🤿 grab shell dude

After writing a viral article called “The Missing Tool,” I was fortunate to meet Gab and Nim who are the co-founders of a startup called Dessn.

If you’re not familiar… Dessn is a new way to ship design changes without having to write code 💪

Over the last few months we’ve had regular jam sessions about the future of design tooling, how AI impacts software creation, and everything in between…

These jam sessions have been some of the most inspiring conversations I’ve had this year. So this week’s episode is a way to loop you in. We go deep into:

• The future of design systems with AI

• Crafting a product strategy in today’s landscape

• Navigating the idea maze as an early stage founder

• What it means to have an “AI native” product strategy

• How the flattening of the talent stack impacts designers

• Why Nim was so inspired by the head of design at Unsplash

• What “taste” looks like when operating as a creative director

• a lot more

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

🤝 WITH PLAY

There is so much more to good design than what it looks like… It’s also how it feels and functions

Now I can accomplish a lot in Figma but there’s still a ceiling there. Which is why I’m so excited about Play 2.0.

Play allows you to create ultra realistic prototypes because for the first time you can design interactions with native iOS gestures and Apple’s Core Animation.

So your prototypes feel real because they are real…

Which is why so many of the best designers I know are all using Play to design and prototype their mobile apps 👇

🎓 KEY TAKEAWAYS

Some (slightly nerdy) thoughts on AI and the future of design tooling

1 — We need to move past the blank slate

So much of building with AI tools today involves creating from a blank slate. Whether it’s typing a prompt into V0 or using Figma’s “First Draft” feature.

But in order for AI to earn its place in our daily workflows, the tooling needs to:

1. be deeply integrated into our product’s existing visual language

2. make it easy to explore within an existing flow or screen (where most of our designing happens)

Creating usable code that looks pretty isn’t the hard part.

If you want to ship, then you need to assimilate into engineering workflows and generate code your developers are excited to use.

2 — QA is an untapped opportunity

Once code is written, your designs don’t matter anymore. Who cares how tidy your layout is in Figma if the frontend is jank.

It’s why “handoff” feels high pressure for many designers. I’ve definitely worked on teams where I felt like I had to pick and choose my quality battles because I only had so many times I could ask “hey could you add a transition on this hover state?”

There’s a hidden social cost to QA’ing software and it caps quality.

So what does the opposite of high-pressure handoff look like? Well… it reminds me of when Henry Modisett said that Perplexity’s hack was having designers that could code 👇

I like to think of what Henry is describing as the process of sanding the UI down. The problem is most teams don’t have designers who can freely jump in and improve things when they have an hour though…

That’s why I’m so excited about Dessn.

I want to be empowered to contribute to production instead of always having to be reliant on engineers 💪

3 — Timing the tooling landscape

Although I think QA is an intriguing “wedge” to enter the design tooling landscape, how long does it really last??

If designers everywhere can ship their ideas, does QA even exist as we know it in the long run?

That’s why Dessn says “if you build with us… then QA goes away”. And many of their recent explorations look a lot more like V0 than redlining in Github comments.

This is why I’m so fascinated with AI startups today. Timing the market has never been more of a puzzle. You have to solve a short run problem while building toward a future that is murky at best.

I sort of picture the tooling landscape like the East Australian Current from Finding Nemo 😅 Choosing your entry point is everything.

If you’re too short-sighted, then you build toward an old-world paradigm and AI passes you buy.

On the flip side, there will be a graveyard of companies who were “too early” 🪦

4 — Taste in curation vs. creation

In Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges portrays an infinite library containing books of every possible combination of letters. Most are gibberish, but there’s also a shelf somewhere where Harry Potter exists.

In theory, UI works the same way.

For every interface, there are millions of permutations that exist in a hypothetical latent space. What if LLMs could help us see those possibilities at an unimaginable scale? What patterns would need to be created to help designers wield that power?

This begs the question… is taste only about crafting the interface?

Or is there enough taste in the selection process that the best designers could still differentiate themselves when operating at a near infinite scale?

Maybe taste becomes finding the weird but cool design that falls outside of distribution… and yet, you’re able to know that people will love it.

I’m still developing my thoughts on this one but it’s a fascinating concept to explore and a big reason why I invited bring Gab and Nim to jam for this week’s episode 👇

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👇

Dessn → How I ship like a design engineer

Framer​ → How I build my websites

Genway → How I do research

Jitter​ → How I animate my designs

Play → How I design mobile apps

Raycast ​ → How I do most things on my computer

Visual Electric → How I generate imagery

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