🤿 scope > speed

Part of my vision with Inflight is to pull back the curtain as much as possible and show people what goes in to designing a startup from scratch.

I want to make the content that I wish I had earlier in my career.

So last month I shared our fundraising pitch and today I’m sharing pt. II of my live design sessions with James McDonald who is easily one of my favorite designers on the planet.

We spent >90 minutes sweating the details for shadows, borders, and James even whips up some gorgeous empty states from scratch.

Watching him design is a thing of beauty so I hope you enjoy the behind-the-scenes 👇

🤝 WITH RAYCAST

AI is making it a lot easier to contribute to the Inflight codebase, so I’m knocking out polish tickets all the time.

And now AI agents inside of Raycast make that easier than ever.

Let’s say I see something I want to fix…

In a single hotkey I can launch a Cursor background agent, add a screenshot or any context that’s needed, and then manage the entire process directly inside of Raycast ✨

You can ship code as quickly as it would take you to type up a new issue in Linear.

It’s a big deal for designers and you can start using it today 👇

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS

AI’s biggest impact isn’t speed

Erik Kennedy asked me this question recently:

The thing is… I don’t see speed as the main value prop of AI. But for some reason, that’s still the measuring stick we use.

The reality is my time in Figma looks about the same 🤷‍♂️

What’s changed is the set of deliverables I consider “within reach”. That box is way bigger now.

I can own much of Inflight’s frontend using Claude Code (I started after Dan Hollick’s video). I literally took a break from wiring up our new welcome email sequence to write this. And later today, I’m spinning up some new components with Base UI.

I’ve never done that kind of work before in my entire career.

The wildest shift of all is probably prototyping but I don’t spend much time building larger clickable flows. Where I get the most out of AI is in the realm of interaction design.

Things that were painful or flat-out impossible to prototype in Figma are suddenly fair game.

In the past I left much of the final implementation up to engineers, but now I can easily sweat the details on how things move and feel.

So no, my workflow in Figma hasn’t changed much. But the range of what I can imagine, test, and ship has expanded dramatically.

And we’re seeing that trend in recent episodes as well:

• Escha using Suno to help create custom music for the Comet onboarding or training her own models to generate invite cards

• Gunnar learning how to create shaders using Cursor

• Ammaar prototyping a totally new type of scrollbar

Designers are bringing way more to the table than ever before.

AI’s biggest impact isn’t speed. It’s scope.

Meet the Dive partners 

I made a list of my favorite products and asked them to come on as sponsors of the newsletter/podcast. They said yes 🥹

The #1 way to support Dive Club is to check them out👇

Framer​ → How I build my websites

Genway → How I do research

Granola → How I take notes during CRIT

Jitter​ → How I animate my designs

Lovable → How I build my ideas in code

Mobbin → How I find design inspiration

Paper → How I design like a creative

Raycast ​ → How I stay in flow while I work

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