The End of the Designer–Engineer Divide

My personal KPI at Cursor this year is to turn all the designers into coders. The roles will start blurring. The designers will start coding. The engineers will start designing. And then our shared language is code.

You start not by, say, getting everything perfect. You actually start by building. If you get something bad or, like, ugly, it's actually your job to make it pretty the way you want it. And that's the part that the AIs can't really do right now As we break the boundaries between these tools, as everyone can start talking with the code, magical things can happen.

Today, I am excited to welcome Rio Lu. He's the head of design at Cursor, the leading AI coding tool used by more than a million people worldwide. Before that, he was a founding designer at Notion and a product designer at Stripe and Asana. Today, we'll talk about his background and design process, and then we'll hear his thoughts on the future of design in a world of AI. Rio, welcome to Design Review.

Thank you. Maybe to start off, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into design in the first place? Mhmm.

I was just making websites since I was 11. I just kept making bigger websites. The first one was for this anime that I really liked. I just made it for myself. And then I started making community websites, little forums.

And then I made one when I was 17 for Apple fanboys in China. That got kind of popular, and I just kept doing it. When I started, I did not know, like, what's the difference between design or engineering or product. It was just the whole thing. Then I became more like a professional designer.

I made a couple startups myself, and then I got an offer from Asana. So I came, and then I became a designer.

Were you technical all those years, like when you first started to design? I

would say I kind of self taught most of my software design and building parts. So I studied CS and bio in college, but most of the CS courses were like so ancient. They did tell me like more systematically how to program, but they weren't that helpful. Mhmm. Like, how I learned is really by just making stuff, building things without knowing what what the fuck I'm doing.

Like, I did not know the the concept, the words. I just I want to do this. I'll just figure out how to do it. Use whatever tool that's there, and then you learn by doing that. Yeah.

But now it's like with the agent, with cursor, you make this process so quick. Like instead of you felt like coding is a little scary. It wasn't like, you know, it's not something that we as designers are supposed to do. Or, like, you just feel like in order for me to start something new or, like, prototype, I need to learn all of these, like, low level concepts that are kind of dependencies. It's kind of scary.

And that'll take forever. Mhmm.

It will

take like That's the fear.

It will take like months. Almost like you need to like really focus on this and then go to a boot camp and whatever. Mhmm. Versus now, you just ask the agent. And then if you don't know, like, exactly what you're doing, agent is able to, like, fill you with the gaps.

It can do research for you. It can search the web on what is the best way to do x y z, and it will help you do that. And then you learn. And you learn by doing. And you get the result really quickly.

And you can iterate really quickly. Yeah. So that's the difference.

And sounds like you went through this journey of being frustrated that you were kind of put in the design box of like, this is the little piece that you should focus on. Mhmm. And now you have all these tools, you're able to actually build the thing that you envision, that you've designed. You can make it come to life and be real. And I know you kinda have a personal mission this year.

Tell tell us more about that.

Yeah. So my personal KPI at Cursor this year is to turn all the designers into coders.

Mhmm.

And then I don't want them to be, say, we're forcing you to start learning how to code, or like, how does the code editor work, how does Git work, all these little details. But rather, now it's time to just start building. Like, you actually don't have to care about all the details anymore. Just let the agents fill the gap for you. But now you can actually start coding without knowing how to code.

But, you know, like, as designers, as people who worked on software so long, we all have intuition of how things should work. Like, we all know these things, like, I don't know, say, like, version control for git files and folders, all these things. We know them. We just maybe don't know exactly, like, what is the right way to do it at this time or all the little details. But now it's like, you don't have to think about it anymore.

So for anybody watching, maybe they're a designer, they feel stuck in that box, they haven't been able to build the thing Yeah. And break out. What's like the first step? Like, what are the things that they should do

Yeah.

To put them on that path to your KPIs Yeah. Of turning them into I think developers too.

It's actually fine or it's good to play with the more, like, live coding tools. Mhmm. So, like, Figma Make or v zero. Like, those kinda help you get started in a more constrained fashion. Mhmm.

And they kinda work with your existing workflows better. But you will run into a point where, like, those more constrained version of coding doesn't let you do everything. And then that's when you go to cursor. Mhmm. And then you realize that, oh, the stuff I do in cursor and the stuff I do in Figma Make or v zero are actually the same or, like, they feel very similar.

It's very simple. But then in cursor, can actually do everything. Like, everything. Anything. Because it's just like, we're kinda unopinionated.

It is just like a suite of tools and agent with an editor that can write any code. Anything. IOS, web, you can even write a novel, like a book with it.

Mhmm. How long have you been at Cursor? And tell us more about your role and and what you do in the day to day there.

I've been at Cursor for almost ten months, but it feels like five years Mhmm. Like in AI time. So I'm the head of design. I was like the first product slash design person at Cursor. When I joined, we had like 20 people.

Now we have 250 people. Yeah. Our team is still really small. We have like four people including myself. Three of us work primarily on the product, and then we have Justin who works on the brand.

We're trying to expand the team a little bit. Everyone on the team codes. And I think how design works at Cursor, the difference is that, one, a lot of our engineers, they also kinda design Cursor. Because Cursor primarily, like, at its core, it is still, a tool designed for professional developers to do stuff with AI and kinda augment themselves.

Right. You have a lot of your own users at the company.

Yeah. Like, every single person at the company is a user. Then every single person has cool ideas. And as you know, like, engineers, they also are very different. Each of them, some of them prefer, like, doing everything in the keyboard.

Some of them are also, like, you know, button clickers. People have different preferences of the suite of tools they need. They might want different buttons to appear. The core of the system needs to be really simple, but it kind of adapts to different needs and different people's preferences. Figure out, like, say, I wake up today and then boom, there's like three new buttons.

Why do we need them to be there? What are the things that we can unify and clean up so that, you know, things feel simple but then you can still do all these things? How do different projects and ideas fit together? How do we decompose them and then merge them back? How do we keep the thing simple, but still like you start simple, but you can gradually get to a pretty sophisticated place.

You don't lose functionality, but things get more organized.

Yeah. It's like layers of an onion.

Mhmm.

You want it to seem simple at first glance, but if you want power tools

Yes.

You're able to uncover those.

Exactly.

Talk about you've been there ten months now. Mhmm. You've shipped a lot of really major things and worked on and designed a lot of really important changes. Can you talk about some of

Yeah. Two biggest thing that I've done. One is the first day I joined. The problem was Cursor, maybe earlier this year, it was more like a couple features slapped on top of Versus Code. There is the tab, which is the inline completion thing.

Mhmm. Still, like, the world's best, the most magical tab experience. We had the chat, which was you're just talking to the model with maybe some code based information, maybe not. And then it just gives you, like, a textual output. It doesn't do anything.

That was, like, the primary interface Mhmm. Of Cursor. And it's it was, like, a little sidebar on the side that you have to toggle it open yourself. And then there's the composer, which is like the chat, but it can offer to edit some files. And that's the only thing it did it did.

It's like, if the chat outputs some code, you can apply the code changes. To me, that and the chat is basically the same thing.

Mhmm.

And then, like, November, Cursor added agents. That was actually what hooked me to Cursor. Like, I tried Cursor three times before. I I churned every time. I had to search on the web how to turn on the agent.

I couldn't find it myself. It was like a little checkbox in the composer tab that says normal. It's like normal versus agent. Nobody knows what normal means. Right.

And then agents can have different modes or, like, how how how I think about it is, they're all agents, same agent, but with different settings applied to them. Mhmm. So, like, ask mode is just the agent without editing capabilities. Or maybe like, you know, we're adding a thing called plan mode. That is just the agent.

Before it wants to, you know, run the plan, build the build the stuff, you have to hit a button. We just block you from doing that. But they're all talking to the same thing. And to the user, we just flip the default. So you always get the agent when you open up cursor.

That's the only thing I did. And then the agent took off like that. Like, we kinda see the data from, like, primarily tab users, primarily agent users like And then the second thing I did, which is pretty recent, is, like, after we flip the default to agents, just noticed, like, the world kinda changed. And also, like, there were, you know, newer agent tools that are almost pure agents. And everyone kinda moved from, even earlier this year, primarily still writing code, but then it's kind of assisting you to now the agent writes most code.

And then you're mostly interacting with the agent. So with Cursor two point zero, all I did was Cursor used to say show the default UI hierarchy from, like, a file centric view. So you have a list of files, you have the editors that show the file themselves, and then the agent is kinda, on the side. All I did was I flipped the order. And then in this new agent layout, when you start, it's just one agent.

When it's empty, it's just a prompt box, you can do whatever. As you do more, maybe you run multiple agents, you can see like multiple agents, their states, you can swap between them, you can see, ah, this one needs my review, this one's blocked, this one's still ongoing. Maybe you can run for a long time. And then as you're doing that, you actually don't have to look at the code if you don't want to. But if you do, you hit this review button, and then we list out, like, every single change you can just scroll through and then review really easily.

Versus said before, everything's like in this really file centric view. When you open up cursor, when you have nothing, you still have like a blank editor, a blank file tree. It's really hard for like a person who who isn't used to coding to do anything in that state. Versus now, we flipped it. When you start on cursor in this new world, you can just type in your prompt.

See what happens.

You've talked a lot about, you know, simplifying UI, simplifying interactions. Is there a lesson in there for design founders as they're building their products?

Yeah. I think of, like, design, you can do it in two ways. One way is more like like I'll call it the traditional human centered design way. Meaning, like, you start from a set of users, their problems, you come up with, like, really specific solutions for their problems, and then you can design like a little world for them that way. The problem with that is like as you start working on more problems, and then as you make more of these specific features, it's really hard to kind of put them back together.

And then what you ended up usually is more buttons. Bun bun bun bun concept concept concept, more levels of nav and hierarchy. Then a thing that you were designing for this small group of people that solved their problem becomes something really massive that's hard to understand, that doesn't really work, that doesn't conceptualize as well. Versus you design in a more like systems first way, meaning you kind of decompose the problems into what are the parts, the primitives, the low level concepts. When they work together, they solve the problems.

And you try to keep that core concepts, the core set of concepts and primitives as simple as possible, but they all are somewhat flexible. Say for for example, when we were working on Notion, like the core concepts are just blocks, pages, databases, and the people, the the teams. And then Notion is just like different configurations of these things. And then when they get put together, they do amazing things. They can emerge complexity.

So it's all about figuring out for the world you're building, what are the core elements that actually, like, they will always stay, they won't really change, but they will evolve, they will, you know, make new connections. Each of them will get better. And then how do you map your user problems, the things you want to do, your roadmap, your ideas to this thing under. And then ideally, you don't add things all the time. You're actually like decomposing things, merging them back, figuring out what is the better configuration of the stuff that you have now.

If you tweak that a little bit, boom, you solve the problem.

Yeah. I think one of my takeaways is, as products scale and certainly, you know, probably Cursor is one of the fastest growing products ever in history. Yeah. The tendency is to keep adding more features.

And

the product expands in complexity as the as the user base scales and, you know, all the use cases expand. And if you're not intentional about going back through and rethinking things and pairing it back down to the simpler state. Yeah. It's very easy for these products to get out of control. And then it becomes something that is for nobody

Yes.

Because it doesn't have an opinion Yes. And it's impossible to work with these primitives Yep. Like you described. And it sounds like that is an exercise that you are regularly going through.

Oh, yeah. Maybe, like, on paper or, like, to the users, like, the concepts don't really change. But underneath, it's, like, getting rebuilt every couple months. Mhmm. And then things that were maybe, like, disjointed, they get unified as we go.

There's like a healthy tension. It's like people want to add things, people want to experiment, you let them do, you let them be. They build some stuff. Maybe they actually just slap a button here. But then, like, as designers, we can help people, like, rethink how to fit things better.

Like, what are the common parts that are shared that can, you know, if you fix this common part, it not only makes this feature better, but makes everything better.

Awesome. I would love for you to walk us through your design process at Cursor and how you've built some of these things. Uh-huh. So one thing I would love to see here is if you can time travel us back to Cursor, maybe before you joined or around the time that you joined. Talk about your feedback looking at the site, especially now.

And and then pull up the most recent one and talk about some of the changes Yeah. Along the way.

Let's go. So I just pulled up Cursor when it started in 2023. Wow. What is this? What does it do?

It's very

dark also.

Yeah. Very dark. Very, like I'm not sure what these gradients are. Yeah. Not sure what this is either.

Mhmm. It's like

Yeah. See some blurry code with

Very very not sure. A text box. Looks like the fonts are not loaded, but it might be something

Okay.

Not that great. Chat with your project. Ask about code base. Alright.

Now we're getting into a little bit more specific.

This thing is kinda crazy.

The line follows you.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So extra. Like, are you trying to do?

Like, you want people to focus on this line? Right. Like, what the hell?

Yeah. It's distracting, Yeah. Or it makes you think you're living in the future right now. It's like John or something.

But if you look at all these UI, just just don't know why I'm looking.

Yeah. That's always the problem with showing specific screenshots, especially of code is it's impossible for somebody to

get

the context of it.

And a lot of the code examples and stuff is like so foreign. Like as a reader, say like, maybe I'm doing like a b to b SaaS app or I'm doing healthcare, and then I see some random agent interface service code. Like, I I just don't it doesn't talk to me.

Right. It's not your code. Yeah. Sure. Sure.

Sure. Sorry. We got a bunch of social proof here.

Okay. Back in the day's cursor, what it's really good at is a tab, but there's no tab. Yeah. What the hell?

Yeah. The biggest thing like? You go in and make a change on this. What's, like, the number one thing that you wanna change and and get right on the next version?

Kill all the gradients. Why? It's just very distracting. You're like trying to create a scene or world for people to come in, and when they come in, you're really like disoriented.

Mhmm.

Like you don't know what is this where.

Yep. That second section is the thing that I would most change.

This one? Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't show you anything.

Yeah. Can't figure out what it's

There is actually like

of and it's prime real

Zero information about what the what cursor can do. Yeah. At the chat tab, the composer. Mhmm. When you toggle these things on, it actually defaults you to the chat tab.

Mhmm. You have to click composer. Mhmm. You have to find this normal slash agent toggle.

Right.

You hit on agent, then you can do something. Right. Versus this. Right. You can just do something.

Yep. It defaults You to the don't have to go through and click all the things.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. That's

it. Okay. Let's take a look at the latest version.

Yes. We kinda clean up all the it's like the foundation of the brand. Mhmm. Like, fine tuned every single detail from the logo, the typeface. We have, like, a custom typeface called Carthagothic.

Mhmm. I noticed it's not dark mode also.

Uh-huh. But it's like the idea is it it should follow your your system.

Ah, okay.

So that's the default. Yep. But if you're dark, it's still dark. Yep. But I don't want to kind of, you know, give people brightness in the day if they want.

Right. Right.

Yeah. Make cursor feel a little less alienating. One of the ideas of, like, say behind these, what we call, like, wallpapers Mhmm. Is that they're they're now, like, just great art created by humans. Mhmm.

Like, a lot of these

pictures human connection. Right?

Yeah. Like, they're not AI generated. They're actually, like, from past artworks Yeah. In the eighties, like, in in the eighteen hundreds and stuff. One thing that's cool with, like, our news side is that, like, all of these are interactive.

Oh, that's cool.

They are real.

I thought it a screenshot.

They're actually real code. Uh-huh. Made a lot of these. It's like, you can actually

So you can just try it out live.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then, like, a lot of these things actually work, so you can swap between different examples. Mhmm.

So maybe, like, this is more for, like, ML training. Yep. This song is, like, you're you're learning how cursor works. Yep. There's, like, a rule that's being edited.

Yep. We show, like, a bunch of different, like, industries.

That's so important because you wanna get people to the moment of using the product. And the best way to do that is not download it and install it and then set it up. Yeah. Figure out what projects you're gonna work on. It's just like, here it is right here in the browser.

You can start using it immediately.

Yeah. And then you can actually type in it and then boom, you can download. Yeah. Yeah. Each of the pages are also really simple.

Mhmm. It's just like boom, boom, boom. And then you can dive into them if you want.

Yeah. And it seems like you have one key point for each one that you're trying to make. Yes. It's something that you are showing with a screenshot visually to illustrate as well.

Yes. It's like kinda calling back to, like, the the core concepts Mhmm. That I just talked about. It's like the slides should also just show those.

Yeah. Yeah. And then Yeah. So go back to the homepage for a second. Let's let's look at all of those.

Mhmm.

And I'm curious which you picked and why.

So Yeah.

Okay. Agents. Yep.

The tab.

Yep. Tab autocomplete.

And this is like the ecosystem slash cursors everywhere.

Right. It's connected with all the other tools that you use.

Yep. Some testimonials.

Mhmm.

These are more like ways for you to kinda go into different spots. There's one for enterprise, one for learning models.

Mhmm. I would love for you to walk us through your design process

Yes.

At Cursor and how you've built some of these things.

Uh-huh. I'll first show you like something I do for work and then I'll show you something for fun. The first thing I showed is baby cursor.

Mhmm.

And the idea is a lot of times for designers, when we explore ideas, we actually don't really care about like the technical implementation details of how things work. So if you want to do your prototype in a in a production level code base that's really massive and complex, it actually takes more time than say, you just build a little environment for you to play with your ideas. You can kind of reconstruct parts of the UI and the interactions. It doesn't have to have all the details, but once you put them together, you can actually feel like like you can feel it almost like like alive.

So baby cursor is like a scaled down simplified version of cursor. Yes. That is like it in many ways. And it becomes your own personal playground

for

you to just add new features and explore different ways of doing things to try to get it right before you eventually wrap it back in Yeah. Into a grown up cursor.

Yep. So I built this in, I think, the afternoon, maybe, like, couple hours. It has all the hot keys, the primary, like, interactions that we have here. There's actually, like, a integration with, like, AI models. So I can ask, like, what is this?

And then you can see the live output. A lot of the stuff here, like, they feel like the real cursor, but it has, like, say, little details that I want that is not even in the product. Like, I want to make the keyboard navigation really well. Like, you can actually select all the parts of the chat. There is, a little preview here where you can see live output of the code.

Mhmm. We added the internal browser, so maybe that's like how this thing ended up. Mhmm.

And that started in baby cursor? Mhmm.

And one example that's kinda cool is I was trying to, like, explore some ideas of how we can run multiple agents at the same time. So I made this, like, you can say translate to Korean and translate to Japanese. And then when you hit this, it will run the agent at the same time. Cool. You can see both live outputs.

You can kinda pick and compare different changes. Mhmm. And, like, this kind of stuff, for you to to make in Figma is gonna be, like, insane. Like Yeah. Because a lot of the outputs are, like, from the AI.

There's a lot of life states and, you know, different things show up and not very hard.

The problem is you would spend forever designing this as a mock up with fake data. Exactly. And and you'd have no way to, like, actually test what it feels like to use it. Yep. And then you'd have to wait forever for an engineer to free

up Exactly.

And be able to prototype it for you so you could compare different ideas. Yeah. And you can just do that instantly. Exactly.

Like, it's so easy. Yeah. This is kinda like how cursor used to look like, like pre one pre two point o. You know, we talked about like there's the files, there's some editors, there's the chat that's kinda like on the side. And then let me show you like cursor two point zero.

So we kinda flip the order of things, like you kinda focus on the agent, what they did. You can make a new one really easily. And we have like this internal browser where you can see the code output. You can keep like cursor really clean. Like if I'm just like doing stuff, say in my little prototype, real OS, I just do this.

It almost feels like a lovable, but the difference is you get the whole thing. Like, you still get, like, all the files, the tools, the search. You get the full, like, command palette. You get everything. But you can always, like, you know, start with a simpler state, focus on, you know, ideating or planning or making stuff.

I love this. This is Rio S. This is your own personal playground. Yes.

Right? Yes.

Yes. Yeah. Just show us high level. Like, what have you built here?

It's kinda meta. I don't know what I'm doing. But the idea is I started this thing from just making one app in this in this OS. Started from this soundboard app that makes sounds.

Uh-huh.

And I just asked the agent, put it in a window. And then they made this, like, draggable window thing and then added the menu bar. And I was like, why not just add more apps? Mhmm. And I kept at kept at making new things.

I made an iPod that actually works. I made a time traveling browser. Goes back in time, but also you can jump to the future, go back into, like, ancient times. These are like generated by

the What happens if you go to 1,000 BC? What did the Internet look like

Oh, back wow. It's in Korean too. But you can actually change, you know, the generation. Mhmm. You can also set like a scene.

I don't know. Maybe we're in The UK. And then let's try refresh. It's gonna fetch the latest apple.com contents Mhmm. Pass it to to like a LLM, and then it's gonna generate the page for it.

And as it does it, it makes like a elevator music. So how I would start a new thing. So in two point o, we have a new mode called plan mode. Mhmm. And then the idea is maybe you don't really know all the details of what you're doing.

You kinda want to ideate with the agent, come up with better details, then the agent can build the stuff exactly how you wanted it. So maybe we can ask the agent, like, I want to make sharing new applets easier and more discoverable. Then we can try, like, see what what the agent comes up with. Mhmm. What it's gonna do is it's gonna search through the whole code base, figure out what's what's there, come up with a plan.

It might also, like, ask a few questions back so that if there's something, like, ambiguous oh, here it is. You can just, like, talk talk to it, and then at the end, it will come up with a plan. So, directions to share. Let's see. Not obvious.

You can share an app that's saved. Two, what would help better? Maybe let's see. Make it auto open and then three. I don't know.

Let's just let it be. So once you answer the questions, it's gonna make a plan for you. Mhmm. And the plan looks almost like a PRD that your PM writes. Mhmm.

You can actually, like, edit the thing if you want. Let's see what it wants to do. Add a share button to the viewer. Add a button for the fee cards. Mhmm.

Okay. So if you're okay with the plan, all you need to do is to hit build. And then it's just gonna do it for you. Mhmm. And with our new composer model, like, it's four times faster than sonnets, and it's, like, twice as cheap.

Mhmm. So things will happen, like, almost, like, pretty quick before before your eyes.

Mhmm. Cool.

Let's see what what's what's gonna happen. Adding more buttons. Cards. Let's see. Is there like a share button?

Fixing some bugs. Oh, okay. Let's see what happened. Share button in the toolbar Upload it. Let's see if I get this.

Little share button.

There we go.

Let's see what happens when you click on it. Hey. It didn't work. Maybe, like, let's ask it to hook up the share button with the share model. Then it's gonna fix it.

Let's see if it worked.

Nice.

There you go. Beautiful.

Cool. That's great. And the cool thing is you didn't even have to touch any code, right? Mhmm. You basically just spoke in English.

You got a PRD

Yep.

Which designers are used to today. Yep. And you just kept telling it what to do to fix things. And if

you want to look at code, it's here.

It's there if you want it. That feels approachable for any designer to do right and start building something themselves.

Yeah. So one thing that I think we're gonna fix maybe, like, even in the next two weeks is, like, when you start cursor, like, you're you're faced with like three buttons, at least the the version before. Mhmm. Where it says like open project, clone repo, connect to SSH. Like, you don't really know what the hell like, those things mean.

Yeah. Many designers

And then our new, like, landing page is just like, boom. You just

start. Mhmm.

And then the agent is gonna help you start a new project if it's not there.

Yeah. That's great. So you obviously, you know, you design your process is very different at Cursor, and I'm sure you see lots of people that are working with Cursor to design as well. Talk about how design process is changing overall in in the age of AI, and certainly Cursor is a tool Yeah. Enabling that.

The roles will start blurring. The designers will start coding. The engineers will start designing. Mhmm. And then our shared language is code.

It is not just picture frames, not pixel values, but code. You start not by, say, getting everything perfect, every single bit of detail. You actually start by building. You start with a vague idea. You put it in the agent.

It comes out maybe like 60%, 70%. You need to be comfortable with like a somewhat bad output and figure out a way to turn that into the thing you want. And as the models and agents get better, that process will just get quicker. Mhmm. Maybe like the first time it comes up is actually the the thing that you wanted.

But then, you know, what's next? How do I get to somewhere even better? The agent is able to do that too for you.

You've described this as like sculpting, right? Is that a way that designers should

think Yes. About Like the difference before was like, we started from, let's do some wireframes and sketches. Then we paint each of the layers and boxes with like styles, with colors and type, and you're like painting stroke by stroke, but you're painting on an artifact, on a canvas that's not real. Versus the new way is, you just ask the agent and you get this clump of thing. It might not be great, it might not be perfect, but it is the thing.

And you sculpt it, you mold it, you you just say, ah, this part, I want to make it like that instead, I want to kill this part, I want these things to be merged together. And as you kind of do do more revs, the thing gets closer to what you wanted, And it is the whole thing. It is the full thing. It is not an artifact. It is not like pixels stuck in a canvas.

And I think we saw that when you were were adding the share sheet. Right? It was like the button appeared, but then clicking it didn't do anything. So you got it like 70% of the way there. And then you're like, Now I need to do this thing.

So you told it what to do and then Yeah. Next time it worked.

Yeah. It's like if you get something bad or like ugly, it's actually your job to make it pretty the way you want it. And that's the part that the AIs can't really do right now. Then we can actually focus on our craft, like figuring out like how to push this thing even further, focusing on the details, making everything fit together.

One thing that I find, there's some projects we've been doing internally and using a very similar process to what you're describing here. And I think one of the things that I find is we pay a lot more attention to like even the interactions and motion and all these things that are really hard to do when you're just in a frame Yeah. Somewhere. And Yep. When you get to experience it, now all of a sudden, all these other layers come alive that you get to experiment with and test.

And it feels like everything is just gonna level up so much more because of this.

Yes. It's like like, it's not even just for designers. Mhmm. It also includes, say, like, your PM's writing some Google Doc that's stuck. It never gets updated.

It's always, like, destroying it from the real thing.

Right.

As we kinda fit these so different parts of making software together, as we break the boundaries between these tools, as everyone can start talking with the code, magical things can happen. Like, don't feel the barriers anymore. People can start understanding each other. People can help each other better.

Yeah. And so in that world, what are the skills that designers should be focused on becoming great at?

One, you need to really go deep into the details and the craft because that is the part that the AI will probably, like, take some time to catch up. And you need to be almost like a more system thinker, not just focusing on one slice of the problem. The more you understand the the other layers or the other concepts that maybe you don't know yet, the better you can, you know, piece things together better with the with the agent. You might not know the best way to do, like, I don't know, front end app web app applications. But, you know, as you learn more about the constraints in your production technical systems, can also instruct the agent better so that it can reuse better patterns and tools.

Then the thing you build is better versus you don't really know much, then it might just give you something mediocre.

It's like a new more powerful tool Mhmm. To use, and you need to

learn how to use it It's almost like the more domain knowledge you have, plus the agent, plus, you know, knowledge of the code base and everything that connects to it, the more things you can do. And it's not just for designers, it's for everyone.

Mhmm. How do you think interfaces are gonna change in the future? There's a lot of talk of adaptive UIs and generative UIs. Like, how how do you think about that? Where do think that's going?

The interfaces will stay, but they get completely decomposed. And then maybe the AI composes it. Or maybe the AI kind of figures out what's your preference and then applies it. We used to say, when I want to make some dogs, I go to Google Doc, like an app, and then it's kind of fixed. Or like, I need to track some issues, I go to Jira.

It's also kind of fixed. Like, they have their own views, their own data models, all the concepts. When the AI or the agent or cursor is really good at just kinda breaking apart all of these things, and then kinda summarize, synthesize everything back together. But the problem is, I don't think, say, just showing text or raw output is the most efficient way for people to, say, parse the information or do stuff with it. When it makes sense, I still want a to do list.

I still want a table. I still want to see the picture, the preview, the states, and track with it even. Instead of doing that in separate apps and I need to stitch them together myself, it's just in one place, maybe in the same agent, in the same chat. And then the tool itself can also morph to what you're like, your way of thinking, how you see the things. Maybe for a designer, the cursor they use might look or feel a little different than the cursor that your devs use, but it is still the same thing.

It's just the same thing reconfigured. Certain things get hidden by default. Certain things get shown by default.

The dream of the adaptive UIs is that they can show the right thing at any moment. Mhmm. The problem with it is that how do you get comfortable and set user expectations around what it is? And it sounds like what you're saying is it's not about generating it different every single time. Yes.

It's about generating the right thing for the right user Yes. The right context. Exactly. They can be familiar and the same for them. Right.

It might be different for me than it is for you. Right?

It's like the fundamental system and how to say, what are the pieces, how they fit together, how they're laid out, it's the same. But then maybe, like, you know, the user can also set their own preferences, the AI can kind of help them find their spot, and then they can start there. But as they use the tool, as they do more things, it might change. It just fits them better as they use it.

Any advice for designers starting companies and building products? Mhmm. Just high level advice that you think

would be most helpful for them going forward.

I think the most important design problem is to think about, like, given the thing you want to do now and ten years from now, what are the core concepts that won't change? How do they fit together? And then from there, you can kind of see what is the first step, what is the most essential pieces I need to start. And then as you go, you kind of figure out how things will evolve and where you are today, what are the little steps to get there. Mhmm.

The closer you get, the clearer it is. But also this thing, they're there, might also be pretty clear, and it doesn't change as much.

It's interesting. There's a quote from Jeff Bezos. Somebody asked him like, what do you think is going to change over the next decade around Amazon's business? And his answer was like, well, can tell you the three things that are not going to change.

Yes.

People are always selection, lower prices, faster delivery.

Exactly.

And so it sounds like what you're saying is finding those core elements Mhmm. Is like that's the thing to focus on and making sure that that is always accessible even though the way people interact with it may change and evolve over time.

Yep.

Those are the important things to make sure you get right.

Yeah. Like, that kind of defines what the thing is, what the company is about even.

Rio, really appreciate you joining us today.

Great.