Design Engineering with Maggie Appleton

25:00Maggie Appleton:Yeah. Yeah. I trained with, 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. Cause these are really 3d. Yeah. Yeah. And then, and they kind of just teach you how to do like landscapes and layouts. I 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 a 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 you know it just comes naturally yeah i mean these are a little bit easier to sketch as well in terms of the user interfaces yeah but then i think it's like that 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 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 it's like way few 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 and also it's visual it's not text and is it is it not a bit more satisfying doing it with your hand 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 the key thing is like again agents only accept text as inputs okay they can read images like i do take photos and put them in but they're not as good at images they're very bad at special spatial reasoning 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 of the wrong size and they make text overlap they can't see right like trying to explain a visual idea in text to an agent is really challenging and doesn't work very well.

27:21Maggie Appleton:So I find I still end up doing a lot of my design without agents upfront, 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. But this is interesting, because even in software design, I'm talking about architecture design some of the i guess most productive sessions i've observed have been in person 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 you could put it on 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 2d space because we don't do 3D.

28:13I know you can draw like cool three, but we can also just box scenarios. 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 Meijer was a good example. They became so popular because they figured out a way to do collaborative whiteboarding. You don't have to be in the same room, but they give you somewhat similar tools. So I wonder if this whole thing of getting your ideas either to a physical medium, which I think for us engineers is the whiteboard, for you is the notebook. Maybe it just helps maybe rethink or solidify.

28:51Or also it does have a forcing function about the verbs, the shapes that you... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

28:58Maggie Appleton:Interesting. 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 wild. Maybe five years. I forget when GPT-4 came out. Was it three or four years ago? Chat GPT 3.5 came out in three years. It was November or December. November 2022. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is when I was at Illicit. 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. Not that Illicit is necessarily competing with them. But that is no time at all.

29:30Maggie Appleton:And it's kind of wild we've made it as far as we have. 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. 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.

29:58Maggie Appleton:and trying to find like artifacts that allow us to meet in the middle and create stuff together is like the really hard challenge because 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 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 so one thing we've talked about your notebooks and digital tools but one thing that you've you've uh posted about recently is woodworking you said you said you're i'm at the stage of my software design journey well no i'm at that stage of software design where you start taking woodworking courses Can you tell me a little bit about that experience?

30:56Maggie Appleton:Well, the little bit of the joke is like, I just feel like at some point, every engineer, you have a choice of things you can get into because you feel like you're like disembodied from the world of working in software. So you have to pick ceramics, 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. 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.

31:23Maggie Appleton:Maybe the same in Amsterdam. I think old housing stock. So then you suddenly become like, oh, I need to learn like DIY skills, which I was scared. You know, Claude, ChatGPT, 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. I need to like fix this banister. So I was like, well, I have no DIY skills, no wordworking, but just signed up for a course being like, well, I'll learn. I'm pretty sure I can like, I'm not too old.

31:52Maggie Appleton:I can acquire new skills and I'm sure I'll find lots of parallels to software, but in a more satisfying way where you actually like touch the thing you make. One thing that you've talked about, you've been talking about is the concept of design engineers. For a few years ago, you posted, I'll quote you, I'm having a strong, should I just become a full blown design engineer today? 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. Yeah. 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.

32:27Now, that was a few years ago.

32:28Maggie Appleton:Yeah. What have you figured out about design engineers? If they exist, what they do, what places they work in? 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. 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 a 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.

33:04Maggie Appleton: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. To me, that's just like very advanced, sophisticated motion design 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. But design engineering now, 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.

33:35Maggie Appleton:You're still caring about like product nouns and verbs and like the visual design. But then you really work with engineers closely and or are like directly involved in implementing and writing code yourself. and you fully understand, well, you know, not fully, you don't have to be like full, full stack, but like you have a deep understanding of 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 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?

34:13Maggie Appleton:Like truly digging into the technicals and not living in the world of like just user interviews and the market and like 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 because it's easier and then the engineers I work with are usually thrilled because they hate CSS and then they get to go work on like the more interesting difficult stuff I'd say it's like the syncing or like 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 very rarely care and I do care 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 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?

35:13Maggie Appleton: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. 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. Yes, I've been there. And obviously there's a tension there because someone made something in a medium. There's a nice gradient and it's mobile and doing gradients would absolutely wreck the scroll performance.

35:49And again, these are like we're talking about years back when this was a thing. And now you're going back like can I use a single color or you try to explain like what you can do with your either performance limitations or think about low end devices on Android or iOS versus Android where a designer might be more into the iOS world. And again, a good designer would not, but there's oftentimes the engineer would come like, all right, we have constraints here for whatever reason.

36:15Maggie Appleton: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 use, Sketch and Figma, these like pixel mock-ups, 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 a table designer would not like be oblivious to like how oak performs in certain contexts, right? 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 is your app like fetching data and what's the loading time?

36:51Maggie Appleton:And what if there's race conditions? Like I think if you're oblivious to that, you'll end up with bad design solutions and then with really bad relationships. Yeah. 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 tool-based things.

37:24Maggie Appleton: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. 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. And then you mentioned Figma. Figma was such a popular tool for a while. That was the interface between engineers and designers. How do you use Figma today or how have you used it in the past? I think I've always used it like not to get to high fidelity mockups at all. I think to get like the rough shape of things past a notebook.

37:57Maggie Appleton:It's 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. But then I would never take it to high fidelity because, of course, everything always looks different. I mean, I primarily designed for the web. Everything looks different in the browser, right? Depends on the font rendering and all this kind of stuff and responsiveness and then exactly your breakpoints.

38:24Maggie Appleton: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 and of course with agents now it's just like I point an agent at my Figma mock-up 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 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 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 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 and inside of GitHub, how do designers work?

39:22How do yourself and other designers work? Because it's a bigger organization, you're building a tool for developers with a bunch of different parts.

39:30Maggie Appleton:I mean, I don't spend that much time with like the GitHub design org proper. I know some people in there, but... Oh, because you're next. 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 org 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 I think they have a very different job to me in that 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.

40:02Maggie Appleton:Like they've got very different constraints to me. Yeah, and they have like millions or even more, like tens of millions of customers who like does now a different thing. They've been used to certain things or finding certain things or certain patterns. Exactly, exactly. Changing anything on.com is like a whole political thing 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.

40:31Maggie Appleton:And they're all really senior. So it's fun to work with them because 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 much more that thing of like what bits of the app we care about. I, of course, care about the interface part. And then like my engineer partners will, of course, care about like the back end and the data flow and everything. So same tools, but different like considerations, I guess. I wanted to take some time to mention our presenting sponsor, TurboBuffer.

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42:13I 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 slash pragmatic. 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.

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44:02And then with LLM, since they came out, how has your design process changed? You've already mentioned how it's now a lot easier. You can, like, for example, if you either have an interface of design, you can ask Plot or Codex or any other agent to implement it. But what has changed, like, between the notebook, between your mock-ups, between the prototype that gets there? What parts are easier and maybe what parts are trickier?

44:28Maggie Appleton:It's definitely all faster and it definitely all feels a bit easier. I will say, like, I definitely remember not suffering through 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 click through prototypes that obviously like everything is faked. So I remember that on the user thing. And then sometimes you have to like have these weird things that click here. and then yeah 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 a bit distracted or confused by the fact it looked terrible but 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 like now i can build something that really looks quite sophisticated and not with the agents doing it on their own a lot of direction I find to make something that I would think was an acceptable interface but it's so much faster 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 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 specced it out like and to you guys this was grunt work right totally it's totally because 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 and you don't really care about the cool quality or tech depth or any of like it's gonna be throw away anyway right like if if it works because of that because then you'll build it and if it doesn't work like create it 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 i can be like okay i'm trying to make like this animated constellation map for something i recently did like what speed are the stars moving at like what zoom level are we at like you did that yeah 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 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 do you have that 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 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 home pages 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 amazing and like this kind of thing to prototype this right of course i started with the sketch and notebook but then made a bunch of jigs where i was like okay what color is the background and like how fast is this map spinning and then there's a bunch of like physics 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 i didn't write any code i made a bunch of different jigs and tweaked and adjust exactly how much.

47:43And so these were, 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 alright, you like this the most, the sizes, all of those, right?

47:53Maggie Appleton:Exactly, I can be like, make me a slider 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. You 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. I mean, I have a skill, so it like knows how to like make them so that they look decent, right? And based on your preferences, you know, what you figured out works. Yeah, yeah. But then it's great.

48:28Maggie Appleton:Just hooks it up and then you can just kind of like play with it. And it's a whole different way to design. It's very, 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 and it's about how like programming is not 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 yeah 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 well another topic which is very related to this one while we're waiting for 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 to something which i hear a lot more which is i'll quote this this person amir as an engineer i asked cloud design to generate 20 high fidelity alternatives and i keep it turning to a line of the perfect design it's very enjoyable and feels much faster than interacting with the design team so 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 take on on this and by the way this is not the first time i think there's always the thing like do we need designers do it as engineers do we need product managers and of course you know product managers will also ask do we need engineers and so on but what do you think where could this be valid what could people be missing 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.

50:33Maggie Appleton: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, wow, like it all depends on taste too, right? Like I might look at them and think, okay, well, 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 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 and that's really like the labor a designer should come in and do 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 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'd like stick to them too strictly so like i find the agents want to put a label on everything in the interface 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.

51:58Maggie Appleton: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. 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. Now, talking about the UX and UI for AI, what do you think UX and good UX and UI looks like? And I know this is a bigger question, but so far, what have you learned of what works and what doesn't?

52:37Maggie Appleton:I think when it comes to this, like, what is the ideal UI of AI, which is like a big question. I don't know that we'll figure out the answer to for a while, but it's something like some things haven't changed. Like in terms of what is good interface design for software, there's still a lot of principles here. Like 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 Elycit, where the app was like helping scientists like extract data from papers.

53:08Maggie Appleton:And they were very used to doing this in Excel spreadsheets. They'd 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? Pretty standard process. But of course, in the beginning of Elycit, 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.

53:38Maggie Appleton: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. And so after a couple months of this like, oh, what's the new UI of AI? We were like, oh, it's a table. Well, at least in our use case, it turned out the interface people were using was 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 UI of AI will be so wildly different from our current imaginings.

54:15Maggie Appleton:and sometimes 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 classic things we've worked out do work and people know how to use. Yeah, it's interesting. There's a cognitive load in learning any new 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, et cetera. And even if like a small subset of people are like, I don't know, familiar with this new UI stuff, you remember like probably like parents or grandparents teaching them how to use the phones, the interfaces.

54:56And once they learned it, they're good. But then do you really want to do that again?

55:00Maggie Appleton:Yeah, no. It's interesting. Yeah, so it will probably be something similar. Yeah, it's kind of like how we started with chatbots, right? It's like chatbots were not the final form. Like if we could look at codecs, like there's a lot going on here. There's 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 familiar primitive and you expand outwards from it and we did similar things 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 so here i can like we have our jig ready well yeah let's expand this so here's a jig this is using um dial kit um this is built with this 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 wow uh how much variation is there in the stars this is sizing and scrolls 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 and this is here like the resting height of this resting logo size let's see what 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 let's 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 middle ground you want to figure out like how much contrast between the background so this is where you weren't kidding that this is like your own almost personal figma if you will or like design tool yeah and then because 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 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 you know 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 it would not have been possible before you could have built this by hand i guess in the olden days just would have been practical just coding the thing itself was slow enough one interesting thing you talked about is capability gaslighting.

57:23What is capability gaslighting?

57:25Maggie Appleton:Okay, so I think this is similar to like Ethan Mollick has this phrase, 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 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 is going to fall into. And then capabilities gaslighting was the feeling I got early on from using them where like they They convince you they're so capable because they'll really impress you on one task.

57:53Maggie Appleton:And then you try them on something else and like they fail and you kind of feel like I feel like you kind of gaslit 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 failed because I still have this belief that like, oh, but you're a frontier model like Opus could never really get this wrong. It totally does all the time. So it's such an inconsistent experience. 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 topic and you work with them, it's very unusual for them to be inconsistent in their performance, right?

58:27Maggie Appleton: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. 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 stochastic 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 yeah it's uh i guess we just need to keep this in mind right because yeah and this is ongoing like of course we always say and we have seen that the models improve but you want to be skeptical yeah 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 in it and it changes what it's good at or it changes like it doesn't perform to your expectations of certain things it's like it's hard to predict you did 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 two dozen agents zero alignment yeah so this is like 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 acknowledgement that we are now working with these agents locally on machines and it speeds up each individual person.

59:50Maggie Appleton:Like us alone with the agent, we can go really fast. The software 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 Linear or GitHub 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 there's all this like upfront work and not many good tools 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.

1:00:42Maggie Appleton:This is starting to change now. 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 coding and talking at the same time. So people, I think, are beginning to realize this is the next big thing we need to push on to improve in 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 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.

1:01:34Maggie Appleton: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. 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 it's like we're all individually running on our machines and it's hard to stay like aligned on what we're doing and you mentioned github next and the prototyping that you're doing can you talk a little bit about the types of projects you've built that you're experimented some learnings that you've had maybe give us a direction of like things you're you're now excited about exploring yeah 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 cloud compute, like sandboxes and micro VMs and a bunch of other stuff in there.

1:02:37Maggie Appleton:Like you can like open PRs and review your code and that kind of stuff. So it was a kind of an all-in-one multiplayer workspace. And it was a really like useful prototype, but it turned out to be extremely ambitious for our small team. 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. 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.

1:03:07Maggie Appleton:And I think it's also made leadership take the multiplayer thing more seriously and try and find other ways we might ship that to the product. And this is a really promising direction. I mean, we already have a deep dive out by the time this podcast is out about Ramp, who have built just this inside and they made it collaborative. It's forced collaborative. You cannot make anything private. Oh, yeah, we took that. They have multiple interfaces. They have this running. It's called Inspect, and it runs in Slack. There's a Chrome plugin as well. There's a web interface. And they did find that in the Slack channels with product manager designers.

1:03:40They 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 because people previously, but they were like, well, it's just civilized things. So it turned out to not be an issue. But because of this, it spreads better. And it has all this feedback loops. And the reason 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.

1:04:14Like cloud development environment, which is 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. I'm sure it will come or I'm sure there'll be attempts. But, you know, this is the difference between like scratching your own itch and doing something that works for everyone or so many people.

1:04:35Maggie Appleton: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. Like there's clearly lots of people realizing this is a problem. And you're also experimenting in this direction, clearly. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So one of the things like When we tried to build this whole thing, it was too ambitious to do it with all the micro VMs. 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 have a bit more direction of where they should run next?

1:05:04Maggie Appleton:One of our functions of our team is just to run out ahead of product and say, okay, you guys know what 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 could make? Or what's more risky? Or what's 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 yeah because proactive agents you think we have this dream of like okay 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 if you could have a hundred 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.

1:05:49Maggie Appleton: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. A question I wanted to ask you is, it's coming from a developer angle, Well, it's what happens when in your experience, observations, when we start to give more and more decisions to the agent.

1:06:24And I'm going to quote a developer, Jorge Manrubia, who wrote an article 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, spending too much time on these details starts to feel like a poor use of human attention. and he writes about how he's not opening it 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 a sense that craft has to do with being there with the details and of course you're you're coming from a design perspective but what have you observed of your own craft changing decaying or you know what you're seeing that you you think this is there's a danger as there's this temptation as you know we talked about like just good good good make this decision we just did this with the slider which didn't matter

1:07:20Maggie Appleton:but it can matter or does it matter? I mean it's hard because I'm not like I would say like a true engineer in the sense of like I don't necessarily care about clean code that much right? But you care about great design but I do care about design but the thing is they can't they definitely can't do design to my standards yet or I have to still be really involved to get the design to look and feel the way I would make it. 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, like this. So you're into details. You're not letting go of those details.

1:07:54Maggie Appleton:Yeah, because I wish I could. I wish, I mean, I've written... Do you? Design. Well, I don't know. I want to push you on this. Yeah. 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. I have preferences about how much padding I like between a border 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. Is this much padding? Is this kind of 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.

1:08:27Maggie Appleton: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 software. 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. 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. 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?

1:08:58Maggie Appleton: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 interior design stuff. Have you been on Pinterest any time in the last like two years? I'm familiar with it. And, you know, my wife is... And when we're decorating a new house, like I remember collecting these things. We work with an interior designer and my wife collected a lot of things, but I also was there and you have these kind 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 didn't have the tools beyond like we just take screenshots.

1:09:32So yes. Yes, yeah. Familiar in open print just, I guess.

1:09:34Maggie Appleton:You know, you know, you know, yes. 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 they're images 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 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 because it's been trained.

1:10:06Maggie Appleton: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 Vercel aesthetic, right? Like very minimalist, very clean, very white, a little bit of rounded corners. If all the agents can implement that, no problem, 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.

1:10:33Maggie Appleton: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. You look like some old 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.

1:11:07Maggie Appleton:And if people read it as like, oh, they didn't care about this site because it's just like the bland basic code. Like Claude has a specific design language. It's very like noticeable, right? Cream background, like slightly red text, like this eyebrow text on things like you look at it and you're like, yeah, Claude generated that. No human was involved in this. 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.

1:11:37Maybe I have this thing where when it's text, when it's written text, I can immediately tell if it's AI written. But I can never tell if it's because I write a lot. I also read a lot. I read a lot of, you know, like fiction. And so it just feels off immediately. And it doesn't it's not just just Claude. It's just the repetitiveness, the adjectives. But I can never tell for sure. Like, am I the one who notices because you said like, oh, you see, it's Claude. And I'm not sure if I looked at a Web page that I would see that it's Claude because you're you're so into this the same way I'm so into words or or nonfiction writing.

1:12:15Maggie Appleton:Yeah. So I do wonder if if maybe 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 I do agree with you that it is predictable in ways that humans are luckily not, I guess. Yeah, like I definitely noticed the writing one too, because 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, nevermind. And then even like going back and reading, you know, nonfiction books that like were really like not written a long time ago. You could go back and read a book written 50 years ago.

1:12:49Maggie Appleton: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. 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 human writing, you've talked about concept of the digital garden. What is a digital garden? It's a blog, but with some extra rules attached. So it's a blog where every piece you put up does not have to be finished. as long as you clearly signal to the audience it's not.

1:13:23Maggie Appleton: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 later. You just have like an update of that date. And I usually will, 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 half finished thought and mark it as a seedling and then like come back to it later and finish it up or fix it. Writing in this way has made me, allowed me to publish much more than I ever would have otherwise. Like I have perfectionistic tendencies.

1:13:54Maggie Appleton: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. 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 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 three 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 it like allows me to work in public which I also think helps like people kind of get to see behind 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 like 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 somewhat related to this again just going away from from from ai you also talked about barefoot developers and home cook software yeah what what are there who are developers so this was i'm not sure i remember what year this is it might be 2024 which feels like an eternity ago it was not that long ago this was at the local first conference in berlin in 2024 i did this talk yeah um home cook software and barefoot developers home cook software is a phrase that comes from robin sloan which is software that you make for you and your family and the way you would make a home coach meal yeah 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 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 conference that i expect to see an explosion of this with language models and okay the writing was already on the wall.

1:16:08Maggie Appleton: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. Everyone's building their own recipe manager and their own household app, 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 bog standard version of it. But I extended this concept by saying, OK, home cook software is for you and your family. But there's another concept that I call Barefoot Developers that comes from in maoist 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 administering antibiotics and then distributed them out to the villages so that you would improve health care 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 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 allotment garden or their like street but they have some problem they need solved and like google sheets doesn't really cut it like it 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 let's say at this barefoot developer type who's like kind of power user, someone who might use Notion and Airtable 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.

1:17:43Maggie Appleton:They don't have to read the code as long as it works, like as long as they verify it's fine. I mean, what reminds me a little bit of the webmasters. Yeah, webmasters. So back, it was a long time ago, but in the 90s, maybe mid 90s, late 90s, the webmasters were just power user administrators who would administer, for example, a school's Yeah. Windows installations and they were not the highest paid. I'm not sure how they got trained, but at some point, every school had a webmaster. Sometimes they were a volunteer. Sometimes they were they were paid. Companies had their webmasters and they would often operate the web pages, which was, again, more involved, way more involved than later.

1:18:22Of course, that's why there was a role. And then like patch things. And it was all kind of, you know, they were they might forget to patch stuff or they might not know. And there were like forums, webmaster forums where they helped each other. And it was kind of like, because what you talk about, the China example, that was, of course, a government program with the goal. But this was just a grassroots movement.

1:18:41Maggie Appleton:Yeah. 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 foundations and they're probably handling the data wrong. They're going to lose their database at some point.

1:19:09Maggie Appleton:They don't have good foundations to build on because they're just telling the agent, hey, make me an iOS app that does X. But they don't really understand engineering. I would advocate for 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 could just sync it between machines. You don't really need a database in the cloud. There's no point to that. A little bit of data sovereignty. They own the data. no one else can buy it or trade it or get access to it. I just feel there should be much stronger like local first frameworks that give you these 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.

1:19:47Maggie Appleton:It's maybe something like the next version of Airtable would be this is what I would hope. What advice would you have for engineers to learn from designers when they have access to working with a designer? work learn from also collaborate better with yeah 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 codex 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 me about typography like you now have like a very patient tutor who's just going to sit there and be like okay this is where when you would vary line height here's exactly how many characters you should fit on a line 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 the data I got.

1:20:59Maggie Appleton:Give me some ideas for possible interfaces that would represent it. Well, they're decent at that conceptual stuff, even if they don't always get the interface right. Going back to your anthropology roots, what are things that us engineers, people building software could take inspiration or learn from anthropology, like methods, approaches, things that have really served you well? Yeah. 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 like a you know pair of glasses you can kind of put on in the same way you can be like I'm gonna 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 in this interaction or this context or this problem and especially in the context of software like sure maybe you're building a database but you're building it for users 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 go and this is and it's all culturally contained like it depends also on like the international how international your audience is and who you're designing for but like there are cultures where like time flows from from right to left right or from up to down but we assume in the west you know time flows left 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 is 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 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 live with natives and and be embedded in them 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 it could it be just an idea when you have the opportunity to embed yourself with customers yeah yeah become a customer yourself i mean this used to be the thing right like the amazon had their customer obsession which also starts with understanding the customer but i guess this might be very natural as someone who's an anthropologist which is like all right go talk to people go and try to be one of them whoever you're building with there is 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 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 one day 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 that like appeals and as closing what books would you recommend ones that you enjoyed reading and why one of my favorites that i give to most people is called addiction by design so it's about people addicted to gambling machines in Las Vegas, but it's an anthropologist doing it.

1:24:38Maggie Appleton: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 you like sit at this machine. It's by Natasha Dauschal. And I read it in university and I love it. It's a total mix of like like cultural anthropology, participant observation, and also machine design and engineering. And like, how do you design addictive systems?

1:25:13Maggie Appleton: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? Maggie, thanks so much. This was very interesting. Yeah, thanks for having me. Really fun. 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 the 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 Agentec tools, she starts her design process with pen and paper. Her reasoning is that agents cannot see, but us humans can.

1:25:46And I have to wonder, is it only true for visual stuff? I mean, when I think back to my most productive brainstorming sessions with engineers, it was usually in front of a whiteboard drawing stuff 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 Figma-like tools dynamically built for you. It's also pretty incredible that we can do this with agents in a matter of minutes.

1:26:23Just wow. Finally, I appreciated how Maggie was honest about how she feels about the design craft. 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, I don't write the code, but it does feel more transaction-wise. I feel a bit less connected to the code and the creation of the code itself. For design, agents are not there yet, but I didn't sense that Maggie wants to let go of that designer in her.

1:27:01I wonder if one thing to learn from her for us devs is that we should also have a notebook to make sketches of ideas, not just UIs, but architectures 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 one.