Dive Club 🤿

There's been a heck of a debate around the future of coding and design tools lately... but what's actually happening inside of today's top teams?
Where is all this headed and how does the future of our tools shape the role of a designer?
Today's episode is with Stephen Haney (https://x.com/sdothaney) who is the founder of the new design tool Paper.
And for the last few months he's studied how design teams actually use AI in their everyday roles... everything from tooling to prototyping to process.
He walks us through some of his key findings and how that's shaping his product strategy for Paper 👇
Some highlights:
- The “designer playground” approach
- How AI adoption looks at startups vs. big companies
- Why designers at big companies aren’t PRing to production
- AI usage being mandated in performance reviews for designers
- The new localhost sharing problem and how teams are solving it
- Why local development is winning over cloud tools for design teams
- Why companies use of AI tools doesn’t match what you see on Twitter
- + a lot more

Basecamp’s “Shape Up” project management philosophy (https://basecamp.com/shapeup)

Gab and Nim are the co-founders of a startup called Dessn which allows designers to prototype in the context of their production codebase (without any of the setup).
So I asked them to hook it up to the Inflight repo and give me a little demo to see what’s possible.
I’m pretty sold 👀

Someone asked me recently... if you had to join a design team, who would you want to work for?
And my answer was easy... Perplexity
So today's episode with Henry Modisett (https://x.com/henrymodis) (Perplexity's VP of Design) is a deep dive into what makes their design culture so special.
Some highlights:
- How to create a culture of decisiveness
- What signals Henry is looking for in designers
- Factors that influence Henry’s leadership style
- How to lay the right foundation for your design org
- Why Henry is doing feedback differently at Perplexity
- Henry’s strategies for building world class design teams
- + a lot more

Kyle Zantos is leading the new UX Tools Labs where he's responsible for figuring out what matters for new design tools and workflows.
As a result, he's pretty quickly become my go-to source as I transition into more of a builder with AI.
So this conversation is a deep dive into very specific tactics you can use on your own design engineering journey.
We'll go through recommended tools, workflows, and Kyle's process for building a design engineering "Skill" using Claude Code.

Kyle’s portfolio site: https://zantos.co
Leva control panel: https://threejsresources.com/tool/leva
Compound Engineering plugin: https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin

Jhey Tompkins: https://x.com/jh3yy
Derek Briggs: https://x.com/PixelJanitor
Will King: https://x.com/willking
Emil Kowalski: https://x.com/emilkowalski

We talk a lot about using AI at startups…
But what are more established companies doing to scale AI prototyping?
What are the best ways to use AI to prototype with your design system?
That's what today's episode is all about because we're talking with Lewis Healey (https://x.com/Lewishealey) and Kylor Hall (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylorhall/) about how they scaled AI prototyping at Atlassian.
Some highlights 👇
- Their vision for a truly AI-native design system
- What's worked to scale AI prototyping adoption
- Tips for reducing hallucinations when prototyping
- ways to help AI make sense of your design system
- Their novel approach to prototyping with “templates”
- How the role of design system designers is changing with AI
- + a lot more

- Atlassian Design System (https://atlassian.design/)
- Figma Make (https://www.figma.com/make/?gad_campaignid=23356954992&gbraid=0AAAABCTX0ItGAe7RZBBeUOUindISLe0Un) (AI prototyping tool)
- AI Builders Week (Atlassian internal program) (https://www.atlassian.com/blog/inside-atlassian/ai-product-builders-week)