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🤿 be a musician

🤿 be a musician

meet the OG designer of AI Studio

Ridd
May 23, 2025

Google I/O took over the internet earlier this week (even though that somehow already feels like a month ago 😅).

So I caught up with Jesse Kulp who is the original designer of Google AI Studio.

He shares what it was like going 0→1 as the sole designer and his ideas for where AI design is headed next 👀

“ I think we're gonna look back in a couple years, the kind of silly stuff we're doing today and say it looks like child's play”

Jesse Kulp

Some highlights:

How Jesse transformed into the ultimate generalist
What Jesse learned about managing lots of stakeholders
Exploring different interaction modalities for AI in the future
How Jesse figured out the initial product strategy for AI Studio
How to handle ambiguity while working in a new problem space
+ a lot more

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

🤝 WITH GENWAY

I've been using AI agents to do research and something surprising is happening 👇

For context I use Genway in two ways:

contextual interviews → I prompt the AI with what I’m hoping to learn and it has a dynamic conversation with each person
usability testing → I uploaded early Inflight Figma prototypes and Genway’s AI agent helps me test them with real people

But here’s the surprising part… At the end of the interview most people say they're MORE comfortable opening up to an AI agent than a human 😮

If you want to try it out there’s a secret landing page just for Dive Club listeners which gets you 2 months free and 10 credits to recruit people 👇

🎓 KEY TAKEAWAYS

My notes from Jesse

1 — Be like a musician

There are two types of designers right now:

Those fighting to maintain a previous world and justify old behaviors
Those embracing change and plunging curiously into the unknown

That’s why I loved this quote from Jesse about acting like a musician 👇

“If you look at artists who last for decades, their style of music changes over the years. They don’t keep playing the type of song throughout their entire career because it gets boring for them.”

Jesse Kulp

2 — New modalities

A big part of our conversation focused on new modalities for AI because we’re about to create entirely new categories of design problems to solve:

“Moving pixels on a screen is fine but that’s a very transitory surface.

The models will become more powerful but the surfaces we use to bring these models into people's lives are going to change dramatically as well”

Jesse Kulp

And as the foundational models commoditize, design is what matters 💪

“The models are going to even out… and what's going to really differentiate is the user experience. Which product do I enjoy using? Which one helps me accomplish my goals quickest and easiest?“

Jesse Kulp

3 — Porsche vs. Tesla

When you’re designing a tool you have to know what you’re optimizing for. Is it people who value simplicity? Or people who want control and power?

This is something we’ve wrestled with at Inflight as well. Our H1 on the new website was finalized in the 11th hour 😆 Every version before that hit on a value prop (speed, alignment, organization, etc.).

So it was interesting to hear Jesse talk about how the design process started in this middle ground between consumer and enterprise.

Consumer products function as Teslas. Everything should “just work” and the goal is to “mask complexity as much as possible”.

But in design discovery they realized AI Studio should feel more like a Porsche 911. So Jesse primarily designed for users who “want the manual transmission and the ability to control things and evaluate model performance”.

Both car types work—as long as you’re intentional about who you’re designing for up front.