Building @rectangleai. Previously design x ai @Gmail, @Google Workspace, @CMUHCII
New York 🗽
Joined April 2010
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Using @benjitaylor's Liveline to dynamically generate og:video previews in real time. Inspired by @jesper_vos
Mobile prototyping is fundamentally tactile. You need to feel an interaction to know whether it works.
Inspired by @joshpuckett's DialKit, I built a Swift plugin that automatically turns code into live controls, so you can tune the behavior as you're using it.
Small changes in timing, velocity, or resistance are hard to describe precisely, but can completely change how an interaction feels.
Favorite design workflow right now is @paper + codex. Instantly closed the gap between what we’re designing and what can be used in production
- Design in Paper
- MCP to keep it in sync with our component library
- Storybook components now usable by other engineers + agents
Also love using comments to vibe-code behaviors that don’t fit into a static mock. Similar to how I’m using the Agentation plugin in production code.
Marvin Kennis retweeted
Today, we're sharing new research on Solaris, our first Interface World Model.
Solaris is a new kind of operating system that generates interactive interfaces frame by frame, in real time, with no code. We find that Solaris outperforms frontier LLMs when generating new interfaces, across structural similarity and information retention. Read more and request early access at the link below.
Marvin Kennis retweeted
grug is probably the first Apple Design Award winner built by two designers using Codex to write the code.
We didn't prompt "build me an award-winning app, make no mistakes.” It did not wake up one morning and decide the world needed grug. We did. We wanted to build it and AI was the tool that helped us take it all the way there.
Ever since we started building with AI a few years ago, we got bolder. You stop killing ideas just because they sound too hard to build. You get weirder when trying things becomes cheap enough to be silly again. You start following the strange little thought further than you normally would.
That is how grug happened.
AI can write your code. It can help you move fast. It can make impossible things feel possible.
But it cannot care. It cannot make your app memorable. It cannot make your app feel like it has a soul.
You have to bring the taste. You have to stay incredibly close. You have to take small steps, make thousands of tiny decisions, throw away good-enough work to get to your best work, and protect the thing that made the idea worth building in the first place.
grug would not have been this memorable if we didn't have Codex to go all-in on all the crazy ideas we had. If we had not decided to make the whole thing hand-drawn. If we had not spent days and nights obsessing over every detail, every animation, every interaction, every tiny bit of weirdness.
That is the difference between slop and something with a soul.
And I think that is why this award means so much to us. Not because what we were able to do using AI to build grug, but because Apple recognized the care we put inside all the weirdness.
For the past 15 years, so many of our ideas stopped at the mockup. They were too weird, too small, too hard to explain, too expensive to build, too unlikely to survive a meeting. Now designers like us can build the fun little things. Designers like us can ship the crazy ideas. Designers like us can make unreasonable little things and see if the world cares.
There are plenty of people who do not get grug. That is totally fine.
We do not try to build for everyone, because when you do you end up building for no-one. The people who get grug really get it. And if it makes their morning feel a little lighter, that is all that matters to us.
Make the weird thing. The right people will find it.
grug no wait for permission.
grug back sun rise.
Unbelievable!!! grug started as a funny joke over the weekend but quickly grew to become one of the most fun things @michelelings and I built this past year.
To win an Apple Design Award is truly a dream come true since we started working together 15 years ago. Speechless...
Spent a bunch of time redesigning our filtering UI. Natural language first. Highlights and hover states to show query understanding
Design production, maybe - lots of people have been talking about this the past few days. And agree we’ll see more overlap.
It’s more about responsibility boundaries around decision making imo (see all recent convos about how working with LLMs is exhausting due to decision fatigue).
Will a generalist be able to make the right call on the hundreds of design decisions required to make a product excel?
Anyways, just for fun I decided to track all decisions I could recall from the design of *a single settings/config panel* I was working on recently
DESIGN: THE FIRST AI CASUALTY
I'm increasingly sure that 2026 signals the end of product design as a full-fledged stand-alone function within companies. If so, it will be the first role / function to be eliminated by AI on a go-forward basis.
Instead of hiring FT designers, startups are hiring / will hire design consultants to create a design system that the founder likes (this takes a few weeks max). Once the design system is finalized, PM/Eng feed it into their AI tool of choice to generate prototypes. The design system is refreshed annually by the same consultant.
Larger companies will likely not backfill design roles and will do some targeted attrition to reduce the design department to 20% the size it is today.
If you're a designer, I think you have two choices:
1. Become an entrepreneur: Start a design agency and become the go-to resource for design systems for startups and even larger companies. This can be a good recurring revenue business.
2. Become a builder: Add PM/Eng responsibilities to become a product builder.
Would suggest you embrace this proactively vs waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I'm really sorry about this - some of my best friends and the people I admire most and have learnt the most from are designers - but it seems inevitable.
@DanGrover feel like prototypes as PRDs are useful to describe very specific behaviors - the prototypes themselves can be artifacts that other agent loops build on, instead of iterating in the full product codebase
Marvin Kennis retweeted
We simply have not started rethinking interactions from the grounds up.
So many possibilities wide open when you think of human - AI in micro feedback loops vs automation alone or classic back and forth.
