Lead product designer, 10 yrs shipping apps and games. Sharing how I work and where design and AI are going. Deeblab studio for product teams, DMs open.
Cairo · MENA & remote
Joined January 2026
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Found a photo of the sticker in a bus cab that explains its warning lights. Over a hundred of them. It still reads fast because they're sorted into four priority groups, red first and green last. Most apps I use send every alert at the same volume.
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My bet is both, and it makes sense from the design side. Agents need surfaces built for them, and most tools are still bolting MCP onto screens made for people. Building your own sheet or whiteboard is the fastest way to learn what that surface should be. nitter.cf/humphreybc/status/2121…
Anthropic has been quite open about the fact their strategy is for Claude to be an employee that you hire, and that Claude will use the software that companies already have to do work, like a person would.
After all, salary expenses are greater than software.
This launch feels inline with that strategy, in the sense that Claude joins meetings as a person would, but what I can’t reconcile is why they’re also building all of these SaaS apps like docs, whiteboards, sheets, etc.
That doesn’t feel inline with the strategy of Claude being an employee that uses your existing tool stack and systems of record.
Maybe they decided that a bunch of the productivity and collaboration tools like Miro, Excel, Google Drive, etc haven’t been building the right interfaces for agents quick enough so they felt the need to build their own.
Yet Salesforce, Atlassian, Figma, Notion, us (Dovetail) are all working towards essentially MCP equivalence and headless or embedded versions of the products.
So which is it?
Is Anthropic trying to steal budget from Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, Miro, Notion, and so on to be the next productivity and collaboration Super SaaS?
Or are they focused on building an AGI generalist ‘employee’ that companies hire to replace humans (and divert budget from salary), which uses existing tools?
Maybe they just have so much product velocity that they are like, fuck it, we’ll have a go at both.
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Step 6 is the one that should worry people. A design partner that calls every assumption excellent is just a mirror. I'd take one engineer asking what happens when the list is empty over all seven steps. nitter.cf/hobdaydesign/status/21…
I haven’t opened Figma in 6 months.
And honestly? I’ve never been a better designer.
AI has completely transformed my workflow. What used to take hours now takes seconds of carefully engineered prompts.
Here’s my process:
1. I ask ChatGPT to design an interface.
2. It generates something incredible.
3. I ask it to make the interface more intuitive, delightful, and user-centric.
4. It agrees enthusiastically.
5. I ask it to challenge my assumptions.
6. It tells me my assumptions are excellent.
7. I ship.
No components. No auto layout. No tedious conversations with engineers.
Last week, I designed an entire enterprise SaaS platform in 11 minutes. I don’t know what it does, but AI assures me it’s a paradigm shift.
Some designers worry that AI will replace them.
I think they’re asking the wrong question.
Why are we still designing things at all?
My productivity has increased by 4,700%, my design debt has fallen to zero, and I haven’t had an original thought since March.
Would you like me to make this post sound more authentic and personal, or keep the confident, thought-leadership tone?
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Adobe will let outside AI agents work inside Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and After Effects, private beta early next year. The app stops being where the work happens and becomes something your agent opens for you. Curious what happens to all the menus nobody ever learned.
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What's the best design feedback you ever got? The kind you still hear in your head every time you open a new file.
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Curious to see it, but I don't think taste is something a product fixes. Taste is saying no to ninety decent options for a reason you can explain. A tool can give me better options. The no is still the job. nitter.cf/skirano/status/2120591…
We’re about to announce something that I believe will fix AI's design taste problem for good (or at least be a solid first step toward it).
I’ve poured my heart into this product, and I genuinely believe it has the potential to reshape the industry.
Can’t wait to share more.
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Agree. Players never cared how the code was written. They care whether the game feels like people who love games made it. That lives in the art, the feel and a hundred small choices. Judge the game, not the stack. nitter.cf/emollick/status/212049…
The anti-AI backlash in games is mostly hurting indie studios.
Insisting on no AI code in a world where all coding will effectively involve AI is an impossible standard. If fans care about human work, reward games centering human artists & designers rather than policing AI use.
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A small component I really like is Sonner by @emilkowalski. Fire five toasts and they fold into a neat stack instead of covering the page. Hover and they fan out. Calm by default, detail when you ask for it. That is most of good UI in one small piece.
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Two carmakers said the same thing this week. Audi says touchscreens have gone as far as they will go, and Polestar's new concept puts real dials and toggles back on the console. Screens are great for things you read. Buttons win for things you do without looking.
How I run a design team
One owner per objective
A steady rhythm
One source of truth
Sounds boring. That's the point.
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Unpopular in 2026, but I agree. If AI does 100% of the work, your work looks like everyone else's. The 10% you do by hand is the part clients actually pay for. nitter.cf/emilkowalski/status/21…
Quite happy with how the new skills docs turned out.
While the process of building it involved AI, I still reviewed things myself, and I’m fine with that.
I don’t want to fully automate the creation process.
It allows to make the work mine and give it a bit of character.
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AI can take meeting notes now.
Notes were never the problem. Most meetings fail because they end without a clear decision. Good notes of an unclear meeting are still unclear.
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Designers leading teams, what's one thing you stopped doing as a lead that made your team better?
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Design was never about the canvas or the code. It's about deciding what's worth building. A tool that moves me closer to code doesn't make me a better designer. It makes me a faster one. Different thing. nitter.cf/jsngr/status/212013640…
designers are now working with code, yet we're forced to work in tools made for engineers
design is the new code. we're bringing it back to the canvas with mainframe.app
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Every week there's a new tool that lets designers work in code.
I don't really care where I design. I care how fast I find out the idea is wrong.
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