Designers empowered by agents

Hosts: Alex Kessinger & David Noël-Ramos 

Guest: Karynn Ikeda — Former Engineering Manager → AI Enablement Program Manager at Babylist @ktikeda

Karynn Ikeda shares the full arc of how Babylist adopted AI across its engineering organization — from a six-week Windsurf pilot on a single team, to company-wide Claude Code adoption and a bold initiative to onboard product managers and designers into the codebase. She discusses leadership buy-in, measuring developer sentiment over raw velocity metrics, the shift toward agent orchestration, and why the return of joy and creative empowerment may be the most important signal of all.

Links & References

• Karynn Ikeda (@ktikeda)
• Babylist  babylist.com
• Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke's AI Memo (April 2025)  Original post on X
• Anthropic Code Review for Claude Code  claude.com/blog/code-review
• Claude Code  code.claude.com
• Devin (AI coding agent by Cognition)  devin.ai
• Cursor  cursor.com
• Windsurf windsurf.com
• Lovable (vibe coding tool)  lovable.dev
• V0 (by Vercel)  v0.dev