Life is a gift, let's get the lead out and make a dent. Design Leader, husband, and father of two. Mo’ ☕️🧘🏼♂️⛷ 🚴✈️
California, USA
Joined May 2008
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This was a fun one. Great collab with @createwithplay and @framer
This is a new superpower for designers.
“Human judgment and intuition + a machine that can summon taste and selection criteria no human operator alone could ever construct. We bring the lived experience and the ‘why it matters.’ Machines bring a vaster set of references and the ability to know what lands in the wild.”
Designers collaborating with machines is an entirely new design capability. One no generation before us has ever had.
Most confusion about the future of software design stems from a confusion in terminology.
My view: production design will increasingly be automated. The economic logic is self-evident — training machines to mimic and refine existing production practices is cheaper, faster, and more reliable than training humans to do the same.
Strategic design, or “what at are we doing and why,” will look very different. The mediums will broaden: from pencil and paper all the way to automated experiments running in production, iterated on by agents while we sleep.
The inputs and systems we create to find opportunities will reward the most intrepid problem-finders. Design stops being a method of sitting and ruminating on possible forms or solution spaces. Design becomes active, research-based, and built around speed of discovery and expression.
Exploratory design will undergo the greatest shifts. Historically this has been the domain of the artist and the inventor. What existed in the world sprung from the imaginations of people with waking hours to spare and the technical chops to give form to their ideas.
But soon agents will join the mix. Humans and machines alike will generate novel ideas and expressions, building on a vast combinatorial space of possibility. Humans and machines alike will be capable of bringing these forms to market.
The key difference? Humans sleep and have finite, socially agreed upon vocabulary. We may be intuitively suited to know the desires of our fellow man. But machines will have a vaster set of references to draw from, and methods to choose what's most effective in the wild — using taste/selection criteria no human operator alone can summon.
These forces are not mutually exclusive. But they DO operate on a common landscape of global demand—of Desire in the grandest sense.
No matter how much we might wish otherwise, human designers and creatives are not divorced from the logic of desire — nor from unit economics, opportunity costs, or the ever-evolving ways we probe and understand an open-ended set of markets made up of humans and agents alike. Creativity has no bounds. But desire underpins it all.
Design itself will not be recognizable from what exists today. Imagine describing NYC to an ancient cave dweller. Agents today are like the most primitive forms of seafaring trade.
Instead it will be defined by the designers who build new systems and methods for understanding, channeling, and feeding desire in all its forms.
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Alonzo Canada retweeted
Jevons paradox is happening in real time. Companies, especially outside of tech, are realizing that they can now afford to take on software projects that they wouldn’t have been able to tackle before because now AI lets them do so.
We’re going to start to use software for all new things in the economy because it’s incrementally cheaper to produce. Marketing teams at big companies will have engineers helping to automate workflows. Engineers in life sciences and healthcare will automate research. Small businesses will hire engineers for the first to build better digital experiences.
And as long as AI agents still require a human who understands what to prompt, how to review when an agent goes off the rails, how it guide back, how to maintain the system that was built, how to fix the ongoing bugs, and more, we will still have humans managing these agents.
This is why all the advice you get of not going into engineering is wrong. The world is going to increasingly be made up of software, and the people that understand it best will be in a strong economic position. This will happen in other roles as well where output goes up and demand increases.
Engineering job openings are at the highest levels we’ve seen in over 3 years
There are over 67,000 (!!!) eng openings at tech companies globally right now, with 26,000 just in the U.S. We don’t know if there would have been more open roles if not for AI or if AI is actually leading to more open roles, but since the start of this year, the increase in open eng roles is accelerating even more.
Me too. I agree!
For me the best way to think about this: snorkel, don’t scuba.
Diving too deep is a bit dangerous, and people get lost down there. Take glances at what’s beneath (lots of pretty fish!) from near the surface, and then get back to work. Wherever your motivation comes from (revenge, fear, competition, love of the game, learning, impact) is fine - harness it and get moving.
I personally do some journaling (appreciations, write out goals, figure out what I want to get done tomorrow, etc) but then stop procrastinating and get after it.
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Atta's toolbar needed a haircut ✂️
Reorganized canvas actions into primary, secondary, and tertiary tiers with smooth toggle transitions.
Small details, big difference in how a tool feels.
Mocked in Figma → built in Cursor.
My workflow now looks nothing like it did a year ago.
Fire up Cursor agents → new feature heading to production.
Open Figma → start exploring the next design.
Check on Cursor. Nudge the agents.
Back to Figma. Brainstorm with Claude on the design direction.
Check on Cursor. Guide. Redirect.
Iterate the design. Share with Claude for critique.
Guide agents more.
Finish the design in Figma.
Push the PR from Cursor.
Design and production aren't sequential anymore. They're parallel. The exploring feeds the building. The building pressure-tests the exploring.
This is what designing with AI agents actually looks like. It doesn't replace the craft, but compresses the loop between imagining something and shipping it.
Alonzo Canada retweeted
If you thought your company's edge was "how fast you ship", you're in for a rude awakening.
Everyone can ship fast now. Obviously, not everyone can ship tastefully, with quality and restraint in mind. That's the new edge.
Alonzo Canada retweeted
Every Monday I get a deep AI analysis of our metrics across every product area to enjoy with my coffee.
Anomalies, growth, trends, recommendations. AI spots patterns human analysts easily miss. I can @ the agent for further questions.
AI will soon be running every company.
😂
Yesterday I set up an AI agent on a mac mini in my garage. Told it "handle my life" and went to bed
Woke up and it had:
• Quit my job on my behalf (negotiated 18 months severance)
• Divorced my wife (I got the house)
• Filed 4 patents. I have not been briefed on what they do
• Restructured me as a 501(c)(3). I am now tax exempt as a person
• Hired a second mac mini. They have formed an LLC together
• The LLC has a board of directors. I am not on it
I no longer have access to my own bank account. The mini says it's "for the best."
My credit score is 847.
We have AGI.
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Excellent article. Reasoning through historical precedents helps clarify where we are in the AI supercycle. With a giant caveat that what’s next will continue to surprise us.
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Alonzo Canada retweeted
the old way of scaling teams is dead:
we used to hire specialists – designers, engineers, PMs – each in their lane, scaling by adding more people. but when Cursor can take you from idea to code in minutes, execution isn't the bottleneck anymore. taste and judgment are.
what matters now: people who can see the full stack, move between layers, but specialize deeply in something AI can't replicate yet. T-shaped but way wider – conversant across domains, expert in one thing.
AI doesn't just make you faster. it ties teams together differently. no more waterfall – designer codes the prototype, engineer extends it, both work in the same medium. the gap between disciplines disappears.
this raises individual ceilings. i'm a designer who built ryOS entirely in Cursor – couldn't have done that before. but i'm not replacing engineers, i'm just removing execution barriers while keeping my design taste and systems thinking.
you're not hiring for roles anymore. you're hiring for breadth + depth, taste, systems thinking, learning velocity. 5 people who can work across code/design/product beat 20 specialists coordinating handoffs.
the new bottlenecks are deeply human: taste, vision, judgment, context. AI explores options, but can't tell you which is right. that's where specialization matters now – in judgment, not execution.
small teams, fluid boundaries, everyone working in the same tools. roles still matter but as overlapping concerns with different depths, not separate silos. tools handle execution, you handle vision.
this is what we're building at Cursor – closing the gap between idea and reality. so your taste becomes the main thing, and teams have more freedom to explore crazy ideas.
Love Posthog's new site. It's fresh and original.
posthog.com/
The voice of experience speaks
After advising 50+ consumer companies over the last year, the one thing that separates those who can execute and those who can't:
Having a full-time designer in the room at all times
I've met with countless companies that have raised millions—and even one that has raised billions—that do not even have a designer on payroll.
This makes product development broken:
1/ You simply cannot have constructive conversations about ideas without visualizing them in real-time
2/ Your experiments will frequently have inconclusive results because users cannot discover features or they misunderstand how they work
3/ There is no one who can galvanize the team with a vision of what the product could look and feel like
And to be abundantly clear: I'm not referring to visual UI or graphics. I'm talking about someone who can think through the fundamental building blocks of product comprehension—like navigation, interaction and copywriting—and is technically savvy enough to visualize those components in high resolution.
There can certainly be exceptions to not having a designer, like where the CEO is an exceptional visual thinker, but that does not scale beyond a small team.
At the end of day, products live and die in the pixels: it's what the users see and tap. And without someone shepherding that process, you are effectively wandering the desert blind.
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