🤿 whale mascot

exploring novel interaction patterns for AI agents in Grok Bot

Author

Ridd
August 25, 2026

Grok Bot has been going viral the last two weeks so this week's episode is a behind-the-scenes of the design journey with John Bai (who was the first NYC design hire at Cursor).

He screen-shares a ton of agent interaction pattern ideas as well as his unused concepts for the Grok Bot onboarding flow.

Some highlights:

  • The prototype that led to the Grok Bot mascot

  • Why John realized chat was still the right UX for AI

  • How John uses agents to streamline his Figma work

  • Comparing John's onboarding concepts for Grok Bot

  • Why John still starts his design explorations in Figma

  • What it took to turn AI agents into a consumer product

  • Why no two designers at Cursor have the same tools/process

  • + a lot more

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

👥 FEATURED RESOURCE

Dive Talent Network

Remember Claire Taylor?

She just posted that she joined the design team at Superpower.

And guess what?? She landed it through the Dive Talent Network 😏

So if you're curious what might be out there (or maybe you're even looking for your next design hire) here's the link ✌

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCES
The making of Cursor's icons

Speaking of Cursor, if you want to see what “people who care” really means, just look at the making of their icons. Geesh.

Beautiful UI

One of my favorite parts of the episode with John Bai is seeing how many different interaction patterns he explored for agents.

So I want to share Beautiful UI. Its a small library of components for agent UX and they’re gorgeous.

James McDonald time-lapses

Remember James McDonald?

He's been sharing time-lapse recordings of him recreating complex visual patterns and they're incredibly fun to watch.

Rauno field notes

If there's one thing you can count on, it's that I'll share one of these Rauno field notes with you.

🧃 INSPIRATION JUICE

3 things I saved this week

Router

Ramp ships so insanely fast idk what they even do anymore as a company 😆 Router is some pretty fresh work though. Love this site.

Calendly brand identity

Remember Mike Smith?

He just redesigned the Calendly brand identity (RIP toilet bowl). The logo is great work but I also love these cards.

Operate

Been loving all of the work coming from the Operate team. Alvish's B2B visuals are always on point.

📻️ DIVE RADIO

Novel UI patterns

This week's Dive Radio will focus on novel UI patterns (and I'm working on a little demo I think you're going to like).

Hopefully Tommy doesn’t turn me into a whale mascot again lol.

See you Thursday at 4pmEST/1PST

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See you next week ✌️ 
- Ridd

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