AI and Design

This week, Dan and Nik make some hot takes on news that has come out this summer.

Everyone's work is starting to look the same: https://marieclairedean.substack.com/p/everyones-work-is-starting-to-look

LLMs reward expertise: https://www.seangoedecke.com/llms-reward-expertise/

A Properties Panel and Annotations, Now in Figma Make: https://www.figma.com/blog/properties-panel-and-annotations-now-in-figma-make/

Unpacking ChatGPT Work: the Agent for a Billion Users: https://www.latent.space/p/unpacking-chatgpt-work

Agent Behavior (agentbehavior.dev)

Measuring the UX of AI: https://measuringu.com/measuring-the-ux-of-ai/

Type designers have created a free font that "poisons" AI: https://www.creativebloq.com/design/fonts-typography/type-designers-have-created-a-free-font-that-poisons-ai

LinkedIn's new anti-slop button is coming to every platform: https://www.fastcompany.com/91584892/linkedins-new-anti-slop-button-is-coming-to-every-platform

How writers are reacting to Substack’s AI transparency tools: https://on.substack.com/p/how-writers-are-reacting-to-substacks

Andrew Hogan and Shane Johnston of Figma join Dan and Nik to unpack Figma's 2026 AI report. The headline is about AI shifting from individual productivity to team dynamics: 41% now say AI meaningfully changes how their teams work together, up from 7% two years ago. Shane and Andrew deliberately interrogate the "10x everybody" narrative: output is measurably up (lines of code, App Store submissions), but outcomes aren't following, because AI is exposing the communication and alignment seams that were always there. Handoffs can still be an issue. Prototypes are trivial to generate but very hard to dissect. And perhaps unsurprisingly, decision-making turns out to be the real bottleneck.

The conversation also covers the blurring of roles (designers shipping fully functional AI-built prototypes jumped from ~10% to 61% in a year; developers doing design work is up sharply) and why developers are now among the loudest voices arguing design matters more. Andrew and Shane reframe role overlap as tax reduction rather than job-stealing — the designer who fixes the visual bug instead of filing the ticket — and make the case for the canvas as shared context, for design systems as the thing "orchestrating relationships" between functions, and for the four shapes of AI adoption (the nascent group has roughly halved to 18%).

LINKS

Figma's 2026 AI Report — blog post

Full report / download

Report microsite

Andrew Hogan on LinkedIn

Andrew Hogan, "AI Fluency Isn't the Finish Line"

Shane Johnston on LinkedIn

Everyone in design is yelling the same two words right now: taste and judgment. But how do you get them? David Hoang's "Training Design Senses" does, and this episode starts there: how to train the eye, design dexterity, fluency of aesthetics, and rhetoric, with a detour into what copying from masters means when the copying happens through an AI. Then Christine Zhu on systems thinking for agentic products, which asks PMs to stop shipping features and start gardening: decompose for agent experience, define contracts between the parts, build feedback loops that capture correction signals. Our last bit of news is LLM Counter-Defaults from Nadia Piet and AIxDESIGN, a slider-based tool that exposes the settings your LLM shipped with and writes the instructions to override them.

Our guest is Dan Maccarone, founder and CEO of Charming Robot, who spent a year rebuilding his studio's entire design process around AI after a project went sideways. He walks us through the experience brief (a PRD with a friendlier name), the whiteboard/review/approved branch structure, and what he calls high-speed mediocrity. He also explains why the prototype's 300,000 lines of code are never shipping anywhere, why documentation matters more now rather than less, and why his team still starts with sketching so they're building from their imagination instead of Claude's.

LINKS
"Training design senses"
https://www.proofofconcept.pub/p/training-design-senses

”what systems thinking looks like for PM'ing AI products”
https://open.substack.com/pub/christinezhu/p/grow-systems-build-features?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

LLM Counter-Defaults by Nadia Piet / AIxDESIGN
https://counterdefaults.aixdesign.co/

Thinking in Systems book
https://amzn.to/4wuNA6o

How Buildings Learn book
https://amzn.to/4g2Y99V

"Never mind the prompts, here's the thinking"
https://uxdesign.cc/never-mind-the-prompts-heres-the-thinking-f4af4b92155f

Charming Robot
https://charmingrobot.com

Story in a Bottle podcast
https://storyinabottle.charmingrobot.com/

The Barstool MBA (Audible)
https://amzn.to/4pGRZ3q

Fool's Gold, NYC
https://www.foolsgoldnyc.com/

MHCI Capstone sponsorship
https://hcii.cmu.edu/academics/mhci/capstone

Dan and Nik dig into a trio of OpenAI stories: the launch of GPT 5.6 Sol and its jump to the top of the Design Arena leaderboard, notably by suppressing common AI design anti-patterns (goodbye, purple gradients) and combining known templates with customized outputs — followed by Figma Make's OpenAI integration and what it might signal about the shifting model landscape. They also geek out over Codex Micro, OpenAI's slick new macro keyboard designed by Work Louder, which uses RGB-lit keys to let developers monitor and control multiple coding agents without touching a mouse.

The episode's guest segment features Jason Hong and Sauvik Das, CMU HCII faculty and co-founders of fuguUX, an AI-powered usability auditing tool. Jason and Sauvik explain how frontier language models can now scale subjective design judgment — evaluating concepts like information scent that were previously impossible to codify — and walk through their two offerings: synthetic user testing (with a diverse cast of twenty AI agents built from Census microdata) and automated heuristic audits. The conversation touches on why B2B software remains so dreadful, the testing pyramid, and the long-term vision of continuously self-improving websites.

LINKS
Design Arena
https://www.designarena.ai/

GPT 5.6 Sol topping the design leaderboard
https://notes.designarena.ai/how-openais-sol-finally-learned-design-taste/

Codex Micro
https://openai.com/supply/co-lab/work-louder/

Figma Make + OpenAI integration announcement
https://www.figma.com/blog/gpt-5-6-is-now-available-in-figma-make/

fuguUX
https://www.fuguux.com/

Dan and Nik pause at the halfway mark of 2026 to reflect on 25 episodes, 10 guests, and a wild six months in AI and design. Fresh off a week of building apps with Fable — Dan's ambient bird-listening app for AirPods, Nik's long-running multi-agent builds — they revisit the year's biggest themes: the collapse of fidelity and whether wireframes still matter, taste as the designer's (maybe) moat, cognitive surrender and the strange compulsion to keep feeding the machine, canvas versus code as Figma and Claude Design converge, designing for agents when your next user isn't human, the rise of markdown skills (and the ick of scraped design systems), the path for junior designers, and why user research may be the most undervalued discipline of the AI era.

LINKS
Scraped Styles MD repository
https://styles.refero.design/

Reverse Centaurs Are the Answer to the AI Paradox
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/

Aaron Draplin Takes On a Logo Design Challenge
https://www.linkedin.com/learning/aaron-draplin-takes-on-a-logo-design-challenge

How tech workers are feeling in 2026
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-tech-workers-are-feeling-in-2026

Why using AI leads to Brain Fry
https://hbr.org/2026/03/when-using-ai-leads-to-brain-fry