State of Play

Tom Krcha, founder of Pencil.dev and former Adobe XD creator, shares his long arc from Flash to agent-powered design tooling. He discusses why agents handle the first 80% while humans finish the last 20. The conversation explores headless design tools, agent-first canvases, orchestration of many AI designers, and why hands-on taste still matters.

Hannah Ahn, a design leader in health tech who led product design and brand at Superpower after product work at Canva, talks about designing trust around health data. She covers integrating Claude Code and AI tools into design workflows. She explains team composition and hiring for complementary strengths. She emphasizes love of the game and managing AI-driven velocity to protect quality.

Diego Zaks, design leader at a fintech driving Ramp’s AI adoption, talks about transforming design when everyone becomes a builder. Short stories cover building Slack agents, designing for harnesses not screens, the four levels of AI fluency, how Ramp hit 99.5% AI usage, and what design looks like five years from now.

Amelia Wattenberger, a front-end developer turned designer and founder building developer tooling, discusses why developers miss their old flow. She maps eras of AI coding tools from Copilot to agentic interfaces. She explores living specs as compressed plans, workspaces as pick-up desks, and how intention becomes the new medium for building.

Nad Chishtie is the Head of Design at Lovable — the company at the center of the AI coding explosion. He nearly got fired before his first day for emailing his CEO a thesis on why Lovable should be a web browser.Now he's redesigning what design teams look like when everyone in the company can build software. We talked about why half of Lovable's design system is now written for agents instead of people, what happened when they went full "agent maxing" for two weeks (and why background agents failed), and there's this moment where he explains who actually ends up owning vibe coding when it lands inside a big company — and it's not who you'd expect.Get the UX Tools Newsletter (written by me)Join 100,000+ designers for weekly insights on creative software and the people shaping it: https://uxtools.coCHAPTERS:0:00 — Almost fired before day one1:20 — Falling into design by accident2:39 — The call that changed his career4:45 — Why generalists felt broken in traditional orgs5:08 — The "gumption" trait for AI-native work6:54 — Housekeeping vs cannibalizing yourself8:23 — End-to-end ownership when everyone can build10:54 — Spiking fast and killing darlings faster13:06 — People who couldn't prototype before now can15:05 — How Lovable's org actually works19:44 — When enterprise came knocking22:45 — Hackathons and making room for throwaway work25:15 — The email that almost got him fired (full story)28:09 — Apple blocking mobile vibe coding apps30:27 — Half our design system is written for agents31:34 — Agent maxing: background agents failed, linters won33:53 — Eating their own SaaS stack37:15 — Who actually owns vibe coding in the enterprise42:43 — What Lovable looks for when hiring designers43:28 — Why every designer should be a founder right now46:54 — Territory Studio uses Lovable for sci-fi UIs48:16 — Thesis: everything will be interoperableABOUT TOMMY GEOCOI spent 15+ years in tech and design. Former military. Father of five. Now building Internet Enjoyers, a weird little media + product studio rediscovering soul in creative tech.ABOUT STATE OF PLAYHost Tommy Geoco discovers what fuels the internet's most interesting designers and builders.LINKS:Lovable: https://lovable.devFollow Nad: https://x.com/nadonomyFOLLOW ME:X / Twitter: https://x.com/designertomInstagram: https://instagram.com/itsdesignertomLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Meet José Rago, co-founder who drives creative and technical experimentation, and Facundo Santana, co-founder building immersive WebGL experiences from Buenos Aires. They discuss using wine to nail a WebGL texture. They explain their R&D lab that spins out tools like XMP and BasHub. They cover scaling quality with company-wide review rituals, open-sourcing work, and turning studio projects into a micro-VC.

Ben Blumenrose, an operator at Designer Fund who advises 50+ design teams, shares how AI is reshaping design practice. He describes why processes must be flexible and how AI ops roles and AI imagineers are emerging. He contrasts enterprise adoption, explains what true AI fluency looks like, and discusses hiring, junior designers, and keeping creativity alive for the next generation.

Josh Puckett, a product and interface designer with ~20 years at Dropbox and Wealthfront and founder of Interface Craft, talks about shipping work in goblin mode and why juniors struggle to get hired. He explores AI as apprenticeship, phantom competency, the value of prolific play and social portfolios, and why demonstrating a high slope and uncommon care trumps labels like "AI native."

Jenny Wen, a design leader who moved from FigJam to building Anthropic's Claude, simplifies complex systems into playful, clear interfaces. She talks about hiding model complexity, prototyping with live models instead of docs, why designers now ship production code, and how design roles must adapt as AI capabilities reshape workflows and tools.

Steve Ruiz was about to start at Adobe. Bags packed. Job accepted. Start date: Monday.Then he looked at what was happening with his side project — an open-source canvas tool he'd been building — and 200,000 people were using it every month. Hundreds of sponsors had put up 00,000. Two major companies wanted to build on it. He called Adobe and said he wasn't coming.That project became TLDraw.Steve's background isn't in software — it's in fine art. He has a masters in it. He spent thousands of hours studying ink on paper — how it moves, how it bleeds, how it dries. And when he later wrote the algorithms for digital ink, he had this deep physical knowledge that most engineers just don't have.We talk about why he killed his own SaaS product to focus on the SDK, why he thinks craft only matters when you're building for high-agency users, and his surprisingly simple answer to the question every open-source founder faces — how do you actually make money?Get the UX Tools NewsletterJoin 100,000+ designers for weekly insights on creative software and the people shaping it: https://uxtools.coCHAPTERS:00:00 - Cold open01:30 - Art school to open source04:32 - 10,000 hours of unmotivated work06:08 - Finding ideas without external validation08:22 - The content-first experimentation loop11:30 - Why software is easier than art14:42 - Most software experiences haven't been discovered yet17:10 - Prototyping obsession and the infinite canvas17:47 - 200,000 users before you could even log in19:14 - Make Real: the first vibe code tool21:13 - Optimize for the points of contact23:51 - Killing the SaaS to ship the SDK29:19 - The open source money problem30:03 - "Just charge for it" — beating React Flow32:12 - When craft actually matters (high-agency users)35:57 - What's most fulfilling about building TLDrawABOUT TOMMY GEOCOI spent 15+ years in tech and design. Former military. Father of five. Now building a weird little media + product studio rediscovering soul in creative tech.ABOUT STATE OF PLAYA narrative podcast about building things that matter told through deep conversations with designers and builders.LINKS:UX Tools Newsletter: https://uxtools.coTLDraw: https://tldraw.comFollow Steve: https://x.com/steveruizokFOLLOW ME:YouTube: https://youtube.com/@designertomInstagram: https://instagram.com/itsdesignertomX / Twitter: https://x.com/designertomLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco