Michael Le

Design being shared these days on X and Mobbin is so good. It’s been years since it has been like this for myself

The rise of AI-assisted coding (vibe, agentic, etc.) is really putting pressure on designers and I don’t think it’s being talked about that much Let’s think about how software at tech companies used to be created, broadly: Some people would figure out what the next thing to build should be. Designers would produce concepts and narrow to the final experience. Engineering feasibility would be assessed, then the thing would be built, tested, and shipped to users Within this process is the expectation that Design Would Be Ready before Engineering Builds It because if not, then it gets messy, additional cycles are wasted, or engineers get sick of waiting and stop respecting designers and just ship whatever they want I’ve worked at companies where design had a few days, a few weeks, or a few months before Engineering Builds It, and obviously more time is better but that’s usually a luxury because screens need to get designed and approved as fast as possible But now with AI everything can be built instantly, all features can be coded by agents while humans sleep, and things that used to take a week to build now take less than a day, or less than an hour, or maybe built by the PM on a Saturday night So when do things get designed by designers? Well, optimally, everything that could ever be built has already been meticulously designed and thought about and iterated on and is just sitting in a Figma file waiting for the water to boil But in reality, Good Design takes time because it takes some thinking and talking and sitting with the problem and iterating and reworking and AI reduces that time a lot but it doesn’t drop it to 0 You’re probably already thinking that the solution is to have a comprehensive Design System that AI and AI-assisted engineers can reference and pull from, but the design of an incredible new feature cannot spontaneously emerge from a library of panels and buttons and toasts and color tokens because that’s like going into the fasteners aisle at Home Depot and expecting the architectural blueprints of your dream home to manifest out of a bucket full of nails PMs can use AI to figure out what to build next, engineers can use AI to build it, so everybody is just waiting on those Figma mockups that were due yesterday and when talking to my product design friends at big tech companies about this it’s clear that they are stresssssssed Leaders have a few options to mitigate this: First, they can bring designers in earlier and get them started concepting and iterating while The Idea is still being refined (the best tech companies already do this) Second, they can push for designer adoption of AI just like engineering has been pushing it. Give designers all the tools (MJ, Veo 3, Visual Electric, ElevenLabs, Krea, and a half dozen others) and hire consultants to give real world demos of how they work and how to multiply creative output while shrinking time spent I left the corporate tech world over a year ago, but if you still work as a product designer at a big tech company how are you doing? How have your processes changed? Are you staying afloat?

🎵💿Built an MCP that lets Claude talk directly to Ableton. Now you can create music with just prompts! Here’s a demo of me creating a lush, 80s synthwave track in just two prompts. It picks the right instruments, creates melodies, and adds effects like reverb and distortion 🔊

Yesterday a simple prompt I gave Claude generated a React component. Today I used Claude to create a whole Vue app complete with paginated queries and state management. I was impressed by both experiences in quality of output and ease of use.

DeepSeek just proved the 'worthless' GPT wrapper startups are actually the ones with real moats. A week ago, nothing was more LOW status than being a 'GPT wrapper' startup. But I think we're learning that's DEAD wrong. Turns out they were just early to the only game that matters While DeepSeek, Meta, Anthropic and Microsoft battle over benchmark scores, these 'wrapper' companies have been quietly building the only moat that matters: interface loyalty. Because of how big owning the LLM is for national defense and the economy, the next breakthrough model is always 2 weeks away. DeepSeek launches today, someone else drops a better one tomorrow. But getting millions of people to make your product part of their daily workflow - that's the real barrier to entry. ChatGPT didn't win because it had the best model. It won because it was dead simple to use. And I think it has staying power because of that. This is why all those AI startups we dismissed are actually positioned to win. They're not competing on model performance - they're competing on being the default way humans interact with AI. Frontier models are becoming commodities. User habits aren't. While everyone obsesses over the next architecture breakthrough, the real game is being played in the interface layer. The moat isn't in the model - it's in being the tool people reach for without thinking. Technology advantage is temporary. Interface lock-in is forever. Keep shipping those wrappers, my friends.

@florinpop17 @GetCadenceApp great alternative to a bike computer

When was the last time you installed a new app on your phone? And what was the app?

Any time you solve a problem with more than ten browser tabs open, you should be obligated to write up the answer so other people can find it in the future.

So what does the inverse look like? Start the company with the goal to be the best for something (@linear is the best tool for software teams to plan and build). Each market can only support 1-2 winners, so if you are not going to be the best, you probably have already lost.

Design in reality is more mixed martial arts than a practice of one of style. Mastery of design frameworks is useful to shape information. The mistake is thinking that there is only one framework or system.

Designs systems are a starting point of creativity. Like music producers using drumkits & samples, designers remix elements of a design system to make new arrangements. Innovation is when you compose sampled patterns with the design system. Context, taste & skills make a hit.

Im glad skinny jeans era is over

This is cheap considering the cost of finding & hiring a full time employee or an agency to do the same with same background history

@Sardionerak Yes that is also true

There is an impact on the final product when a designer optimizes user testing for 5/5 participants liking the concept versus 2/5 participants loving the concept

@hpdailyrant Agree “tHERe are no SiLLy QueSTiONs”…there always were a few. Teams would incorporate most ideas into the final design (design by committee) or dismiss the ideas to go a different route (what was that workshop for?) Async or providing context prior to workshop works too.

@laraisuncool If mobile experience consider using flutterflow. Good components, can deploy as web app, iOS, Android, and good integration with Firebase for data storage and analytics

so i have a product idea, and i am seriously considering building it... the thing is... i'm not a developer. founder friends, what would you suggest?

@Carnage4Life I like the message that strategy should give you a competitive moat.

With all of the design systems and guidelines out there, knowing where to put a button on the screen is not a trivial task - AI or not.

@vivekkalyansk @teosiyan This would be a great for those trying to learn/document how a code base works. Good thinking and visualisation concepts here. Would love to get access when it is ready! Till then if you wanna chat about anything related to this I would be happy to connect.

Reading code is much harder than writing code, but all the AI tools now are focused on helping developers write more code. AND I am very interested in building AI UX that goes beyond chat. So, @teosiyan and I built something this weekend! #buildinpublic