The Pragmatic Engineer - Design Engineering with Maggie Appleton

Transcript

Intro

0:00 · like you have an idea in your head and sure I could go into Claude code and be like, "Hey Claude, here's an idea I have." It's like a stack [music] of cards and it's an accordion, but it's much faster to just get a piece of pen or pencil on the desk next to me and draw that with my hands. And then you can look at it. It doesn't go away on your screen. It can sit on your desk and you can like the next day be like, "Oh yes, I remember." Like you have to understand the materials you're building with in any design role. If you're designing for the web and you don't understand performance or like how is your app fetching data and what's the loading time and what if there's race conditions, you'll end up with bad design solutions.

0:30 · I'm hoping agents actually help solve this because then designers using agents can step more into the engineering side. So, you can play around with like layouts and [music] ideas, but you can't get a sense until it's live in the browser of how this is going to feel and like how much scroll you need to do here. Whenever I'm designing something visual, it's so much easier to have live variables, which again would not have been possible before.

0:52 · You did a talk titled one developer, two dozen agents, zero alignment. Why we need collaborative engineering?

0:58 · Us alone with the agent, we can go really fast. The software is always built on a team. The biggest gap seems to be like we have agentic coding tools, but what makes for a great designer or a great design engineer and what can us software engineers learn from them?

1:14 · Maggie Appleton is one of the most thoughtful design engineers I know.

1:17 · She's worked as an illustrator, as a designer at an AI startup, and is currently prototyping at GitHub. Next, today we talk about what is a design engineer, and why there's often a tension between engineering and [music] design, the tools she's used before and now, and why pen and pencil is not going away, even with agents. Do you still need a designer when AI can generate 20 high fidelity prototypes, and is [music] AI design obvious to spot? And many more. If you're an engineer wanting to know where design is important and how to get better at design yourself, this episode [music] is for you.

1:48 · This episode is presented by Turbopuffer Vector and Full Text Search built on object storage. [music] It's fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. Today's episode will be about design and design engineering. And so I wanted to share something visually interesting about our season sponsor, Anticysis.

2:05 · We already know that antithesis verifies your system correctness by running your whole system in hostile simulation and finding bugs. Here's a UI for casualty analysis. You can open a report for a bug and see the probability of a bug occurring throughout the timeline of the simulation. In this case, we can see that at virtual time 25, something happened that makes this bug close to 100% to occur. So, we can jump to this point in virtual time simulation to read the logs. This kind of bug probability visualization is one that I've never seen before. There's also this neat log explorer.

2:37 · You can filter on error messages and then visualize how common or uncommon the error is over time. For example, here's looking for failing linearization failures, the purple line, and you can understand how rare or common a specific failure was. Again, I've yet to see this kind of error visualization, and I really like the innovation on the UI side. And finally, the simplified multiverse debugger. You can go back in time and replay a debug timeline. And you can inject bash commands at any time without affecting the playback of the bug. How cool is that?

3:08 · For example, we're listing files in the current directory, but as you can imagine, you can go debug the whole environment so much easier. I love how the team at Anticys are pushing what's possible with both debugging and verifying software. Head to antithesis.com/pragmatic to learn more. Maggie, welcome to the podcast.

From anthropology to tech

3:26 · Thanks. I'm thrilled to be here.

3:27 · I've had so many guests on on on the podcast. Uh, no one had quite the introductory story into tech like you.

3:34 · How did you get into tech? And you came from a very different background, right?

3:38 · Yes.

3:38 · Yeah. Um, I mean, I came in because it was where the money was, I guess. I mean, not pro [laughter] not really, but in the sense that like I in university, I studied cultural anthropology, which is like one my one true love. Like I adore cultural anthropology. I totally fell in love with it in university.

3:52 · What is anthropology?

3:54 · Yeah, it's okay. Okay, it's the study of human beings, which sounds impossibly broad and like how could that be a discipline, but it does it in a particular way where you go and you live with people intensely in this thing called participant observation. Usually it was done kind of when the field was born of different cultures. Of course, it was like anthropologists from the west primarily going to places like Papa New Guinea or Australia and living among kind of traditional peoples and then realizing how different their cultures were. Not just like, oh, they eat different food, you know, they have different houses, but they have completely different understandings of like what color is.

4:22 · They don't they have completely different understandings of time. It was it was kind of alongside the birth of psychology like understanding how flexible is the human mind about constructing understandings of the world. And anthropology is really one of these eye opening subjects when you get into it because you can kind of get into like medical anthropology or the anthropology of sex and gender and you just find out how extremely adaptable and fluid human beings are.

4:45 · And I loved it because I grew up as an expat kid overseas. So I think I was exposed early to lots of different cultures. And so it felt very natural to me to realize like oh the way things you know people do things at home you know quotequote home would be London for me but I left at age six is is completely different to the way they do it elsewhere. And there's no fixed way for humans to kind of construct a society or live life and the bounds of what we think is possible is much wider than we originally assume which is what I loved about it.

5:10 · So I I studied it, but of course come senior year kind of go right, what jobs are there available in cultural anthropology? [laughter] I guess living with natives isn't all that many.

5:21 · It's not very lucrative. Uh so the options were like go get a PhD and become a professor or the military hires lots of anthropologists to come up with torture techniques for people in different countries. So [laughter] when presented with these options by our professors, we were like, "Okay, okay, we'll go think about that." And I had always loved design growing up. So I had been doing like I you know I was a kid of the 90s.

5:43 · I grew up on Neopets with HTML and CSS and MySpace and I learned HTML and CSS probably around 12 or 13 and knew how to do it but in the way where like there wasn't that much complexity to it in whatever this was 1999.

5:55 · Did you have a MySpace?

5:56 · I did. Oh. Oh yeah.

5:57 · Oh. And you customized it with all the crazy animations and like the little sparkle trail at the end of your cursor and like I think mine was quite goth at the time like but I learned a lot. But of course, at the time, the web was so new. It wasn't like people thought this was a career or you didn't really think of it that way. But I came out of university with this degree that wasn't necessarily employable. And I just started doing freelance web design work because that was how I knew how to make money. Like throughout school, I was doing IT tech work for the university and just naturally went into this because it was like, well, I need to pay rent somehow.

6:26 · And I gravitated towards illustration originally cuz I love drawing. So I was originally an illustrator for the first couple years.

6:34 · And the way that I went more into the tech side because you can kind of be an illustrator that's like, you know, editorial or you could go into branding or like all kinds of types. But I started um working for a a startup. I guess I wouldn't call it a startup. It was more like a design dev shop in Prague that was making UIUX apps for like SF startups at the time. They were doing work for like Tinder and Uber like in the early days like in their beginnings. So it was there I got exposed to UIU UX design and I was making the illustrations for these apps and doing logos and branding.

7:00 · But I like that was my first exposure to like oh there are people who design buttons and and sidebars and that's kind of interesting. I didn't end up going into that for a while but that was my first introduction to like what is product design in tech as a as a field.

7:15 · And eventually I joined this company called Egghehead which does developer education. So they taught JavaScript. Sure you've seen them around. Um and I was their illustrator for four years.

7:25 · And then I became an art director and like art directed other people's illustrations for them. And that was really where I learned JavaScript, React. Like that was I think my real front end engineering education was like doing illustrations for them. But in doing the illustrations, I had to understand the material I was illustrating, which turned out to be like React components and use effect and like JavaScript functions and uh in a weird way, I just ended up moving more into front-end engineering and visual design because it just felt like a natural move.

7:52 · You worked at Elicit as well, right? Was that before EAD?

7:56 · After.

7:57 · That was after. Yeah. So, so you you you were at ead as as their learn design there and then elicit was an AI startup, right?

8:06 · Yeah. Early. Pretty early. Well, okay.

8:08 · Pretty early. Yeah.

8:09 · I mean, it was like the founders there were really kind of incredible people and that one of them had been studying language models for 10 years. He had like seen the writing on the wall way before anyone else, but like kind of out of MIT like PhD kind of like you know machine learning stuff and kind of had this realization of like language models are going to revolutionize science. he was really big on like how could this speed up the scientific process.

8:29 · So elicit originally was um and it still is actually I mean they've they've expanded but at its core it is using language models to speed up the scientific literature review process which usually very manual slow thing of all these academics reading thousands of papers and extracting data about them into spreadsheets perfect for models like a perfect use case. So I joined them. I think it was late 2021, early 2022.

8:52 · And and you were the only designer.

8:54 · There's no product manager. You were the founding designer.

8:56 · Yeah.

8:56 · Yeah. I think there were six of us in the beginning when I joined, maybe seven. I might have been the seventh. I forget. A very small team. And it stayed small most of the time I was there. And yeah, I was the only designer the whole time. And then we had [snorts] a PM at some point who left and then we didn't get another one. So there's no PM for quite a while. And it was a really wonderful experience cuz it was a classic early startup. Like it was like we were family. We would like stay together for weeks at a time during retreats. Like the founders had really strong conviction and they're really smart people and I trusted them so much.

9:24 · So it was sort of like get on board with the vision kind of deal. And it was there I really learned product design end to end I'd say in the terms of we had lots of users cuz we had a free prototype that was like very very popular. So you had all this data you could collect about what people were searching for and clicking on and what worked and what didn't and AB tests and and we just went really fast. Like we shipped a feature every week for a year.

9:44 · So it was like design, build, like ship it, measure, design, build, ship it, measure on repeat over and over for like the solid I think I was there a little over two years. And I had learned a ton in that time just about the core mechanics of product design in the sense of like really going from what are the user needs, what's their domain through to doing all the front-end engineering and like tying it all together. So it was a really wonderful experience. I learned a lot. It was intense. By the end of it, I was like step back from startups for a minute.

10:10 · So you got into design I guess kind of more like selftaught like figuring out there's a need for this. You worked at EKAD where you learned to design or explain developer concept educational concept for for developers. You worked at an AI startup as a designer. What does a designer do? [laughter] It's it's kind of a simple answer now that you've actually

What does a designer do?

10:32 · several roles and I I I get a sense that of course like there there's going to be the it depends but but at at startups that you've worked with that that you know how would you describe and of course many of us developers have worked with designers some have not at all

10:48 · I mean I kind of describe it it's not that different to engineering it's it's problem solving but the materials are different is the way I would describe it is like you go through the same process of like you have defined defining what your problem is like are you sure this is the correct problem have you defined it well and scoped it well you know researching possible solutions doing wide exploration what were all the ways we could solve this what are the trade-offs of them you know prototyping solutions validating those are the right solutions do they work for users do they make sense I don't think it's that different to engineering in the sense that I do some of both in my job but

11:19 · it's just the material is different instead of working with code although nowadays with developers you're working in higher level kind of architecture data flow you're not necessarily writing the synt syntax. But at the time, what syntax are you going to use to write this problem? And with design, the materials are like space, size, weight, color, you know, things you'd see in an interface in terms of the visuals, motion, you know, prominence. Is this is this big enough? Are these the right words for the user to understand what this button's going to do? Like everything from copywriting to visual graphic design.

11:47 · But with product design, you're also dealing with what we would call nouns and verbs of a product. So, it's easy when your product is like a sneaker store. It's like the nouns are like sneaker, cart, money. [laughter] If you're designing AWS, uh, the nouns get extremely difficult. Um, and I've primarily worked in what I'd call power user tools like scientists, developers, where the nouns are extremely hard because they get very abstract.

12:11 · It's sort of like what's the right container for a set of data or what's the right container or noun to point you to like, oh, this is your whatever set of data or like this set of data connects to that set of data or like here's a function that transforms this data into another set. need a a noun and verbs to give to users so they can understand how to manipulate whatever you're trying to get them to do. It's really difficult in dev tools sometimes because there's so much malleability in a way there isn't with stuff.

12:37 · What what is malleability?

12:38 · Uh like ability like it could take many different forms and shapes versus if you're designing things for the real world like I have friends who work for like government design. There's restrictions there where it's like you're trying to get someone to fill out a form. It's it can be a hard design challenge, but it's not complex in the same way versus like at the moment, right? I'm of course trying to design like agentic tools and it's like what are the nouns of agents? Like we don't know. There's like chat sessions. We have these things called plans. There's something called an MCP. There's skills.

13:06 · Like could we make new primitives that like connect a bunch of sessions all the way to a PR that becomes a new noun that contains it? Like there's all kinds of boundaries you could draw that would make the user think about your experience differently. And then you have to define what verbs can they take on which nouns, right? Can you sure edit, rename, delete? This is like classic CRUD stuff you have to figure out. But I don't know, can you like fork an agent session? What are the implications of that?

13:28 · Like I think the hard bit of product design is is designing a coherent system that takes all this complexity that could exist especially in something like DevTools and reducing it to the simplest possible form you can which is a very easy to say extremely hard to do every time to to like a really canonical set of nouns that the user can go okay I can point at that I understand what that's going to do I can when I click a button I don't get surprised at the outcome. This takes time to do this kind of like hard reduce it to its best most elegant form.

13:57 · This is so interesting because what you've described of like you know we have a new product that has not not existed before like a deaf tool in a digital space which lives in our head or inside of a computer with things that we just invented may that be an MCP or an agentic scale and then thinking of how

14:16 · we find the right words so people can use it and it makes sense and it's and you're kind of I I just see that you're kind of drawing up a map in your your head which is not all that different to when you're building a new system as a software engineer And I remember talking with Ken Beck who talked about how uh with Ward Kunigam they they came up with

14:36 · with some of the basics of that might have been domain driven design or it might have been some uh some some some related concepts but they had a thesaurus in front of them trying to they searched for the right words on how to oh it was a design patterns design patterns later came out of it but they were trying to put a name on these constructs and these things and how which is which feels like a very similar thing to what you're describing.

15:03 · Yeah.

15:03 · Yeah. Yeah. That's design. This is where I kind of get into sure there's types of design. Like you could be like there's interior design, there's brand design, there's product design, but product design when we talk about it in tech is actually software design and software design is engineering. It's actually the same skill. like you might be working with slightly different materials in the sense of one of you cares more about the colors and the size and the shadows and like the shape of things and the motion design but that person also has to understand like what's the shape of the database like what are these APIs like what is the

15:31 · data in the right place are we passing data through this component in the right way like they have to also understand this is interesting because the designers I I I worked with years back at places like Uber and and at Skype you know they had their design tools which was sketch later Figma, they typically work with the product folks. They they did uh explorations or or UX prototypes.

15:52 · They often sat into user testing, but in the end they they had a design. They had they had visuals. They had animations.

16:00 · That was their thing. And they handed us over to us engineers together with the the PR or here's the product, here's how it's going to look. And then we built it. And we would build the UI, let's say, on mobile. And we would then go maybe sit with them or show them and they would say like, "Oh, this motion doesn't feel good." But my view of of designer is like well it was very visual and for example those designers maybe they didn't didn't need to but they didn't need to get involved in like how the database works and how the flows they were very much aware of the flows of the user journey.

16:29 · Yeah.

16:29 · So like is that type of design how would you characterize as as being different or is it just that they that their domain is a little bit different that's more at the business level that the more kind of mobile these were like mobile and web and and some of those yeah I think it gets into kind of like how we label different parts of design like the kind of design I'm talking about is obviously biased by my experience which is much more design engineering stuff because it is like when I hear design engineer that's kind of a catchphrase now and what does that mean but I think of it as a designer who

16:58 · really engages is in the engineering and understands how the product works and it's required. It's not required in all domains. Again, if you're doing government forms, I don't think you need to understand the database. But if you're designing for developers or you're designing in a brand new field like AI where so much of how the product works is determined by what is possible on the back end and the shape of the data, then you do need to engage with it a lot.

17:20 · But if you're working on an app where actually a designer is probably better served by advocating for the user, I think that's a kind of more traditional philosophy of product design is like you represent the user and you represent trying to get the best experience possible for the user. And that means user interviews caring about flows like does this button feel big enough? Does it have the right words?

17:42 · And then they can spend much more energy there if they don't have to care about the technical back end. like maybe it's actually irrelevant when really what you need to care about is like does this flow make sense to people. So that's not necessarily a different kind of designer, but it's you kind of think of the whole the stack, right? But expand it all the way out, not just back end and front end, but the interface and users and then the product in the context of a business and like a product in the context of an economy. Like there are people who lean way more on this side. And I'm I'm a bit more the straddling of the product design and the engineering.

18:10 · But you can have valid designers all along this and some people again, you know, just visuals or just animation. Like there's lots of niches. I just like a bit more of the the half engineering half design like slice of it.

18:22 · To help understand a bit more of what you do, can you talk about the tools that you use? Like you know as as engineers we're kind of used to our tools used to be the ID and the code editor and you know some of the hardcore people like Vim and and some of some of those things and these days of course it's changing a bit more but you know those are the tools used. What are your tools?

How Maggie works

18:38 · It changes all the time. I mean to some degree like some things stay constant like you're and you're use doing similar tasks but of course at the moment I'm trying to try everything because part of my job is like trying to figure out what GitHub should do next. That's what our team does.

18:53 · That's actually the name right.

18:53 · GitHub next. Hey that's like it was well named. Um so a lot of the time like we are just you know of course I'm trying out codeex and claude and like dog fooding stuff internally at GitHub. I've tried conductor amp. I mean name any agentic harness like open code uh pi I try them all. I do love codeex at the moment like I do think like openai is on to some really good stuff at least in their their design of their like desktop app is is beautiful. They've really thought it through. So I think they're doing some really good stuff. I still use paper and pen for like initial brainstorming.

19:24 · Yeah, you you have you have your notebooks here.

19:26 · Yeah, I brought some along because notebooks aren't dead. I don't think they're going to be dead forever [laughter] forever. Uh, and I still use Figma because I know how to use it and I can do some brainstorming in it before I pass it off to an agent. But to be honest, there's a point where once you figured out what you need to build, which is actually all the work once you hand it off to an agent, it's not that implementation is solved, but we've reached a point where implementation is like good enough that if I speck it out

19:51 · really well and I and I list out how the agent should verify for me that it actually did the work, I can hand it to an agent and just like be like, "Right, let me know when you've got a PR up."

19:59 · You know, I don't really look at code that much anymore. I do look at PR code when I'm reviewing it, but skim skim skim, you know, okay, that looks sensible. Merge. [laughter] Um, so most of the work I find is everything leading up to telling the agent to implement something and then the PR review is kind of a separate piece of work. But like the bulk of my tools deal in this first section now versus we used to have the IDE, you know, once it was like, okay, you've decided this is the right thing to design. Now you actually start the work of like implementing it. It's kind of beautiful that that's no no longer part of it as much.

20:31 · I open VS Code sometimes but not really.

20:34 · Yeah. But but beforehand you would prototype, right? Like you you build prototypes.

20:38 · Yeah.

20:38 · Yeah. Yeah. As part of the like what should we build? I include in this lots of prototyping and I I kind of have the privilege of being on a team where we don't have to build like production quality software. We are mostly trying to prototype and validate ideas. So we have a lower quality bar than someone shipping to proper github.com. That's a very high quality bar.

20:56 · Yeah.

20:56 · Which makes sense. I mean that's that's kind of you get the kind of you get the directional things right and then once it's as great you might build it or you might decide to build it.

21:04 · Yeah.

21:04 · Yeah. But I definitely I mean we can hopefully show these later. I do I do a lot of stuff sketching. I mean even just interface design a lot of what you're doing is just drawing boxes and then being like does this slide over from the front from the bottom like if I click this button.

21:17 · So this is like you kind of drawing up a how an interface you think could look like. So, so I see I see a mix of of mix of UIs and we'll put these on onto the screen, but UIS description of of what they do. What like can you just talk to one of these or like one that that's interesting or memorable?

21:38 · Yeah.

21:38 · Yeah. So, this is a new I should explain the context. I'm prototyping at the moment something where my theory is like one of the bottlenecks with agents is planning is a really bad experience at the moment. Like at the moment you have a long chat with an agent you sometimes even in a CLI which is a pretty primitive interface and then the agent grills you by asking you a set of like choice A, B or C questions and it does this like hundred times over if you're using Matt Pox's grill me skill or whatever you like.

22:04 · He he he was just on a podcast and yes [laughter] uh and by question 20 you're like quite tired and your brain starts shutting down. [laughter] That was my exper I went through and I got 36 questions and I I was kind they were good but I was starting to get annoyed around like yeah like 20 or 25.

22:20 · I'm like and also and I had no idea when it would stop right it's endless and like the human brain you get tired you can't make this many decisions in this short of time and also you don't have enough information about most of those decisions because it's given you a question and three options and it's told you number A is recommended then you just start being like yep a a enter a I agree with you.

22:40 · So this is not an ideal experience. This gets into like uh agents love to output reams and reams of text and that's an ideal output for agents but it is not an ideal input for humans. So we have a mismatch with like what do humans need to be able to digest large amounts of information and truly understand it and be able to make informed decisions that is not the interface for this. So I'm trying to explore how would we make an interface that got us to do better planning and better decision-m but in a way that was easier for us to comprehend. So, this is what I'm prototyping at the moment.

23:08 · And part of this is like, okay, it's going to be multiplayer because of course everything should be with your team planning together.

23:14 · Yeah. So, several people can do it together.

23:17 · Exactly.

23:17 · Um, but also just like how do you make it so that you have more space for each decision? So, I'm trying to prototype like, okay, so first of all, this has to definitely happen in a guey, not in a CLI.

23:28 · So, these are just like rough ideas of how you could have more space or Exactly. So, I'm thinking of it as like each decision maybe has its own little mini document or card. And [clears throat] depending on the decision, some of them maybe you can just have three multiple choices. That's fine. It's maybe a simple decision, right? A B or C.

23:43 · But sometimes it'll ask me things like do you think the borders should be like gray 10%, 12% or 15%. And I'm like, well, show show me this is a visual question. Or sometimes it's like, how do you want the architecture to be structured? And I'm like, well, show me an architecture diagram. Show me a data flow diagram. Show me a state machine.

24:01 · I'm trying to prototype like decisions that have come with diagrams and prototypes and HTML embedded in them so that depending on what question is being asked, it shows me the correct interface to make that decision. So what I meant prototyping here is like okay, you've got a plan that's a big document. you've maybe got these little decision docs embedded within them that can you can expand to see more of and then looking

24:21 · at like I think each decision should have a human assigned to it who made that decision so that you have an audit trail later not necessarily to hunt people down but to be like okay why why did we make this decision about the back end well let's go see okay Luke made that decision like 6 months ago let's go open up his decision card and be like what information did he have available in order to make this decision hopefully this becomes useful later but here I'm just sketching what are the possible shapes this could take is this like a stack of cards that expands on the screen. Is this like all one big linear thing? Are we like swiping through stuff like it's Tinder?

24:49 · Like what what interfaces are are going to be useful for this? So, this is a lot of the sketching is just trying to figure out like possible possible shapes of things. I have all kinds. Oh, these are like characters cuz I was trying to make an ESP character.

The case for planning with physical tools

25:03 · Can you show the character?

25:04 · Well, this is like, do you know Oh, this is like my kid scribbling all over my notebook. This is like, you know, ESP32s. Do you know Steve Ruiz has like sold everyone on buying an ESP32? It's like this little device with a screen and a very small microchip that has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. And so I was designing this little character who like tells me the weather and like I'm trying to hook it up to my agent so it can be like you have this much capacity left before your reset limit happens. So like this is just all kinds of things happen like it's a mix of like like some serious stuff and some fun stuff.

25:31 · Yeah.

25:31 · Yeah. And I can show like um the whole thing with notebooks and thinking on paper. I think all designers do this, but coming from illustration, the reason I do this is because I started in a world where you have to draw everything to like figure out what you're going to do. So, when I was an illustrator, I had tons of these notebooks where you're figuring out like what's the composition? What's the physical shape of things? Like, how are you working out like the shape of the grass in a scene?

25:54 · And so, I think I started problem solving on paper like very early on in my career, like figuring out compositions and layouts.

26:02 · Was this was it was this in college?

26:04 · When was this? I think I was working for Egghhead when I was doing this.

26:08 · And you drew all of these?

26:09 · Yeah.

26:09 · Yeah. I trained with um I was in LA for a while, which is a terrible place to live, but with I trained with like people who are concept artists on films, and they have a really beautiful way of working that's that's very technical. It's very like constructing things from 3D shapes and like drawing in space.

26:25 · Because these are really 3D.

26:26 · Yeah.

26:26 · Yeah. Um and then [clears throat] and they kind of just teach you how to do like landscapes and layouts. They loved their way of teaching and it's very again it's very technical. It's very like engineering you have to understand like with robotics like different types of joints you could like put together a robot in so that you could actually draw a robot that was believable. There was a lot of like understanding reality in order to believably draw reality. So I think doing this set me up to when I moved into like UI design to do a lot of this kind of sketching because it just comes naturally.

26:55 · I mean these are a little bit easier to sketch [laughter] as well in terms of the user interfaces.

27:01 · Yeah.

27:01 · But then I think it's like then it helps you think on paper that all of this is just sort of like you have an idea in your head and sure I could like go into Claude code and be like, "Hey Claude, here's an idea I have. It's like a stack of cards and it's an accordion."

27:13 · But it's much faster to just get a piece of pen like pen or pencil on the desk next to me and draw that with my hands.

27:21 · It's like way fewer effort. So I feel like people online keep being like, "Oh, like everyone's just going to prompt everything to create." But but you need something that is like quick feedback and very loose in the early stages to figure out the shape of something before you can put into words what you want an agent to do.

27:37 · And also it's visual. It's not text.

27:38 · And is it is it not a bit more satisfying doing it with your hand?

27:41 · So much better. Yeah. And then you can look at it. It doesn't go away on your screen. It can sit on your desk and you can like the next day be like, "Oh yes, I remember I was trying to like figure out what shape this this feature should be." Or like you can draw like data diagrams, whatever you want. It's it doesn't have to be visual, but it's just a way of externalizing thoughts before they're then they're not linguistic. I think this is like a key thing is like again agents only accept text as inputs.

28:06 · Okay, they can read images. Like I do take in photos and put them in, but they're not as good at images. They're very bad at special spatial reasoning.

28:13 · They're very bad at visual design. I mean, trying to get them to do design, they just make mistakes where like they just don't put spacing around things and things are the wrong size and they make text overlap. They can't see, right?

28:22 · like trying to explain a visual idea in text to an agent is really challenging um and it doesn't work very well. So I find I still end up doing a lot of my design without agents up front because all it is is thinking through the visual the visual pieces of it and then when I'm like okay I know this is the shape of the thing I want then I can tell an agent to do it but I find it hard to like involve it earlier in a way that I think some people on Twitter are claiming they do but I'm skeptical.

28:47 · But but this is interesting because even in software design and I'm talking about architecture design some of the I guess most productive sessions I've observed have been imperson around the whiteboard. Yeah. where people again we're talking about like components, databases, networking connections, retry logics, whatever, you know, like these things you could describe or or you could put it in a computer, but when you put it on a board, when someone puts it on there and then someone else takes and you know, they kind of they're forced to take their ideas into a 2D space cuz we

29:19 · we don't do 3D like we I know you can draw like cool 3D but we cannot. So just boxes and arrows. someone does that and the other people understand and they go in and they add their own thing or they circle or they add new components and even in digital space I think my was a good example they became so popular because they figured out a way to do collaborative whiteboarding for you know like you don't have to be in the same room but they give you somewhat similar tools.

29:46 · Yeah. So I I I wonder if if this whole thing of of getting your ideas either to a to a physical medium which I think for us engineers it's the whiteboard for for you it's the the notebook may maybe it just helps maybe rethink or solidify or also it it does it does have a forcing function about the the verbs the the shapes that you Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this gets into kind of like the interfaces we have to agents right now are so primitive. I think we know this right. We're all like a couple years into this entire thing which is is wild. Maybe 5 years. I forget when GPT4 came out.

30:17 · Was it three or four years ago?

30:20 · Uh Chad GPT 3.5 came out in the 3 years. Four years four years November 2022.

30:27 · Yeah.

30:27 · Yeah. Yeah. This when I was at elicit and then because we were debating doing a chat interface and then they did it and we were like oh they like stole our idea [laughter] is necessarily competing with them. But that is no time at all and it's kind of wild we've made it as far as we have.

30:41 · But it's also like I always say software design is an extremely young field. Like what are we 60 years into it at most? So even that we haven't figured out a lot of things about how to design the best interfaces for people and machines to like communicate with each other and agents barely at all. I feel like there's this like there's this world that agents live in. There's like weights and models and skills and MCPS.

31:01 · And then you have your human side that is like physicality and texture and light and materials and all these things agents don't understand. And trying to find like artifacts that allow us to meet in the middle and create stuff together is like the really hard challenge cuz you've got two totally different types of beings. Not that agents are conscious beings. I'm not in that camp. But they're a type of intelligence that like wants to think and act in a certain way that is not the way humans want to think and act. And it's hard to like translate between the two.

31:28 · I just find myself very frustrated that they can't sort of, you know, be looking over my shoulder, looking at my notebook, and be understanding what I'm drawing and like helping me move my ideas along. This is like the eventual dream is they understand space and light and shape and lines and and you know, but I think we're quite a ways away from that.

31:47 · So, one thing we would talk about your notebooks and digital tools, but one thing that you've you've uh posted about recently is woodworking. You said [laughter] you said you're I I'm at the stage of my software design journey.

Why Maggie is learning woodworking

31:58 · Well, no, I'm at that stage of software design where you start taking woodworking courses. Can can you tell me a little bit about that experience?

32:05 · Well, the little bit of the joke is like I just feel at some point every engineer you have a choice of things you can get into because you you feel like you're like disembodied from the world of working in software. So, you have to pick ceramics, um bread baking, you can maybe pick like motorcycle repair or something, but woodworking is a pretty popular one because it's like engineering. There's a lot of like measurement and being precise. Um, so yeah, I'm learning woodworking because I bought a house here and all the houses in London are very old. So you buy a house that needs a lot of work. That is like always what happens. Maybe the same in Amsterdam, I think. Old housing stock.

32:34 · So then you suddenly become like, oh, I need to learn like DIY skills, which I was, you know, Claude chat GBT very helpful coaches in this regard along with YouTube and Instagram like you can learn a lot. But I just was like, oh, there's so many things I need solutions to that I need to figure out how to make. I need to like make shelves here.

32:51 · I need to like fix this banister. So, I was like, well, I have no DIY skills, no woodworking, but I just signed up for a course being like, well, I'll learn. I'm pretty sure I can like I'm not too old. I can acquire new skills and I'm sure find lots of parallels to software, but in a more satisfying way where you actually like touch the thing you make.

33:08 · One thing that you've talked about, you've been talking about is the concept of of uh design engineers for from a few years ago. you posted. I'll I'll quote you. Uh I'm having a strong should I just become a full-blown design engineer day. I'm not even sure what it means, but I just want to touch a lots of code and solve tangible problems on screens and make beautiful animated stuff.

Design engineers and engineering constraints

33:29 · Yeah.

33:29 · And then you went over and you tried to collect names of people who you knew who you felt were kind of doing this design engineering. Now that was a few years ago.

33:37 · Yeah.

33:38 · What have you figured out about design engineers if they exist? What they do? where what places they work in.

33:47 · Yeah, I think they do exist. I think Twitter might have a different definition or like I think there's a lot of people where not that I should call it X. Sorry, X. Um, Twitter X all the same on X. I feel like a lot of people who get called design engineers or who present themselves as design engineers actually are like very good micro interaction designers. Like little like here's a cool hover effect on a button and like here's a cool loading transition state. And those things are definitely cool. I don't consider that design engineering because you could achieve most of those things by just telling an agent to do those without looking at a single piece of code.

34:19 · To me, that's just like very like advanced sophisticated like motion design and and visual design. And that's cool, but I don't consider that design engineering because I don't think that's like a full job for you to do that as a career.

34:33 · [laughter] But design engineering now what like the people who I think of as good design engineers do the kind of thing I was talking about before where you step much more into the engineering side of work. So you're still a designer. You're still caring about like product nouns and verbs and like the visual design but then you really work with engineers closely or and or are like directly involved in implementing and writing code yourself and you fully understand well you know

34:58 · not fully you don't have to be like full full stack but like you have a deep understanding of the technical the technical architecture of the product you're building. you really are like okay given the shape of the backend data what is possible in the interface like that sort of design work you know given given what models are capable of and what kind of skill like custom skills we're building into this product like how do I explain to users what the capabilities of this product are like truly digging into the technicals and not living in the world of like just user interviews and the market and like

35:29 · what color is the sidebar but caring much more and working much more closely with the engineers and almost always I feel like implementing a lot of it yourself. Like I've always done my own front end work just cuz it's easier. And then the engineers I work with are usually thrilled cuz they hate CSS. And then they [clears throat] get to go work on like the more interesting difficult stuff. I'd say it's like the syncing or like the the the like back of the front end work, you know, like the more logic stuff. They really get to engage in that and they don't have to worry about like is this the right border radius on something like I don't think they they very rarely care and I do care.

36:00 · So it's always worked out well to kind of do that. So I just define it as someone who's like deeply into the engineering side of the design.

36:09 · What's in your past positions, current positions through friends who are also designers? What have you seen great engineering and design collaboration look like? May that be with designers or design engineers? I mean, I do find being a design engineer, I've always had amazing collaborations with engineers because again, you do the bit they didn't ever want to do.

36:28 · And you take away what I assume is most of the tension between designers and engineers that I've never experienced because I've always been a front-end person, but I've heard of people, you know, there being the tension where you have like someone's made some perfect Figma file and the engineer hasn't implemented it exactly to spec.

36:44 · Yes, I've [laughter] been there. Yeah.

36:46 · Yeah.

36:46 · And obviously there's a tension there because because someone made something and immediately there's a nice gradient and it's it's it's and it's and it's mobile and doing gradients would absolutely wreck the scroll performance. And again these are like we're talking about like years back when when this was a thing.

37:01 · Yeah.

37:01 · And now you're going back like can I can you just do a single color or you try to explain like what you can do with your either performance limitations or think about lowend devices on Android or iOS versus Android where a designer might be more into the iOS world and

37:16 · again a good designer would not but there there's often times the engineer would come like all right we have constraints here right uh for whatever reason yeah I think this gets into like I don't want to blame the designers because I think it's a failure of tools because the design tools that everyone used to Sketch and Figma, these like pixel mockups, they have no relationship to the constraints of the medium, which is like whatever you're building for iOS or desktop or the web. Like you have to understand like the materials you're building with in any design role. Like yes, a table designer would not like be oblivious to like how oak performs in certain contexts, right?

37:48 · Or like how pine dents in a certain way. And in the same way, I think if you're designing for the web and you don't understand like performance or like how how is how is your app like fetching data and what's the loading time and what if there's race conditions? Like I think if you're oblivious to that, you'll you'll end up with bad design solutions and then with really bad relationships.

38:08 · Yeah. So I'm hoping agents actually help solve this, right? Because really then designers using agents can step more into the engineering side and also use agents as a coach and like a learning tool and say, "Okay, the engineers come back and told me that we have this like error state. I've never heard of in my life. Like explain to me why that error state would occur, you know, and help me build a state machine, right? Like there's like all these new tools available. But those old frictions I have to assume were just like toolbased things. And I would say designers that are maybe stuck in the past who don't want to let go of like, oh, I make pixel mockups.

38:39 · I don't know if anyone's there anymore, but if they still are, I mean, you're just Yeah, I can't imagine that relationship going well in the future.

38:47 · And then you you mentioned Figma. Figma was such a popular tool for a while that that was the interface between engineers and designers. Uh how do you use Figma today or or how have you used it in in the past?

How Maggie uses Figma

38:59 · I think I've always used it like not to get to high fidelity markups at all. I think to get like the rough shape of things past a notebook. So like a notebook you can be like okay the shape of it is like this but it's such a rough sketch and Figma is useful I find for being like okay exactly what color is like the right amount of contrast to like draw attention to this element on the page or like exactly what size does this text need to be to like flow well.

39:20 · But then you I would never take it too high fidelity because of course everything always looks different. I mean I primarily design for the web.

39:27 · Everything looks different in the browser, right? Depends on the font rendering and all this kind of stuff and responsiveness and when exactly your break points. So I would always take it into browsers pretty early on. You get like medium fidelity in Figma like the shape of it and then you take it into a prototype and then you can really tweak and refine.

39:43 · And of course with agents now it's just like I point an agent at my Figma [clears throat] mockup and I'm like just get all of that in there and then and then uh make you know what's called a jig which is where you get like little sliders and variables attached to like a little a jig a jig comes from woodworking or you make like a little device that helps you do one specific job. So with design when you're working uh on a live prototype you say like okay here are the variables I'm not sure about. I'm not sure about like my my headline size.

40:09 · I'm not sure about these colors. give me sliders and color pickers and like all these things or like the animation curve I'm not sure about. Give me and then I'll and then I'll tweak it live and then when I have the values just right in the live version then we'll commit those to be the actual values much faster. It's like build your own Figma as needed.

40:27 · And inside of GitHub, how do designers work? How do yourself and other designers work? Cuz it's a bigger organization. You're building a tool for developers with bunch of bunch of different parts. I mean, I don't spend that much time with like the GitHub design or proper. I know some people in there, but No, because you're next.

Design at GitHub Next

40:44 · So, the GitHub Next team is a little bit isolated. Like, we still have good relationships with the rest of the org, but a little bit by design, we're supposed to be kind of like the R&D team out on the side kind of doing weird stuff and then trying to convince the rest of the or what like that we're right and they should like pay attention and do our thing, which is a whole different politics thing. So, I like kind of see the designers, but they I think they have a very different job to me and that like they have to like uphold quality standards and they're working on like a big design system and like an old Ruby on Rails app. Like they've got very different constraints to me.

41:13 · Yeah.

41:13 · And they have like millions or or or even more like tens of millions of customers who like that's now a different thing. They've been used to certain things or finding certain things or certain patterns.

41:23 · Exactly.

41:23 · Exactly. changing anything on.com is like a whole political thing because because customers expect you know them to come in and they have critical workflows you can't move their button but the team I work on there's me and one other guy who are both design engineers so we both like do engineering work but we are more the design people and everyone else is much more engineer like and they're all really senior so it's fun to work with them cuz like they've seen everything they like know how to architect an app but we don't work that differently to engineers I find I mean we're putting in PRs the same as them we're like working in the same tools and materials it's it's much more that thing of like what bits of the app we care about.

41:54 · I of course care about the interface part and then like my engineer partners of course care about like the back end and the data flow and everything. So same tools but different like um considerations I guess.

42:06 · I wanted to take some time to mention our presenting sponsor Turbopuffer. Turbopuffer couldn't be a better sponsor for this episode as they have what I think is one of the most refreshing brands in tech right now. Turbopuffer's co-founder Simon describes their brand as hardcore and whimsical and their design perfectly reflects this.

42:24 · Turbuffer the database is extremely hardcore AI infrastructure. It supports critical search workloads for Entropic, Notion, Bridgewater, Cognition, and many more of the largest and fastest growing AI companies in the world. They take reliability, performance, and scalability very seriously. But Turboper, the team, refuses to be another sterile, boring enterprise tech company. Just look at their website. It's exactly what you would want the website for a database to look like. It's simple, modest, and transparent.

42:54 · They even put the limits on the homepage, but it also isn't boring. It's nice to look at. It's very well thought out, and their little asai diagrams perfectly blend hardcore engineering with whimsical design. Plus, if you've ever tried to generate a good Askai diagram with AI, you'll quickly realize that they create all of these by hand, not with AI. Turbopuffer's brand is the perfect reflection of who they are and that's why it works so well. The brand is hardcore and whimsical and so is the team.

43:22 · I highly recommend Turbopuffer not only as the extremely scalable search engine for AI but also as a group of people that will go to exceptional lengths to deliver for their customers. You can check them out at turbopuffer.com/pragmatic.

43:36 · I also want to mention our season sponsor entire. Maggie mentioned that as a design engineer, she's still putting in PRs the same as everyone else. And every one of those PRs is pushed to Git hosting, but there is a problem with Git agents. Git is increasingly becoming a bottleneck for modern agent heavy software development. Devs are creating more code with agents. These agents are pushing more code and many devs are running parallel agents that are pushing even more code. GitHub is clearly struggling to keep up and has frequent outages. So what is the solution?

44:04 · Entire was founded by GitHub's last CEO Thomas Dunca and here we built git hosting for the agenda from scratch. Entire was built to be very fast and have your repos regionally close to you to reduce latency allowing for fleets of agents to push in parallel. And Entire's performance is next level. The repo can handle 418 pushes per second. And that's up to 89 times faster than every other competitor on the market. When GitHub is down, you can still keep working and you don't need to migrate away from GitHub.

44:36 · You just sign up to entire and the platform mirrors your repo. Oh, and one more thing. Have you ever wondered what prompt resulted in this code being generated? I find that the prompt and conversation with the agents carries more information than the PR itself.

44:49 · Entire captures all the prompt history with your agent right in the repo. Easy to check back. And it's got a pretty innovative UI to show all of this. If you're looking for get hosting that works even when GitHub is down, head to entire.io/pragmatic, install the CLI, and mirror your repo with a click. I've already done it. Oh, and did I mention that it works with any agent and is open source? And then with LM since they came out, how has your design process changed? You've already mentioned how it's now a lot easier.

How has AI changed design

45:15 · You can like for example, if if you either have an interface design, you can you can ask plot or or codeex or or any any other agent to implement it. But what has changed like between the notebook, between your mockups, between the prototype that gets there, what parts are easier and maybe what parts are trickier?

45:37 · It's definitely all faster and it definitely all feels a bit easier. I will say like I definitely remember not suffering through like like making elaborate prototypes in Figma because that was going to be faster than like building more complex things in the web and then trying to show them to users with these like Figma clickthrough prototypes that obviously like everything is faked.

45:55 · Oh, I I remember that like on the the user thing and then sometimes you have to like have these weird things that click here and then so you're like in these user interviews and like the user's trying to click something that you haven't hooked up to like a like a fake new screen and the whole thing just feels a bit insincere and then even when you did make prototypes you you couldn't spend any time making them look nice. So then sometimes the users would get like bit distracted or confused by the fact it looked terrible. But you're like, "Yeah, but we only we only had a few days and then we've got to move on to the next prototype." And now I wouldn't have that problem at all. Right?

46:24 · Like now I can build something that really looks quite sophisticated and not with the agents doing it on their own. They need a lot of direction I find to make something that I would think was an acceptable interface, but it's [clears throat] so much faster.

46:36 · Sometimes I have even mocked up quite high fidelity stuff in Figma and then just been like, "Hey agent, here's the Figma file. You know, goal mode. You play right, take screenshots. If it doesn't look like the Figma, keep going.

46:49 · Keep looping until it looks exactly like the Figma and it'll get there." And so that was just like I can run that overnight. I don't have to do anything in the morning. The interface is pretty much there as I speced out. Like and and to you I guess this was grunt work, right?

47:01 · Oh, totally. It's totally cuz you're like this isn't complex. This is like okay again we're building another sidebar, right? Let's get the React components and like but and and you don't really care about the cool quality or tech depth or any of like it's going to be throw away anyway, right? Like if if if it works because of that because then you'll build it and if it doesn't work like great, [laughter] doesn't matter. So prototyping is a whole different game now. I feel like you can prototype much more ambitious things. And then I do love the whole jig thing. It feels like this malleable software thing where like you can make the software whatever you want it to be where I'm not constrained by Figma's available tools.

47:32 · I can be like okay I'm trying to make like this animated constellation map was something I recently did. Like what speed are the stars moving at? Like what zoom level are we at? Like you did that?

47:41 · Yeah.

47:41 · And like how much what degree is the gradient at on the screen? and you just put these all on little sliders and you just tweak it and then you think, "Oh, I I really want like a slight like green like grain over this." Tell the agent, you know, it's like it honestly feels like magic a lot of days. It's Did you have that?

47:57 · Oh, I might be able to pull it up. Yeah. Let's see. So, this is something I built for the new GitHub next like um website.

48:03 · We have a kind of basic one up, but I wanted something a bit fancier. We want to make it a little bit easier to like publish research frequently. So, I was playing around with some like, you know, some jazzy some jazzy homepages. Um, and this whole thing, this is like an animated like spinning constellation. And these are like some projects that the team's worked on over the years.

48:20 · Amazing.

48:20 · And like this kind of thing to prototype this, right? Of course, I started with a sketch and notebook, but then made a bunch of jigs where I was like, okay, what colors the background and like how fast is this map spinning? And then there's a bunch of like phys cool physics on the stars that I didn't have to do any physics, you know, I didn't have to know anything about that. Um, you know, how how big are these when you hover over them? And then I did this like cool scroll effect down into the proper page. Um, and all of that, right?

48:46 · I didn't write any code. I made a bunch of different jigs and and tweaked and adjust exactly.

48:51 · And so these were like just imagine these were like things on the screen. For example, the color you could go from like blue, green, red, and then you figure out all right, you like this the most, the sizes, all of those. Right.

49:02 · Exactly.

49:02 · I can be like make me a slider um for controlling the animation variables on the constellation experiment. So, we'll let that work. But that's the kind of it's like really simple. If you tell it like make me controls or make me a slider for whatever it is you're trying to do, just think about like okay, what are the ways I need to like tweak this to make it work? It's pretty good about just making them.

49:27 · I mean, I have a sil skill so it like knows how to like make them so that they look decent, right? and and based on your preferences, you know, what you figured out works.

49:36 · Yeah.

49:36 · Yeah. Um but then it's great. Just hooks it up and then you can just kind of like play with it and it's it's a whole different way to design. It's very um you know Brett Victor like the live programming stuff. Um Brett Victor was he's he's an engineer also a designer. I mean he's off doing some crazy stuff now. He did a set of talks between I don't know it was like 2010 2013. One of them's like, "Stop drawing dead fish."

49:59 · And it's about how like programming is not a a very live medium. Like, you know, you code in the editor, you do your whole build, and then you like look at it in the browser or wherever it is. And these two things feel very disconnected, and it's very hard to like you're tweaking variables in code, and then you have to go see the effect. And it's not a direct connection.

50:15 · And so his whole thing was like you need to have instant direct feedback at all times to be able to like look at the artifact you're making and directly tweak it. And it's like this kind of stuff come to life. like now we finally can do it, but before you couldn't do that. There was like no programming system in existence that could give you like a live preview of every possible variable or or thing. Like the closest we have is like dev tools in the browser.

When models design and why humans are still needed

50:37 · Well, another topic which is very related to to this one while we're waiting for it. One thing that with AI, of course, you're saying it's easier to build stuff, but with AI it's also easier to design. When I was asking people like how they work with designers, an engineer replied something which I hear a lot more which is I I'll quote this this person Amir as an engineer I ask cloud design to generate 20 high high fidelity alternatives and I keep it trading till I land at a perfect design. It's very enjoyable and feels much faster than interacting with a design team.

51:04 · So it it is a thing saying oh I have these tools I don't necessarily need a designer like I can just ask for all these like and in this case it will just give me 20 alternatives. I'll choose the perfect one and boom, I'm done. As someone who is a designer, what's your t take on on this? And and by the way, this is not the first time. I think there's always the thing like do we need designers? Do we as as engineers, do we need product managers? And of course, you know, product managers will also ask, do we need engineers and so on? [laughter] But what do you think where could this be valid? What could people be missing?

51:32 · I think in cases where you don't have a designer to hand and you're trying to like validate a product or like prove a hypothesis, but you need an interface for it. It's great to just use a model to be like, sure, make me 20 high fidelity designs. I'm sure I might look at those designs and be like, well, like it all depends on taste, too, right?

51:51 · Like I might look at them and think, okay, well, the these look obviously generated by AI to me, and I don't know that they're going to do the job that they need to do it. Again, it depends on the context. If it's something simple, needs a button and a sidebar, fine. But if it's like, you know, we have some new primitive we're trying to make figure out the shape of, that's when you really need a designer to come in and like really it's just someone who's assigned to like think through the prop problem properly, like put in the brain work and be like, okay, do the experiments, like show them to users, like figure out what people actually understand and don't. I think that's really like the labor a designer should come in and do.

52:22 · But I think it's completely fine for for developers without access to one to like use models as much as they can. But when models do designs for me, I of course just look at them and think that is terrible quality. [laughter] That is awful. Even to the extent of like I think they've been prompted with some what we would call like universal design principles, but they sort of don't don't understand nuance and context. And then I think they like stick to them too strictly. So like I find the agents want to put a label on everything in the interface.

52:53 · Label meaning like a small bit of text. Like there might be like a little button that's like to close the sidebar and we would usually use an icon button for that because most people are trained that this little button near the sidebar means it'll close it and they'll experiment with it and they'll click it and they'll figure out that is correctly what it does. But the agent will write close sidebar or close modal in the top right hand of the modal and you're like there's now a lot of text on this page [laughter]

53:16 · and and they'll just like put like four lines of instructional text over a button and just things where you're like I understand in the model's mind it's thinking oh this is how we like make the interface explainable to the human you know but actually it's really bad design. [laughter] Now talking about the UX and UI for AI, what do you think UX and good UX and and UI looks like? And I know this is a bigger question, but so far what have you learned of of what works and and what doesn't?

UX and UI

53:45 · I I think when it comes to this like like what is the ideal UI of AI which is like a very a big question I don't know that we'll figure out the answer to for a while but but it's something like some things haven't changed like in terms of what is good interface design for software it's there's still a lot of principles here like what what formats do we have to show users like data you know it's like dashboards and sidebars and documents like there's a lot of things that haven't changed we actually had a good story from this about this from elicit where the app was like helping doing

54:15 · scientists like extract data from papers and they were very used to doing this in Excel spreadsheets. They get a big Excel spreadsheet, put the papers in one on each row and then they'd extract each piece of data into the cells, right?

54:25 · Pretty standard process. But of course in the beginning of Alys we were like oh that's so old school. There must be some like much better interface for like you know seeing the data extracted from papers. So we tried all this crazy stuff. There was like infinite canvases with like cards spread everywhere. There was one that's like a bunch of cards that are all like linearly stacked. We were like maybe it's more like notion with these like composable documents with rich interfaces. Like we tried all this stuff and every user interview I did users were just like this is very confusing. Can I just have a table like every time?

54:54 · And so after a couple months of this like oh what's the new UI of uh of AI? We were like oh uh it's a table.

55:02 · Well [laughter] at least in our use case it turned out the interface people were using was the the best because it was the most familiar to them and it caused the least amount of like cognitive load for them to use the tool. So we were like right back to tables that's fine. Like it was good to go on that journey. But sometimes we have this notion of like the the UI of AI will be so wildly different from our current imaginings.

55:24 · And sometimes it's it's really not at all. It's like you can do more powerful things. I think there's lots of leverage, but I expect it to all be built with documents and sidebars and cards and tables and like all the all the classic things we've worked out do work and people know how to use.

55:38 · Yeah.

55:38 · It's interesting. Yeah. There's a cognitive load in learning any new UX UI paradigm. It can be confusing if your existing tools don't work like that because again people will still use operating systems and Google Sheets or Excel or Office documents etc. And and even if if like a small subset of people are like I don't know familiar with this newi new UI stuff. You remember like probably like parents or or grandparents teaching them how to use the phones the interfaces and and once they learned it they're good. But then do you really want to do that again?

56:09 · Yeah. No. [clears throat] It's interesting. [laughter] Yeah. So it will be something some there will be something similarish.

56:13 · Yeah.

56:13 · It's kind of like how we started with chat bots, right? It's like chat bots were not the final form like as if we could look at codeex like there's a lot going on here there. Sure there's a chat window here but there's all kinds of things going on with git work trees over here and then we've got this whole interface and like I can do like annotations and debug in this. Like there's a lot of extra stuff where you take the the familiar primitive and you expand outwards from it. And we did similar things at elicit like there was still a table but then we baked a lot of stuff into the table and around it but you start with with familiar primitives.

56:41 · So here I can like we have our jig ready.

56:44 · Well yeah let's let's expand this. So here's a jig. This is using um dial kit. Um this is built with this. So I can change the speed of the animation to see like oh is that too fast? Like is that too slow? Um the intensity is like the how much gravity is being applied to the stars here.

56:59 · Oh wow.

57:00 · Uh how much variation is there in the stars? See this is sizing and scroll. So this is like when I scroll down to have this zoom out like what's the resting height? Uh I think this is of the when this is here like the resting height of this resting logo size. Let's see what's this. This is like I have some glass effects on the surface that it's like oh it's on the um on the top top thing like that. How much is that glass effect like is but see that's too bright. Then you can't read the words all the way down here. You can barely tell it's glass. So there's some sort of like happy middleground you want to figure out like how much contrast between the background.

57:32 · So this is where you you weren't kidding that this is like your own almost personal Figma if you will or or like design tool.

57:40 · Yeah.

57:40 · And then cuz it's really difficult to mock up static versions of this in Figma which I have done. Yeah. Like I was for a minute we were thinking maybe like a gray background trying to figure out how much like grain and stuff. Maybe like a wavy one. Yeah.

57:52 · And then I'm trying to figure out here like okay is it like halfway off the screen? Maybe there's like a slice out of it here. So, you can play around with like layouts and ideas, but you can't get a sense until it's live in the browser.

58:03 · Yeah.

58:04 · Of of how this is going to feel and like how much scroll you need to do here. Um like and then like the themes and the colors and textures and everything. So, I I work with this a lot now. Whenever I'm designing something visual, it's so much easier to have live variables, which again would not have been possible before. You could have built this by hand, I guess, in the olden days. It just would have been practical.

58:25 · Just coding the thing itself was slow enough.

58:28 · One interesting thing you talked about is capability gaslighting. What is capability gaslighting?

Capability gaslighting

58:34 · Okay.

58:34 · So, I think this is similar to like Ethan Mullik has this phrase um the jagged frontier. It's pretty much that, but I came up with capabilities gaslighting before I read his work. But so that people are familiar with the the concept. It's that models are really really good at some things and really bad at others. And it's really hard to predict when you give it a certain task which of those it's going to fall into.

58:54 · And then capabilities gaslighting was the feeling I got early on from using them where like they convince you they're so capable because they'll really impress you on one task and then you try them on something else and like they fail and you kind of feel like I feel like you kind of gaslight me like imagining that you're this extremely intelligent agent or model and then you like fall on your face and then sometimes I feel like they fail but I haven't totally noticed how badly they've failed because I still have this belief that like oh but you're a frontier model like Opus could never really get this wrong and totally does all the time. So, it's such an inconsistent experience.

59:23 · It and it's like it's so different to working with a human. Like, if you find a human who you feel is like really an expert in a in a topic and you work with them, it's it's very unusual for them to be inconsistent in their performance, right? Like it's very rare for them to suddenly forget all of their like expert knowledge on a topic. And if they did, you would be very like, are you having like a mental breakdown? Like this is very weird behavior.

59:45 · But this is how models like behave every day. like one day they will actually perform really well on a task and they could fail at that same task the next day because you prompted differently or they had different context available or like random whatever it is like stochcastic outputs they just didn't do as well. So I think it's hard to work with them because you never quite know what you're going to get.

1:00:05 · Yeah.

1:00:05 · It's I guess it's we just need to keep this in mind right because and this is ongoing like of course we always say and we we have see that the models improve but you want to be skeptical.

1:00:15 · Yeah.

1:00:15 · Yeah. Of course, there's some baseline with Frontier models like they're not going to perform below a certain bit, but you know, of course, the models are changing all the time and people complain about this that you upgrade to a new model and it and it changes what it's good at or it change like it doesn't perform to your expectations of certain things. It's like it's hard to predict.

1:00:32 · You did a a talk titled one developer, two dozen agents, zero alignment, why we need collaborative engineering. Can you talk about just this observation like one developer, two dozen agents, zero alignment?

One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment

1:00:45 · Yeah.

1:00:45 · So this is like a a problem that the GitHub next team has been focused on trying to find various ways to solve I think for well over a year now is this is this acknowledgement that we are now working with these agents locally on machines and it speeds up each individual person like us alone with the agent we can go really fast

1:01:02 · is always built on a team right you're always trying to align with like the product managers and the designers and the other engineers like what decisions you're all making and we don't actually have good tools in place to do that it's sort of like we have Slack people might have something like Lineia or GitHub have issues where they're like doing issues, but there's tons of pre-planning work before you write an issue because usually when you write an issue, you're like ready to hand it off to an agent, but before that point, you have to have agreed upon your approach and like should we build this feature? Is this feature the right shape? Does it have the right interface? Like, do we have some sort of database migration we have to do?

1:01:32 · There's all this like upfront work and not many good tools to do that work in is how we felt, especially not ones with agents involved in them. So the biggest gap seems to be like we have agentic coding tools but none of them are real-time multiplayer. All your sessions are private and shared to you often locally on your machine. So you couldn't possibly share it with someone.

1:01:50 · This is starting to change now like I we have seen some products come out that are trying to do live multiplayer agent work like Buzz from Jack Dorsey and ACE the prototype that we made at GitHub next was in this direction was like shared compute shared sandboxes in a Slack like interface. So you're like coding and talking at the same time.

1:02:06 · Mhm.

1:02:07 · So people I think are beginning to realize this is like the next big thing we need to push on to improve in like our agentic coding tools, but it's still totally unsolved. Like even once you have a Slack interface and there's an agent in there, you still need tools to agree on things. This is where I'm kind of pushing on like maybe decisions need to become sort of first class primitive.

1:02:25 · Like when an agent presents a decision to a human, you first need to have the decision be like large enough on screen to give you the information about it. But then also you probably need someone else in your team to come like help you make that decision or at least like give input on it. And then someone has to be responsible for having had made that decision. You need like a record of like here's the things we decided like here's the context we're going to feed to the agent. You know there's some moment where we've written like a clear set of issues or specs that we're going to hand off to be implemented and then some verification check on the other side.

1:02:56 · But you all need to be so aligned up to the point of implementation because in the old world implementation took so long you could like adjust along the way. But now because there's a sort of hard handover point to an agent, you need to all be aligned up front in a way that we're not at the moment. Like even our team, we feel this all the time.

1:03:12 · It's like we're all individually running on our machines and it's hard to stay like aligned on what we're doing.

1:03:16 · And you mentioned GitHub next and and the prototyping that you're doing. C can you talk a little bit about the types of projects you've built that you're experimented some learnings that you've had may maybe give us a direction of like things you're you're now excited about exploring.

1:03:32 · Yeah.

1:03:32 · Yeah. So um I joined the team like a little less than a year ago but most of the time we were working on this prototype ACE which is like Slack plus uh cloud compute like sandboxes so microVMs and a bunch of other stuff in there like you can like [clears throat] open PRs and review your code and that kind of stuff. So, it was a kind of an all-in-one multiplayer workspace. Uh, and it was a really like useful prototype, but it turned out to be extremely ambitious for our small team.

1:03:58 · We had like three or four people working on it at a time. And we wanted at some point to take it to like a real product, but it just turned out that was like not feasible with the number of people we had. Yeah.

1:04:07 · Um, but we're trying to take bits of it and ship it to the rest of GitHub. Like sandboxes have now gone out to be part of the GitHub desktop app. That's being used in other ways. And I think it's also made leadership take the multiplayer like thing more seriously and try and find other ways we might ship that to the product.

1:04:22 · And this is a really promising direction. I mean we already have a deep dive out by the time this this podcast is out about RAMP who have built just this inside and and they made it collaborative. It's it's forced collaborative. You cannot make anything private. Oh yeah, we they have multiple interfaces. They have the they have this running it's called inspect and it runs in Slack. There's a Chrome plugin as well.

1:04:42 · There's a web interface. uh and they did find that in the slack channels uh with product manager designers they can talk the agent inspect gets all this input and then all the sessions anyone can join a session and anyone can prompt and change the direction which actually was a really concerning point they weren't sure if they want this cuz

1:05:04 · people privacy but they were like well it's just it's just civil civilized things so it turned out to not be an issue but because of this it spreads better and and it has all this feedback loops and the reason And it works really well for them is it's integrated this agent to all of their internal systems and their cloud machines are like a full-blown developer machine which is a lot of work a bit like cloud development environment which is all all this to say like doing this for one company specifically for them it's possible doing it as a generic solution probably more difficult but I'm sure it will come um or I'm sure there will be

1:05:36 · attempts but but you know this is the difference between like scratching your own itch and doing something that works for for so many I mean, Slack, right? They launched their whole like developer experience IDE thing, which like they might be able to make this experience happen or like Buzz from Jack Dorsey is kind of going in this direction too.

1:05:52 · Like there's clearly lots of people realizing this is a problem and and you're also experimenting in in in this direction clearly.

1:05:58 · Yes.

1:05:58 · Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, one of the things like when we tried to like build this whole thing, it was it was too ambitious to do it with all the microVMs. But now we're kind of scaling back and thinking, okay, what bits of this can we prototype in ways that would help GitHub leadership like have have a bit more direction of like where they should run next? Like you know one of our functions of our team is just to run out ahead of product and say okay you guys know what like the things you should probably do in the next six months to one year is we are much more like what is a big crazy swing GitHub

1:06:24 · can make or what's more risky or what's like the far future and so that's why we're trying to prototype okay people are now on this multiplayer like sessions thing what comes after that so now we're interested in like how do you make proactive agents that aren't annoying is one of the things we're trying to explore because proactive agents you think we have this dream of like okay assume Assume assume intelligence is like free or so cheap that like it doesn't matter, right? That's an that's a fun assumption to make.

1:06:48 · If you could have 100 background agents running, what would be the least overwhelming, least annoying way to consume any of their outputs is like an open research question we're trying to figure out. How would you have agents working in a document with humans where it's not again overwhelming or annoying for them to be making changes or doing helpful background work in a way that doesn't feel like invasive or interruptive? So we try and take these kind of design questions and figure out prototypes that could solve them in the hopes that like you know if one day GitHub wanted to build something in this direction we can then be like hey here's all the research we did.

1:07:18 · A question I wanted to ask you is it's coming from a developer angle. is what happens when in your experience uh observations when we start to give more and more decisions to the agent and I'll I'm going to quote uh a developer Jorge uh Man Rubia who wrote an article

Craft and AI tells

1:07:39 · called oh my craft he wrote the need to intervene on the small stuff is decaying quickly as models improve and when models are capable enough to handle those details themselves themselves spending too much time on these details start to feel like a poor use of human attention and he writes about how he's not opening he really opens his code editor anymore. He it's been months he wrote a single line itself. But the thing is he used to live inside and see all the details. And there is this sense that craft has to do with being there with the details. And of course you're you're coming from a design perspective.

1:08:12 · But what have you observed of your own craft changing, decaying or you know what you're seeing?

1:08:18 · Did you do you think this is a there's a danger as as there's this temptation as you know we talked about like just good good make this decision. We we just did this with the slider which didn't matter.

1:08:29 · Yeah.

1:08:30 · But it can matter.

1:08:31 · But it can matter.

1:08:32 · But does it matter?

1:08:33 · I mean it's hard because because I'm not like I would say like a a true engineer in the sense of like I don't necessarily care about clean code that much, right?

1:08:40 · But you care about great design.

1:08:41 · But I do care about design. But the thing is, they can't they definitely can't do design to my standards yet. I have to still be really involved to get the design to to look and feel the way I would make it.

1:08:53 · So, I'm annoyed almost that I'm always in there being like, "No, that is a terrible transition. Here's how we should do it, you know, or like this."

1:09:00 · So, you're in the details. You're not letting go of those details.

1:09:03 · Yeah. Because I wish I could I wish I mean I' I've written Do you design Well, I don't know.

1:09:08 · I want to push you on this.

1:09:09 · Yeah.

1:09:09 · What I I keep thinking this like if tomorrow I keep trying to write design skills that tell the agents exactly my design preferences which won't be universal. Like I have preferences about how much padding I like between a border and a and an element, right? And that's not everyone's preference and it's not right for every product. But for me, I'm like there are set rules. It's this much padding is this kind of border um border shadow. Like it's pretty standard. And I've tried to write these rules, but then they don't universally apply them properly and it doesn't work.

1:09:34 · And so I always end up in there changing specific values that you would think by this point in time would have been automated away. The way that we all talk about that agents are like taking over stuff.

1:09:45 · You would think this would be like so trivial to like for them to implement like a certain kind of whatever it is opacity level on a border. Um so I kind of think like if I woke up tomorrow and they just the skill just worked or like the agents just had enough context and they just designed exactly to my specs.

1:09:59 · I wonder if I would be like oh all the fun bit is gone. like is it satisfying to have like a gorgeous inner face appear in front of me, but I didn't I didn't do anything to make it. I'm not sure. I almost I also think about this with like um interior design stuff. Have you been on Pinterest anytime in the last like 2 years?

1:10:16 · I'm familiar with it and you know my my my wife is and when when when we're decorating a new house like I remember you collecting these things. We work with an interior designer and you know my wife collected a lot of things but I I also was there and you have these kind

1:10:32 · of like we're kind of thinking like this but not quite but like when you mix this trying to explain you know like we we didn't have the tools beyond like you just take screenshots so yes don't know what print I guess you know you know you know yes um is a lot of it is AI now if you get on there oh really there's gorgeous rooms if you search for certain things but you look and you can kind of start to see like oh that's for sure AI that's for sure AI which is definitely problematic when there of a physical space because then you go like well the light might not be accurate or this is all just fake and they look

1:11:02 · beautiful but you kind of think like well someone didn't make that room and that's not a real room that exists so it's almost irrelevant to my interior design and I kind of wonder if it's like this with interfaces where like it is all objectively like looks gorgeous cuz it's been trained it's like very much like everything that was on the web that we've you know clicked thumbs up on but with interfaces if they all become extremely slick like think you take you know what's popular right now the linear and the versel aesthetic right like very minimalist, very clean, very white, very a little bit of rounded corners. If all the agents can implement that, no problem.

1:11:31 · Just like dead on, people will start to design in different ways because that will become a tell that you've just used an agent to do the design. And if you want to look like you're going to stand out, you need to have some human do something new and different. I think it gets into like design. Although it has universal basics, like is the text big enough to read? Do you have enough space around things? A lot of it is fashion. Like it's in fashion right now to look a little bit like linear. It's not in fashion to look a bit like MySpace, but it was a while ago. And there'll be in 10 years in the future, if you look like linear, you're very out of date.

1:12:00 · You look like some old p crafty piece of software and there'll be some new aesthetic that comes up. So, it's like the models can't necessarily understand that design is like within a cultural context. And that cultural context is always changing and it signals different things to people and if people read it as like, oh, they didn't care about this site cuz it's just like the bland basic code. Like Claude has a specific design language. is very like noticeable, right? Cream background, like slightly red text, like there's eyebrow text on things. Like you look at it and you're like, "Yeah, Lord generated that." No human was involved in this.

1:12:32 · Like, I don't know if I'm going to bother looking at it. So, it gets into this like the aesthetic style you pick communicates to the person viewing the product or page. And things that clearly were made by agents, I think we might start to reject out of hand. Maybe I'm I I have this thing where when it's text, when it's written text, I can immediately tell if it's AI written.

1:12:52 · Oh, I cannot.

1:12:53 · But I I I can never tell if it's because I I write a lot. I also read a lot. I read a lot of, you know, like fiction. And so it it just feels off immediately.

1:13:03 · And it doesn't it's it's not just clawed. It's just the repetitiveness, the adjectives. But I can never tell for sure. Like am I the one who notices?

1:13:12 · Because you said like, "Oh, you see it's clawed." I'm not sure if I looked at a web page that I would see that it's clawed because you're you're so into this the same way I'm so into words or or non-fiction writing.

1:13:24 · Yeah.

1:13:25 · So I I I do wonder if if maybe we're we're having to as an expert you can always tell but the experts are always a small percentage of population. We don't know but but I do agree with you that it is predictable in ways that humans are are luckily not I guess.

1:13:39 · Yeah.

1:13:39 · Like I definitely noticed the writing one too cuz I'm the same I'm a writer. I love writing and the minute I hit any sentence that is like remotely like yeah just like close tab never mind and then and even like going back and reading you know non-fiction books that like were really like not written a long time ago. You go back and read a book written 50 years ago and just the opening is so refreshing. You're like oh these are such novel words like there's none of this like if this then that or it's not X it's Y.

1:14:05 · There's not a single bit of it to be seen. you just like breathe in like original human writing and it's so refreshing that you go yeah I can't stand to read anything that's agent contrived speaking of original writing and and human writing you talked about concept of a digital garden what is a digital garden it's a blog but with some extra rules attached so it's a blog where every

Visual gardens, home-cooked software, and barefoot developers

1:14:28 · piece you put up does not have to be finished as long as you clearly signal to the audience it's not so it's a blog that you grow over time so you can put a piece up that's half done and then update it data you have like an updated that date and I usually will I I communicate it with three different stages my posts go through. So I have seedlings budding and evergreen like very in the gardening metaphor. So I can put up something that is like a halffinish thought and mark it as a seedling and then like come back to it later and finish it up or fix it.

1:14:55 · Writing in this way has made me allowed me to publish much more than I ever would have otherwise. Like I have perfectionistic tendencies. This was very much a counter to that where of course I want some of my stuff to be my best work, my most polished, but it's completely unrealistic. I would never put anything up if that were the case. So working in this way really freed me.

1:15:16 · I mean, I started my garden in like 2020, I think. So it's not been that long, but I've written a fair amount, more than most people have blog posts on their website because some of them are frankly like three paragraphs long.

1:15:29 · Yeah. or they have some of them I have big long essays that have taken me a long time to write but halfway through the essay you'll hit something that says draft in progress and everything below that point is pretty rough. One of these I started 3 years ago every time I have like some free time I go back to it I like finish one more paragraph I like move the little draft notification down.

1:15:47 · It like allows me to work in public, which I also think helps like people kind of get to see behind the the garage door a little bit because often the notes below the draft point are like bullet points or like oh I should say something about X in here. I'll just kind of put it on the website. As long as it's marked appropriately, I think it's fine. It's about this like contract between you and the reader. As long as you're communicating to them that these are like rough notes I haven't finished, that's okay. as long as you're not saying like this is my best finished work that I feel like people read it in the right spirit.

1:16:16 · Somewhat related to this again just going away from from from AI you also talked about barefoot developers and homecooked software.

1:16:26 · Yeah.

1:16:27 · What what what are barefoot developers?

1:16:29 · So this was I'm not sure I remember what year this is. It might be 2024 which feels like an eternity ago. Was not that long ago. This was at the local first conference in Berlin in 2024. I did this talk. Yeah. Um, homecooked software and barefoot developers. Home-cooked software is a phrase that comes from Robin Sloan, which is software that you make for you and your family in the way you would make a home-cooked meal. Yeah.

1:16:50 · So, it's about this app that he built for his family where they send each other little like video notes and it's like it's not on anyone else's server.

1:16:56 · He doesn't have to pay for it. It's not managed by some big company. And this is the way more software should be. There's lots of little pieces of software we can build for ourselves that benefit our lives and our families. And it doesn't have to be like $2.99 on the app store or sell my data in exchange for this software. And I made this um this case at this um conference that I expect to see an explosion of this with language models and okay the writing was already on the wall. I don't think it was that crazy of a prediction, but we were still more in the early days. We didn't have agents yet. But now of course it's like totally happened. There's like personal software everywhere.

1:17:24 · Everyone's building their own recipe manager and their own household app and their own gym app and like there's all these great use cases that people can just make the software to be what they want without having to download a a bog standard version of it.

1:17:37 · But I extended this concept by saying okay homecooked software is for you and your family. But there's another concept that I call barefoot developers that comes from in Mauis China they had this thing called barefoot doctors where they took peasants from rural villages and trained them up with basic medical training like giving vaccinations you know uh administering antibiotics um and then distributed them out to the villages so that you would improve healthcare for everyone and it was a wildly successful program like across the board improved health as you would expect people who can't get to a hospital and I think we need the same concept for developers because so far developers are extremely

1:18:08 · expensive as a profession and like extremely skilled But there's lots of people with lots of needs who would maybe need little software built for like their a lotment garden or their like street, but they have some problem they need solved and like Google Sheets doesn't really cut it. Like they can't really just do like a Google doc. They want something like maybe managing a schedule or like managing inventory and like either they would have to all like raise money together and like fund it and pay some piece of software that doesn't quite fit their needs but does an okay job or maybe trades their data for this or if they had someone who was

1:18:39 · let's say this barefoot developer type who's like kind of a power user someone who might use notion and air table in an old world now can just use an agent or language model and build them the software they need for like not many tokens like pretty cheap. They don't have to read the code. As long as it works, like as long as they verify, it's fine.

1:18:56 · I mean, what what reminds me a little bit of the web masters.

1:18:58 · Yeah.

1:19:00 · So, so back it was a long time ago, but in in the '9s, maybe mid '90s, late '9s, the web masters were just power user administrators who would administer, for example, a school's Yeah.

1:19:12 · Windows installations. And and they were not the highest paid. I'm not sure how they got trained, but but at some point, every school had a web master. Sometimes they were there were volunteers. sometime they were they were paid.

1:19:23 · Companies had their web masters and they would often operate the web pages which was again more involved way more involved than than later of course that's why there was a role and then like patch things and it it was all kind of you know there were they might forget to patch stuff or they might not know and there were like forums web master forums where they helped each other and and it was kind of like because what you talked about the the China example that was of course a government program with with the goal but this was just a grassroots movement.

1:19:50 · Yeah.

1:19:50 · Yeah. And I think that needs to happen again. Like we definitely have these people to some degree. Like there's like a techie person in each community who kind of people go to for help. But I think these people need more like support and tools. And I mean that in the sense of building like libraries or frameworks for them because I think there's a whole bunch of people now coming in as vibe coders or whatever, right? Like building apps without looking at the code. But you know they're hitting terrible security like foundations and like they're probably like handling the data wrong.

1:20:15 · They're going to like lose their database at some point. like they don't have good foundations to build on because they're just telling the agent like, "Hey, make me an iOS app that does X, but they don't really understand engineering."

1:20:26 · You know, I would advocate for something like something that is I think it should be local first because as a philosophy it matches up with the need. It's like data should be local. You can just sync it between machines. You don't really need a database in the cloud. There's no point to that. Like a little bit of data sovereignty. They own the data. No one else can buy it or trade it or get access to it.

1:20:42 · I just feel there should be much stronger like local first frameworks that give you these good good solid principles in place good security good data persistence make it easy for these barefoot developers to build like maybe some good interface primitives on top it's maybe something like the next version of air table would be this is what I would hope what advice would you have for engineers to to learn from designers when when

Advice for engineers and lessons from anthropology

1:21:06 · they have access to working with a with a designer work learn from also collaborate better with yeah I I think it's in the same way that I'm advocating that designers aren't shouldn't be afraid to get involved in engineering now vice versa right like in the same way that a designer can sit down with codeex or claude or co-pilot and be like hey explain the back end to me like just not the details the shape of it I think in the same way a developer can sit down with an agent and be like okay I need to design a sidebar like what are the principles of good sidebars okay I have my blog like teach

1:21:37 · me about typography like you now have like a very patient tutor who's just going to sit there and be like Hey, this is how where when you would vary line height. Here's exactly how many characters you should fit on a line.

1:21:47 · Like they can just teach you and you know, as long as you're willing to learn and you want to expand into the design skills. I think before it was very hard to learn these things. You had to be on a design team, especially product design stuff where it's like how do you interview users? How do you do like a usability test? Like not generally available information really except for some books. But now you sit down with an agent, you're like, "Hey, here's here's the data I've got. give me some ideas for possible interfaces that would represent it. Well, they're they're decent at that conceptual stuff, even if they don't always get the the interface right.

1:22:16 · Going back to your anthropology roots, what are things that us engineers, people building software could take inspiration or or learn from anthropology like methods, approaches, things that have really served you well?

1:22:32 · Yeah.

1:22:32 · Yeah. Because I feel like I look at everything a little bit through the lens of anthropology or I try to. It's like a it's like a you know, pair of glasses. you can kind of put on in the same way you can be like I'm going to look like look at this like an engineer but if I look at things like an anthropologist you think about like what are the unspoken cultural rules going on

1:22:48 · in this interaction or this context or this problem and especially in the context of engine of of software like sure maybe you're building a a database that you're building it for users in a in a cultural context right like they have assumptions about how they decide something is trustworthy they have assumptions about how they decide that something is worth their time or like or like how a flow should though and this is and it's all culturally contained like it depends also on like the intern how international your audience is and who you're designing for but like there are cultures where like time flows from

1:23:18 · from right to left right or from up to down but we assume in the west you know time froze flows left to right um but that's not universal everywhere I think just like reading a little bit of cultural anthropology and understanding how varied people's worldviews can be like like some cultures see not see different colors but categorize colors differently in a way that makes them see them differently. Like they might see blue and green as actually one unified color. And if you're designing an interface, like not that that necessarily directly applies, but I think it's understanding there's a broad range of ways humans can interpret something.

1:23:49 · And you know, if you're if you're building tools for humans, there might be some way you could like teach them to see the world differently through the thing you're building as well, like change their perspective on like how they how they interpret reality. And then in anthropology you said that you know anthropologists would one thing that would they would do they would the traditional anthropologists would live with natives and and be embedded in them.

1:24:10 · Is that something that maybe now that AI is you know like it's making code a bit easier as engineers I think it's pretty clear that an engineer becomes more valuable the more they take on the other parts of the business the more empathy the understanding. Could could it be just an idea when you have the opportunity just you know embed yourself with customers?

1:24:29 · Yeah.

1:24:29 · become a customer. I mean, this used to be the thing, right? Like Amazon had their customer obsession, which also starts with understanding the customer, but I guess this might be very natural as someone who's anthropologist, which is like go talk to people, go and try to be one of them, whoever you're building with.

1:24:45 · There's a good point that like engineers are about to have more free time in a certain way. I know there's an infinite number of engineering problems to solve and then it's like maybe we solve them better, you know, by having with that extra time. But a big part of this is yeah, you could expand into more of the design side and past the interface is is really like the user research side and that is like go fully understand the domain you're designing or building for and like what real world context are people using it in? Like when are they pulling out your app?

1:25:12 · Like in a factory, are they on a in a tube? like like I don't know a little bit of like understanding context of use is a big thing that user researchers do and then understanding the moment when someone reaches for your product versus like reaching for a different product like when do they decide you're the right solution? That definitely gets into the user research side but that's a great thing for engineers to expand into if if that like appeals.

1:25:33 · And as as closing, what books would you recommend ones that you enjoyed reading and why?

Book recommendation

1:25:38 · One of my favorites that I give to most people is called Addiction by Design.

1:25:42 · So, it's about people addicted to gambling machines in Las Vegas, but it's an anthropologist doing it. And she talks about both like living among these people and their experiences, but also the machine designers. Like, how do you design a machine that is so addictive that someone sits at it for 12 hours straight? It's like a really fascinating thing. And how are like gambling casinos designed to have no windows? So, there's like no time around you as as you like sit at this machine. It's by Natasha Daw. Uh, and I I read it in university and I I love it.

1:26:09 · It's it's a it's a total mix of like cultural anthropology, participant observation, and also machine design and engineering and like how do you design addictive systems, which of course you read it and then you think about phones and Instagram and you reflect a little bit on like what are these systems we're building for people.

1:26:30 · Maggie, thanks so much. This was very interesting.

1:26:33 · Yeah, thanks for having me. Really fun.

1:26:34 · [laughter] This was a very visual episode, so I hope you were able to watch it over video, especially the parts where Maggie showed her sketches in a notebook. And this was one of the most interesting parts of this episode for me. Even as Maggie spends her days prototyping the future of Agentic tools, she starts her design process with pen and paper. Her reasoning is that agents cannot see, but us humans can. And I have to wonder, is it only true for visual stuff?

1:26:58 · [music] I mean, when I think back to my most productive brainstorming sessions with engineers, it was usually in front of a whiteboard drawing stuff [music] where we drew out our ideas about the system and the components. Another extremely cool trick from Maggie is how she uses AI to generate prototypes with sliders to change parameters and change the design. She calls it a build your own Figma. And we did a live demo with the constellation animation that she played around with. This was so darn cool. You get [music] Figma-like tools dynamically built for you.

1:27:27 · It's also pretty incredible that we can do this with agents in a matter of minutes. Just wow.

1:27:33 · Finally, I appreciated how Maggie was honest about how she feels about the design craft. [music] It's cool that agents make her work faster, but she said she's not sure she'd love if an agent just spit out a perfect design. And yet, agents are getting better at design. It feels to me that this is kind of how I feel about code. It's great that the agent can generate good code, but it was something I liked being good at and I was good at it. Now, [music] I don't write the code, but it does feel more transactional. I feel a bit less connected to the code and the creation of the code itself.

1:28:04 · [music] For design agents are not there yet, but I didn't sense that Maggie wants to let go of that designer in her.

1:28:10 · I wonder if one thing to [music] learn from her for us devs is that we should also have a notebook to make sketches of ideas, not just UIs, but architectures [music] and systems. I don't know, but I might give it a go. At least it will make me feel less that I'm dependent on agents and I'll have some AI free space, if you will. Thanks for listening and let me know how you like this less conventional episode. Thanks, and I'll see you in the next