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Hey Reader,
A common story I'm hearing in my coaching calls is how AI is enabling product and engineering to design and ship without looping in design. What does this mean for our role as designers when anyone can push design changes to production?
Read on...
In today's email:
- AI-native is misunderstood: what the phrase actually means, why "using more AI" isn't the same thing, and what happens when teams chase the label instead of the outcome.
- Principles over speed: a design engineering lead's six rules for keeping craft intact while shipping fast with AI in the loop.
- Tools built for AI, not just for you: a design-token generator made to be read by an agent as easily as by a human.
Can AI actually understand your Figma file?
As AI becomes part of more design workflows, the structure behind your files matters even more. Join Christine Vallauere (moonlearning.io) for a session on variables, components, states, naming and how to give AI better context without losing control.
Level Up Club member? Join the Event Calendar using the email tied to your membership for free access.
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Design gems of the week
- AI invasive design: A sharp argument against chasing "AI native" as a goal — the better question is how to build AI that fits human behaviour, not the other way around.
- Principles for building a design engineering practice: Six practical rules for balancing speed, AI, and craft when building out a design engineering team.
- Depths: A shadow and elevation token generator built for designers and agents, super handy if you're building or maintaining a design system.
- Creating the conditions for experimentation: A deep dive into how Stripe's design team is creating the conditions for AI adoption. The video is worth a watch for the demos alone.
- on.design: the new dribbble?
- bencho.dev: A library of interactive UI blocks you can explore, tweak, and take straight into your projects.
- Influence doesn’t come with the promotion: A solid read from product coach Jenny Wanger on the difference between persuasion and influence.
Open design roles worth a look
- Product Designer, Evals & Prompts @ Anthropic, San Francisco, California, Hybrid
- Product Designer, Design Systems @ Apple, Culver City, California
- Senior Product Designer @ Highbeam, New York, New York
- Product Design Lead @ Good Pair Leads, Sydney, Australia, Remote
What if your design canvas ran your actual product?
I've been testing Dessn on a real app I'm building. What struck me immediately: I didn't have to recreate anything to start exploring — one click to connect my GitHub repo, and I was working directly against the real thing. Dessn's new infinite canvas runs on top of your actual codebase, so I can pull in an existing screen, branch into different design directions, and compare them side by side — with no separate design file to keep in sync.
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Tools and resources I've been loving lately.
Wonder — Where I explore product directions with AI on canvas
Monologue — For capturing thoughts quickly by voice or talking to my AI agents
Granola — My go-to for meeting notes
Framer — Build and host a beautiful portfolio website
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Your PM is vibe coding prototypes. Now what?
If you've chatted with me in a coaching call recently, there's a good chance we've ended up here: a PM vibe-coding a prototype and sending it straight to engineering, an engineer pushing a UI change you never approved. Design gets pulled in late, if at all, and your job has turned into polish.
I'm going to say something spicy 🌶️
You ready?
This is the best opening design has had in years, and most designers are about to miss it because they're too busy grieving the old job description. Design's real leverage was never about the screens.
It was judgment — knowing what matters, what's good and what represents the product's integrity.
AI doesn't remove that judgment from the world. It just makes it obvious when that judgment only lived in one person's head — because now everyone can move fast, and only some of it holds up.
Design now has an opportunity to become infrastructure instead of a bottleneck.
If you're struggling with this mismatch of expectations, toe-stepping or misunderstanding of the new role of design, here's four things you can start doing:
1. Draw the line — clearly, not defensively
What is your org's version of a collaboration matrix? Could low-impact, small-audience, reversible work be self-served by whoever's closest to it – regardless of whether it's a PM or engineer?
This would reserve designer's time and energy for high-impact, zero-to-one, brand-defining work which should remain designer-led.
By defining ownership and collaboration, nobody has to guess whether they need to loop design in, and you stop being the mystery, unpredictable gatekeeper.
2. Build your judgment into the system
What would your org need to ensure that quality doesn't depend on you personally reviewing every screen?
You can be the one who builds a tool that carries judgment. Not another playbook, but tools to help your peers design within the guardrails of what quality, taste and craft represent at your company.
This is what Owen Williams, design manager at Stripe (and also my life partner btw!) did. He built ProtoDash, a tool that turns prompts into production-ready prototypes using Stripe's real design system, Sail.
Nobody assigned it to him. It was a passion project that solved his own friction, and it spread because it was good, not because it was mandated. I was able to watch from the sidelines as he built it, and it was clear how fun it was to build.
Chris Greer, a staff content designer at Stripe built Dante, an AI agent that enforces the style guide because of course they "still care about sentence case and Oxford commas," even at speed.
When design's role moves away from reviewing what AI made to designing what makes AI good, everything changes. 3. Make experimentation a rhythm
Instead of setting the boundary once and locking it in, fold experimentation into the process.
Stripe calls their approach "roof shots, not moonshots" — lots of small, low-effort bets instead of one big standardization push on tools that are still changing monthly.
Set a short, genuinely open period to try things, then reconvene and fold what worked into the system. Repeat.
4. End with a checkpoint that earns its keep
The equivalent of code review for design: fast, expected, non-negotiable — but not a toll booth.
Create tools and workflows to set people up for success so that air time in reviews are spent on strategic decision making and critical thinking, instead of copy errors and incorrect component usage, which AI could've spotted.
If it's approval theatre, people will route around it. If it's genuinely useful, they'll want it.
The mindset shift, plainly
None of this is about stopping anyone from building or reclaiming territory. It's design becoming the reason everyone else can move fast without breaking things.
Stripe's head of design, Katie Dill, put it well: "We set the table to enable the party." That's a builder's posture, not a defender's.
If you've been working on making the leap from execution to strategic influence, this is it, happening in real time — and it's a far better story than "AI took my job."
It's "I built the thing that enabled everyone else do theirs well."
Looking for more? Here's how I can help:
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