to pretend that a legacy org that hasn't adopted AI has been watching your YouTube videos and they're like, all right, this person's super plugged in, which you are. They bring you in. You're like a series A consultant, effectively. And they're like, hey, Tommy, we want to save money on tooling, so we are getting annual contracts. What are the annual contracts that we should commit to as a design org?
- [21:33]
A
Oh, oh, man. Yeah, that's hard. That is a hard question. Because the one luxury I have is I don't have the security issues, the security kind of compliance problems that I think a lot of these enterprise companies have.
- [21:50]
B
Let's imagine that, you know, SOC2 even isn't a requirement, which I think a lot of the company, I think a lot of these tools, if they don't have SOC 2 are gotta be like right on the horizon, right? So like, let's imagine it's like mid level security requirements. You really can lean into what you think, what tools empower an org and shape an org in a way that you would be happy with, right?
- [22:14]
A
Well, for the work, for design work, this is what I'm seeing and what I would recommend first from a high level, like if you think like sort of primitives, you have canvas. Canvases I think are always going to have a place in this workflow. What's your canvas tool? I think you need some sort of code intention tool. I like Codex a lot. I really like the cursor codex new UI pattern for agents. You need like an agentic coding tool inside of this process. And then I think you need your briefcase, you need your context, you need the thing that ingests everything. And it's like a backend to, to the, the two types of tools that you're using. And then you need the surface area where the work lives and that maybe that's like linear, right? Maybe you're like an Atlassian person and they have an agentic tool there. I can't remember what it's called. So it's like you need, you need the work surface area where, where the work, the source of truth of work lives. For us, when a video is done, the source of truth is not like the script we wrote in Notion. The source of truth is like where that thing gets uploaded in our backend, which might be like Frame IO, right? Like when, if it's in Frame IO, we know it's done. That's like a place where if it gets uploaded there, it could become a lot of different artifacts, it could become a task to upload on YouTube, it could become a description we need to write. So you need somewhere where like, you guys know like the work is happening, the intention of the work, and then where the work is done. So I think like a linear tool like that and then you need the interface, you need like Slack. I really hope Slack is paying attention to this because talking with agents through Slack, it has a lot of areas where I think that process could be better. Talking with agents is very different because I'll scroll through like seven different chat instances with my one agent and it's just, it's kind of messy and you can like lose context easy. So there needs to be a better tool for that. But right now I think Slack is still pretty good. The way I've seen people using it in Slack is good. So you need like an interface, surface area, you need where the work lives surface area, you need a canvas for more deterministic work and you need your agent or your like interface for coding for more probabilistic work. You know, when I think about a canvas, there's three that are on my radar right now. That'll get me in trouble. I still think figma's in the game. A lot of, even a lot of these like agentic teams that are like super forward thinking, like they're using Figma a lot still, like this is still a big part of the equation. And as long as Figma continues to innovate with these, the, the agentic side considered, I would consider them in Paper is paper didn't show up in our like top 30 tools on this survey. Which it was wild to me because every conversation I'm having I'm hearing, oh, and we're, we're playing with paper right now. Like I'm hearing paper pop up more than any of the other new tools right now in the canvas side. And then pencil.dev is really interesting. And I think Tom, I think Tom's a sneaky little winner. I think he's going to come out with something like he's going to continue to make that product really good. The other thing is, it's not just when you, when you think about stacks like these two, there needs to be like a shift in how you think about work. And that's the hard part. It's like, you know, I think when we started installing like assembly lines and stuff, people came in early and just like tried to install new equipment on Top of old factory workflows. And it didn't work right until Ford came out and said, no, we gotta like rearrange the entire factory. A version of that has to happen right now. Meta Lab has a team called Team Zero. It's like three people. They're tasked with, like, hey, you pick the project, the client, assuming the client's cool with it. You're gonna just do like a fully automated. Like you're not a fully automated, but you're gonna explore AI in a way that like the rest of the company's not. And you're gonna report back to us how it goes. They have a. They have their own set of criteria for how they determine success on that. And I think that's a really smart way for a company to mitigate the risk of hoping that they reinvent the whole factory floor. This way this team can come back and just say, like, here's what's working, here's what's not. And they can kind of slow roll into it, you know, versus then you have the ramps who are just like, no, we're just like, everybody do it. And those are like the two different types of ways that I'm seeing factory floor restructuring.
- [26:14]
B
Okay, let's use this as a launching point because you've now went on the ground with some of the most prolific design teams in the world. Perplexity, Vercel Ramp, Metalab. So talk to me a little bit about the unifying threads or signals that are standing out to you about how the best design teams are operating today and what they're exploring.
- [26:33]
A
I think the number one is that the company is making room for the experimentation. And it's expensive. It's expensive in token cost. It's expensive in. Because you go down rabbit holes that like, are throwaway work. A lot. Leaders are saying, no, I'm going to unblock it. We're going to throw, spend at it. We're going to give people time for this, you know, and it's coming in different flavors, but at the ones who are really doing it. Well, like at Vercel, they do a Friday Hackathon presentation every Friday. And it started as like a fun thing for a very specific group. And then other people from cross functional departments were like, hey, can we get in on that? And people just like, create things. They're. They're presenting like startup killers at every single one of these things. And those things just get shelled like, it's wild to me. And we were there just for one week, like just a little company getaway. That they did. And everybody, the ideas were like the sales team, they would go out and you know, like a typical hackathon, they'd recruit like a designer or an engineer and if they didn't have one, they'd just do it anyway. And it was like, people are fighting to get in line to present on that Friday now it's so company wide.
- [27:38]
B
I'm trying to do that. It's hard, right? Like, I feel for everybody that's like, man, when do I get time to do that, you know? Yeah, you get both ends. I've done experiments. I'm like, dude, I can't believe how well that worked. I can't believe how efficient that was. And then I've done other ones. I'm like, I just spent an entire night trying to build like a custom icon generation platform on top of the Quiver API and I just didn't really quite get it to work the way that I wanted to. And I'm like, I wonder how much money I just lit on fire in six hours of my life. You know.
- [28:05]
A
The three reasons that people are saying from our survey that they're not adopting the tooling are pretty tied. It was like a multiple choice question and it was that the outputs they didn't feel like were good enough yet, it was too expensive in some cases and that there was no time. Like people are frankly too employed void and if their company's not making room for them, people are already spending like their weekend probably trying to get stuff out the door just so they can show up Monday and look like it got done last week. So on top of that, you know, I, I feel for that a lot and that's why I put the onus on like the leadership to be like, hey, you have to make time and if, if, if it's really expensive. Another way I've seen this done is they'll just do like the hackathon once a month or a quarter and like give like a week to people. You can do kind of the Carmack week method where it's like, hey, go heavy on work time on an idea and then like, let's present it. And like that could be like a really cool lessons learned opportunity. The one thing I'll call out to you about that is if like you do make room for people to go heavily in some sort of hackathon, like just squeeze their brain in the base, you gotta attack on like a day of rest afterwards because it's cognitively a lot. Do you feel that? Do you get cognitively wiped out?
- [29:11]
B
Yes, I don't know, I think I'm on my own weird creativity roller coaster and sometimes I don't know what the dominant factors are.
- [29:17]
A
You're just having a Carmack year, you're
- [29:19]
B
just like, yeah, I can go so hard for like four or five days where I'm just flying, you know, everything I'm putting out feels good. I'm being incredibly productive. And then, you know, it'll be a Tuesday afternoon and I'm like, I'm just gonna go walk aimlessly because I don't know what to do with my life. Right.
- [29:36]
A
There is another piece of this that says all the things that I've just talked about and have seen skew more helpful to people like me who are changing lanes a lot. Whereas, like, when you get to like the specialist focusing on like individual tasking, you can get a lot out of it. But like, at some point, like, there's a faster ceiling maybe. I'm not sure. Yeah, maybe. And it might be more like agentic, like kind of system related, but I'm starting to wonder that too. I love this stuff because I switch lanes daily.
- [30:05]
B
You know, I tweeted that months ago. But the ability to effectively multitask, like being able to paralyze work at a really high level, is one of the core skills of operating in this like, AI world. Like, I always have multiple different types of tasks going simultaneously, or I'm working on different work trees simultaneously, different linear issues simultaneously. Maybe I'm designing and coding at the exact same time and you're just bouncing in between. Like, my tooling answer is like, I use conductor for everything and they have this little choo choo sound that you can turn on when an agent is done working. Like, I just move from one choo choo to the next choo choo and it's like this little game of Whack a Mole and the choo choos are doing all different kinds of things, man. They're doing all different kinds of things. And, and that's like my entire life is just like, choo choo option space bar, talking to my computer, choo choo option spacebar, talking to my computer. And I just do that all day.
- [31:01]
A
I wanna, I wanna say something too because, like we're geeking out on. I don't get to talk to a ton of people, I feel like, who have the perspective that we have. We've got this like 10,000foot view where we talked. I don't think people realize I was trying to count yesterday how many conversations I'VE had with designers and design leaders this year, and it's. It's already in like, like almost 200. I think it's been wild. Like, daily I'm having multiple conversations. The thing that I. I'll tell people is that, you know, when I talk to you, I like geeking out about this because we can compare a lot of notes that I think I can't compare with a lot of folks. But I also will say this is still really early. It is accelerating pretty quickly. But if you hear us yapping about this and you're like, this is really overwhelming, this makes me have a whole bunch of fomo, like, you were fine to wait. I really think you can wait at the moment for some of this, especially all this agentic stuff, because someone's going to come out with a tool that is eventually going to make me want to off board of my OpenClaw setup because it's just so well done and it works really well. And most importantly, the change cost is really cheap. That's probably going to be the great time to get in on this stuff. You're not going to have to worry about all the, like, tightening the screws the way I have to do right now. You know, I think that there will come a time where and at that point, like, it'll be really cognitively easy to get into it is my thinking.
- [32:14]
B
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 in open beta. It's the feedback tool that I've always wanted it, 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. Let's zoom out from there then, and tap into that kind of vantage point and perspective. Given the fact that we do have a lot of conversations with people in the industry and leaders, teams, that kind of a thing. So maybe going back to some of the on site team visits that you've done, I'm curious, especially given you know, what you're talking about with, with the open claw stuff. Like I know that a lot of people listening right now feel this little tinge of pressure and maybe this worry that they're falling behind. And how do you adopt, which direction do you point yourself when it feels like you go in every single direction simultaneously? So did your time with those teams do anything to shape the way that you think about the future role of the designer? But even more specifically, like where we should invest and what we will even bring to the table as professionals and the months and years moving forward, I
- [34:00]
A
have so much to say about it. So there's like in there. There's the sentiment you hear from just like the working designers and there's a lot of sentiment that's good. And there's some like very. There's the decelerationists, there's people who are afraid, then there's the accelerationists. Then on the other side it's like, what are people actually focusing on? What are they becoming? What seems to be happening is more people are finding themselves being given responsibility is what I'm seeing. And having to lead something, whether it's like the agentic installation or people or even both, I want to see those roles starting to have compensation to match that. That's kind of. That was like my hypothesis from 2024 showed like this visual that it was like as the tools get better, the capacity for work starts to open up. Like you can do more in a day. And they think there's a cognitive component of that that wasn't addressed, because that's true. But you can do more. Like you have more time, you have more ability, but you stack more things inside of that open space. Compensation should increase. That's the hypothesis. And I actually want to run a survey this quarter tracking where that's at for teams and like where, where I think people should invest skills or where they're looking at it is just like being able to build intent and zoom in and out. Like the ability to move between altitudes. Not just of like product thinking and then like the interaction moment, but also from workflows. Ben Blumenrose had a really good answer to what makes someone AI native. And it's not about the tools. Like, it's not about like there is some competency in there. Sure. But to him it Was what do you do with the question what if? And I feel like that framing is really where I would rather have designers focus, because I'll have some people who are like, hey, what do you recommend I do right now? Should I create a project? Should I, like, should I play with cloud code? And I would just say, like, tune out the noise for a second and think of something that you have as, like, a problem. And like, a problem every designer has is the blank canvas problem. It's the hello world project, I think, to get you into this stuff and then just go and figure out how to solve the blank canvas problem for yourself. Meaning we would do crazy eights. You know, we would fold a piece of paper and we do quick crazy eights in eight minutes, one minute per idea, to come up with, like, some solve some problem, some interface problem. What is the version of that with the tooling available, and go and just explore a couple of tools to figure out what is the blank canvas problem. Oh, maybe you open up paper and you just, like, use the new tool to do stuff you're already familiar with. Or maybe you open up Claude code and you vibe code, like, eight quick variations. Or maybe you go even deeper and you're like, hey, how do I connect cloud code to Papers mcp? And then how do I actually create a plan in Claude code and have it execute it in. In paper's MCP so that it just open up paper? And I have, like, eight probably shitty versions of this intense that I can just kind of, like, decide what's trash and what's interesting. Just do that and do it in a way that's, like, interesting to you. Don't. Don't look for, like, Tommy's newsletter. Don't look for the dive club newsletter and figure out what you should do. Just, like, tune it all out and pick up a couple of things that, like, you found curious, like, practice thinking and just try it and start to build your own little database of insight around what you're learning and what you like about your workflow. Because everybody's workflow. And this is the one thing I have seen. A lot is different. Like, if we were to put screenshots up of everybody's workflows that are emerging. There's shapes and sizes and, like, oblong and weird, and they're just very custom right now.
- [37:30]
B
Even within an org, Even within an org, the delta between workflows within an org. Like, I've been doing a lot of customer calls, and it's shocking, man. Like, obviously everybody had their own process and means to tap into creativity. But people are using fundamentally different tools, ways of working, ways of thinking. Like, the. The spreading apart of the creative design process has gotten so extreme, it is chaotic.
- [37:56]
A
And I think there's a lot of value in the people, the teams, the individuals who are just sharing their workflow. And I think it's important to remember that, like, that's a good activity right now and, you know, you don't have to attach the language to it that, like, hey, here's my workflow. You should do this right? Like, strike should from the vocabulary right now and just like, compare. Compare workflows, compare shapes. Because we will eventually converge around some better practices around this stuff, but we don't know what that is yet. And so right now, the best thing you can do is if you want to get involved in this. This type of work, to just try to find workflows that, like, are. Are good for you and spend like, 80, you know, some percentage of time on the familiar stuff that gets the work done, and then some percentage of the time, like where you have. You make room for yourself to explore a workflow. And to the point, for the people who. I said, you can wait. Like, we're going to converge. We are going to converge around stuff. If you have the luxury and you don't have to get involved yet, you can wait. And there probably will be, like, a concentration of, like, these are the better workflows.
- [38:53]
B
I think something that makes our journeys similar but also unique maybe to the average designer who's listening, is we both made this investment in distribution, putting our ideas out there, kind of seeing where it would take us. And at least for myself, I kind of rode this wave of figma, throwing in a bunch more technical features. There was this new type of design that felt a little bit more like engineering, honestly. And. And it was. It was really easy for me to just tinker. I was curious. I just went for it. I just tried every little different tactic and kept putting ideas out there. And it wasn't like, do this. It was more, hey, I tried this. This was really cool. I'm gonna try this again tomorrow. And I think we're in this moment in time where that opportunity is wide open again for people who do kind of want to, like, grow within the design community. There's so much hunger and desire for people to just see workflows and the different experiments that people are running and the different learnings that others have. And if you just show up, try things, be curious, and then treat, probably Twitter like a little journal of the things that you're learning and the experiments that you're running. Like, this is the moment in time right now to reap the rewards of being publicly curious.
- [40:04]
A
I've been very prescriptive to the last couple of people who are newer designers and they asked me like, hey, what should I do? I said, okay, do the thing. I just said there, like, pick it. Pick a project, do an experiment, go to Twitter, share it. You don't have to act like you're a guru. Like, this is not about guru.
- [40:21]
B
In fact, don't. People will.
- [40:22]
A
In fact, in fact, don't. Yeah, build in public and just say, here's what I did. Because here's the thing. Like the things that really pop off. So if you want to talk about just like algo maxing, it would be create like vibe code, something really visual, something that's like weird and unique, like a 3D graph or you know, some 3D space and time thing and just share it and like that. It's so easy to vibe code for content now, but if you want to make it useful and that's what I would recommend is create something that is specific to a workflow you want to solve for a project and then just capture the visual artifact out of that. There's some moment in there that's really visually interesting and just share it and then a few bullet points on what you learned and like you just farm. Like that would work so well right now for client work for lead gen.
- [41:09]
B
I don't know if you're seeing this. Very curious to hear your perspective too. But something that I'm kind of starting to notice specifically in more of the job market, is that there's this demand, not on paper necessarily, but there's this demand for designers who can help level up the rest of the org and the way that they work and the AI systems and the person that can just kind of blaze the trail, you know. And if you can position yourself as that, whether in an interview or even just on your Twitter profile, it's a massive, massive, massive green flag in today's job market. You've seen that at all.
- [41:44]
A
Yeah, the, the thing that's been really interesting, again, like it's the internal tool building. If you are not a designated leader at the organization, the absolute best way to find yourself being leaned on that way is to do something that brand Engineer did at Vercel. Find a cross functional use case where design is needed by marketing for a task that like, you don't have time for. You don't want to Spend time on and build an internal tool. I think they said there was like 1500 vibe coded tools inside of Ramp that they had made. Right. And the question is like, well, how much of that is throwaway? Well, most of it, like most of it is throwaway. And so the question was like, well, how does like internal adoption happen? Well, it happens just like anything else happens with a product. It's useful, someone tries it and then it starts to spread. Like, oh, so and so built a thing for this and, and that sort of thing. Like you are, you are installing something new. You are now the subject matter expert on that thing that's getting installed. People are going to start looking at you and saying, hey, like that was really interesting. How do I do that? And they'll start making time for you. Like that is almost a way where if you work at a company that doesn't have a lot of time for this stuff, but you do have the ability to use the tooling that way, which is another issue too. Right? That's a fantastic, fantastic way to do that. And that's what I would recommend.
- [42:58]
B
Multiple episodes are coming to mind where people who've built the early prototyping playgrounds at Notion, Atlassian Stripe, like they were catapulted internally in the Org, you know, like it became a, it became a big deal all of a sudden where different designers were relying on them and there's just so much to figure out. And designers, we're problem solvers and it's interesting to think about how a lot more of the problems that we will be solving in our day to day roles might be internal rather than user facing. And there's actually more bandwidth for that now too as we can accomplish the user facing tasks much more quickly.
- [43:33]
A
People are like, why would you create tools that would replace yourself? You're just replacing yourself. You're, you know, this is a self own and you know, at Ramp, there's two things that stuck out to me which was they really want people, designers to focus on like creating 10 out of 10 experiences on like the friction points that matter. You don't need to be creating the blog post image for marketing. You know, like that's probably not the best use of your time as a product designer. The other thing that was really interesting to me was the tools that do get adopted internally. Like they look really cool, man. Like, and I'm like, whoa, that's weird because anytime I've ever worked on an internal tool, I remember one for Quantcast. Like our account managers needed something. It was just like, make the thing work. It was like bootstrapped. It was a bunch of ugly things strapped together. It just worked. And then even when it got leveled up at some point, it was still just subpar because now I'm looking at, like, there was a tool. I can't remember what it was. It wasn't glass. At Ram and Diego and Simon, Corey had been working on, like, this drop cap letter. And. And it was like, you're gonna get this summary every day. And the drop cap letter was just like this tapestry with the old, like, you know, Renaissance language. And it just looked really beautiful. And I was like, that's crazy that that much attention to detail went into this internal tool. I get it. Like, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that that's potentially. I mean, like, I just. I just think it continues to grow in direction like that.
- [44:48]
B
I'm not thinking about Shopify's artifact tool. They had that tweet, and it's like one of the best design products of the year. And it was just an internal tool.
- [44:56]
A
Yeah.
- [44:57]
B
I received so many DMS in the weeks afterwards, people being like, can you just build this for inflight? Like, this is what we want for inflight. You know, in my head, I'm like, yes. But then the other part of me was like, I don't know if I can design a UI that good. Like, legitimately. I. That internal tool might just be beyond what I am capable of making, which is insane brain, because you're right. Like, if you would see somebody even that had a resume where they're like, I've been building internal tools at X company for the last few years. Your brain immediately is like, well, they probably don't have the visual skills. You know, they're probably just building really gray box functional ui. But that is not the case anymore.
- [45:26]
A
No, it's. It's. It's really interesting. And. And I'm, you know, I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm not like, full blown. I'll. I. There are some people who think, move everything out of the way, let the acceleration of this happen as quickly as possible, because we got to get through the painful middle as fast as possible. I've heard that take, and I mostly align with that take. But I do still think, don't go a hundred miles an hour. Probably go like 60 miles an hour. Like, let's go the speed limit and let's pay attention to, like, what we're seeing as we get there. But let's get. Let's try to get there. I think getting There is a worthwhile cause.
- [45:59]
B
All right, let's talk to a very specific listener for a second. Who they are working at a Midwest mid tier agency. They've been there for three or four years. They did some random freelancing before that. They're not going to win people over with their resume. But they believe that they have the skills to take a big leap and to land one of these roles that people care about and kind of puts them on the mat per se. Help them think about where to point, what are the types of ways that they should be spending their time. You only have so much time outside of day to day work responsibilities, what artifacts or processes or, or pieces of knowledge. What can they do to equip themselves to take that leap and play in the big leagues?
- [46:41]
A
I think the biggest thing you can do to add value right now, I really think, and not every designer wants to be a systems designer like someone who's thinking about systems. And I can appreciate that. I do think there's a world where a lot of very visual specific folks are still valued. But I think right now the biggest thing you can do is to go in and to try and help cross functional people do more design work easily. Like parts of the process. Enable your marketing team to create that blog image without needing you. Right? Like create a design function that is enabling cross functional partners. I truly don't think you're going to cannibalize yourself. I don't think that's what's happening. I don't think you're going to build these processes and then they're going to be like, all right, thanks. See ya. I think like they're going to find more and more things that need that sort of system thinking. I think there's going to be more things that need like actual product contributions that aren't the things that cross functional partners should be focusing on. And you're going to have a lot more time to do that. When you have a lot more time to do that. I think of someone like Andrew Wendling. He's this wonderful designer over at Iverson Studio and now he's living in this wild generative image video world and combining those with coding projects and, and getting these like really rich experiments. Amelia Wattenberger shared some of her like just blog posts that are these combinations of interactions made between different generative images and like really thoughtful philosophizing posts about the future of interface work. And it's like those things become possible because you now have time because you've enabled these systems that remove the toil of what you have to work on.
- [48:27]
B
And let me push on that a little bit because you could make the most high impact systems at this old company that you're trying to leave imaginable. It's a whole other set of challenges to figure out how to stand out in the market on top of that skill set. Demonstrate that value, do it in a way that gets people to spend more than 10 seconds on you as a person. So where do you go from there? Because I think the fact is that's not as easy to sell as the kind of goofy gradient machine that you were talking about gets clicks on Twitter.
- [48:59]
A
I don't have the perfect answer. I don't want to act like I'm a subject expert on how to get hired today. I'll tell you what I'm saying. Intern programs that still have whiteboarding, but like before that they do 20 minute exercises of vibe coding. But that was really interesting. You know, they want to test those capabilities. Yeah, I was like, they said they didn't want to see like figma, they wanted to see like, hey, vibe, code this. And it's for product design. There's like people who are trying to figure out how to evaluate AI fluency. And I think like AI fluency is going to eventually just become like an ambient thing. I don't think we're going to like highlight that language forever, but I think right now it is important language because a lot of companies are like, yeah, we want this designer who can come in and think. We want someone who knows what to do with the question. What if, in a way that doesn't feel like it's from 2012, 2015, you know, 2018. That question seems to be being answered by like, what are you showing that you're sharing? Like social media is the new discovery engine right now. Like, that is the way to. For better or worse, that is the way to prove that you are someone who is experimenting and that you're exploring what to do with the question. What if in ways that like a lot of other people aren't, let's say
- [50:04]
B
that you're the hiring manager and you're talking to this hypothetical person that I've been bringing up the last couple of questions and you are trying to figure out specific questions or measuring sticks to get at this level of AI fluency, what are you reaching for and what would, what signals would you hope to see right now?
- [50:24]
A
What's really. I mean, this is, I think the biggest question that I want to know is like, show me your workflow. Show Me how you design something. You know, take me through an idea that you've created, and that is something that I want to know. I want to watch and pick apart and ask why and see which tools are involved in that. That's a challenging thing because I don't think people are like, what do you mean? In my workflow? Like, well, I went over here, I asked some customers, I went over to Figma. I made this thing. I think the things that I want to know is, okay, cool. Yeah, totally get that. Is there anything you've played with? And, like, why did it work or why didn't it work? Oh, like, well, normally I would pull up super whisper, and I. Or whisper flow, and I would just be like. And then it would, like, look like this. But I don't. I don't want to show you guys that because that's, like, a bunch of waste of time. I'm like, no, no, show me that. Like, actually show me. Like, what are you. Why did you decide to do voice? Well, because, like, I'm kind of rambling. I'm not a great communicator if I just talk. But AIs, like, really helped me condense my thinking. And so then I can take that and I can plug it into this prompt over here. And I found that it could actually generate this plan better. And I'm like, okay, cool, now we're onto something. And want, like, let's dig into that. You know, and not everybody has that workflow, but that's what I'm looking for is like, have you played with workflows like this? How are you thinking about it? Like, why did you decide to do that? If I'm looking for, like, AI fluency, I'm looking for. I'm looking for that. I'm looking for people in the playground of not just, like, you have a playground where you vibe coded, but you've also, like. Like, you're treating your workflow a little bit like a playground. Whatever your Alt tab is on Mac looks different at any given week.
- [51:51]
B
I'm going to pull back the thing that you said earlier, which I feel like is a little bit intentional with this, which is it's okay to just wait because what you just said is totally what I'm seeing as well. And I have this. In the talent network, we have this product that kind of powers everything behind the scenes called decimals. And I have this thing I can hover over, and it shows the green and red flags that a hiring manager is looking for in any given role. And it's really interesting to look at the trends across those green and red flags. A red flag that I, by far the number one red flag that I see is that a candidate has not demonstrated any interest or curiosity in new AI processes or tools. What you're describing is kind of, that's the, that's the opposite, right? Like, that's the green flag. If you can show up and be like, man, I've just been exploring in every different direction and I did this, this one thing that it really, this worked kind of over here. And I'm playing with this new tool. Like hiring managers love that. They love that.
- [52:46]
A
I don't have the perfect answer for the balance. I'm trying to be responsible with language and not just crush people into fear about this. Again, 60 miles an hour versus 100 miles an hour. I do think at some point, because you have to understand what it says about you as a designer, though, if you're not experimenting, it says that you might just be too damn busy. You may not have the luxury. And that's very real. It's a very real thing. You work at a company or at Oracle where like, the mandate is like, we are, we, we do not think the future of design work looks like that. And they might be right. But I, from my understanding, Oracle, like very, very anti that direction. And maybe that's the situation that you're in and there's not much you can do about that. And it's probably going to be okay because, like, you'll figure that. I do think there's going to be a second adoption wave that occurs. But I do think if you're somebody who's like looking for a job right now and you want to stand out, like if that's, that's what we're talking about is standing out, having a shorter loop to getting that next piece of work. It's a really positive signal that you're exploring these tools because it says it's, it's a hundred percent says you give a. It doesn't mean you don't give a if you're not doing it, but it's a hundred percent means you give a if you are doing it. And, and sometimes the biggest differentiator between two people, people is like, how much gas they have in the tank. How much give a do you have? If you're going to keep up with this stuff and if you're going to do really good work, you have to care a lot. You have to care a lot about this. You know, I'm going to put you
- [54:14]
B
on the spot here, the chances of us getting this right are almost nothing. But let's say that we have this conversation six months from now, we run it back on an episode.
- [54:22]
A
Yeah.
- [54:22]
B
What topic do you think that would be much more in the zeitgeist that we would be talking about that, that, you know, isn't as top of mind today?
- [54:30]
A
Well, I, I mean, I think that context layer, the headless design, I think that's where this is going. I, I will. I like making predictions and I like fact checking my predictions because it helps me like hone my worldview. Like, am I full of, or am I like paying attention to the right things? I've been on a little bit of a run. It hasn't always been the case, but I feel like, like I'm, I'm plugged in and I do. I, I think we're gonna see this like, headless design topic this because I'm, I'm so early. We're so early talking about open claw installations and like ramp building glass. And I think over the next few quarters we're going to see that really accelerate. I think a lot of companies are going to realize, like, oh, agents are using tools. What does that look like? And what does that mean? Dan Shipper just launched that writing tool and that was a really, that was a really like, compelling case for working alongside an awakened AI that's just paying attention. That's like, hey, actually you should do this over here. Or actually this thing, this insight came in. Like, maybe you can consider this. Like, I think there will be. The first conversation is the installation of that briefcase, moving tool to tool. And then after that I think is going to be like, okay, how are people actually working with an AI that is like always on in the tool with you? I think that's going to be a real conversation that comes up. And that sounds like sci fi to some people. Like, we're there already. Like we were there, it just hasn't been yet.
- [55:48]
B
There's just a lot of friction to creating and managing the briefcase.
- [55:52]
A
Correct. The onboarding is terrible right now. The onboarding is like not, you know, but I think it's going to be solved very quickly.
- [55:58]
B
When you think about the design of the interior of the briefcase and where are the folders, what goes in where, what's the taxonomy of the little file paper? I've never had a briefcase, but I would imagine, you know, there's like little compartments inside of it. The design of that is going to fall as much on designers as anybody else. 150 different type of problem to solve.
- [56:21]
A
Yeah. And that's why you see, like, Google Stitch launching, like, the design MD file. Well, you're going to see a lot of, I think, initiatives trying to standardize what that means, like, how do you standardize intent? And we're moving in that direction, and it's going to look probably very different a year from now.
- [56:35]
B
And how do you share the lessons derived and the best practices derived across an org too? Because something that we said in the very beginning is how we're not even reading our markdown files. I don't even read my markdown files. So how is another designer going to have any clue what is in there? There's, like, a visibility challenge that's going to be really interesting to think. Think, too.
- [56:55]
A
That's. That's a really good point. I haven't thought about that as collaborating. Collaborating around those black boxes is going to be a challenge that needs to get solved.
- [57:03]
B
Totally random question, left field. Before I let you go, if you had to take a W2 role at a company tomorrow, where would you want to work and why?
- [57:15]
A
Oh, man. I think it would be Vercel, dude. Yeah.
- [57:19]
B
Really?
- [57:19]
A
I left that. Like, they're not full of it. Like, they're. They're really working in this way. And I am just a builder, and I really think the future belongs to builders. There was, like, something I said the other day, which was like, I think the future is bright, but it has to be built. And I love being surrounded by people who are just, like, building, who just, like, are obsessively about building in a direction that betters things. And. And I. That was one of the coolest cultures I've seen.
- [57:44]
B
There's a gravitational pull towards more technical products right now that I think think gets kind of the cream of the crop of the designers that skew builders, or more like the early adopters, you know. And so it's no surprise to me, I guess, that those cultures are attracting the level of talent that they are, because anybody who's freaking out right now that all of a sudden they can build their ideas wants to be in kind of an environment where they're told to just run crazy. And so, yeah, there is a little bit more of a separation maybe, in terms of the. The different tiers of orgs and what that makes possible for a designer. So I get it. Anything that we haven't talked about up
- [58:16]
A
before, I let you go that quick plug. We got a party coming up.
- [58:20]
B
We do have a party coming up. If you're listening to this, come to San Francisco for config. And the last night is Detach. It's going to be so fun.
- [58:28]
A
Detach is this idea that Jesse Showalter and I had 2 configs ago. It's where you and I met, I think. I think it was like 150 people. It was just like, let's just invite like once the conference is done, let's not have a mini conference. Let's like just. I. I told Jesse, I was like, I just want to get drunk with all the designers that I see online and hang, you know, and. And we did. We had. It turned out great. Then last year it was like a little bit bigger. I think we had like 300. We've been like selling out every year. And then so this year I'm like, cool. We got like a three story at 25 LUS. Really cool venue. It's got like a beautiful rooftop and we've got like 400 people. And it's like the people who are hitting me up who are coming, like Vercel's team's coming. Brett from Design, Joy, who never leaves out of his house. He's like, I'll be there. And I'm like, heck yeah. You know, Josh Puckett. It's just so many cool people. And I'm telling you, if. If you have an interest in like really networking in a way that's like, not pretentious or anything, come to the party, come hang out. Like, I want to have a drink with you.
- [59:21]
B
You get a little taste of how amazing this community is. And Tommy, you've played a pretty outsized role in contributing to it, shaping it, and super appreciate you coming on and sharing a little bit about what's on your mind and what you're seeing today. I think we should make a regular practice out of these because that vantage point is a good one and things are moving way too quickly to have a full year in between episodes.
- [59:43]
A
We should have like a bi annual state of. The state of perspective.
- [59:48]
B
You know, I think that. I think this is the first one of those.
- [59:51]
A
And we'll have more so inspired by you, by the way. So that's where it all comes back at you.
- [59:56]
B
Right back at you.