For quite some time now, I've been exploring AI extensively both in my professional and personal projects. Testing, experimenting, pushing the limits, and finding where AI succeeds and where it breaks. This is a record of some of those learnings. Some of these are quite long, others aren't. But read them anyway.
I am often asked to detail my design process and explain where AI fits into it. Which means, I've had this conversation a lot and thought it would be worth documenting here.
At the beginning of 2025, I was begging my engineer friends to help me with side quests and answer questions about code or the limitations of an idea I had. It was frustrating. Now, I'm just shipping things myself and learning a lot along the way.
Experiment While working on a new feature, I designed a net-new component for our site. Could I use Cursor to build it myself, ready to integrate directly into our corporate codebase? There was only one way to find out: bother my engineer with a lot of questions.
I used to pride myself on my Figma prototypes. Dragging arrows around and creating a mass of digital spiderwebs, screens, and interactions. I felt like a magician! But, damned if that didn't take a lot of time. Entire weeks were spent turning the design into something we could actually test with users. Now, I can do it in a couple of hours. And I never have to touch Figma to do it.
Experiment In a meeting, someone mentioned we have no way of calculating credit usage in UserTesting, and we’re on our way to running out of credits before our contract is up. So I set out to build a dashboard, and it was almost too easy.
I have a coworker who continues to amaze me every week. We show up to design review, and they show a masterpiece in product thought and organization. They are a Figma expert. I dream of this level of organization.
Experiment I’m not an engineer, so building a fully-automated workflow felt like a real challenge. Turns out, it was simpler than I thought when I combined two AI models to help me plan and build it, but it didn’t do everything well.
Experiment I started out as a print designer way back in college. And I loved the ability to create dynamic and interesting layouts on the page. The web feels a bit boring by comparison. So can we create those fun layouts for the responsive web?
Experiment A friend called me and said his website stopped working and he didn’t know what to do. The easy answer was it was eight years old and built using now-deprecated PHP. So I offered to rebuild it for him. Here’s how it went.
