Patrick Diola

I find I now *expect* a half pane chat & agentic experience in every application - and get frustrated when it's not there. Static UI is dead! A new intelligent & adaptive paradigm is in. I no longer want to click through dropdowns, hunt for filters or leave to ask a question, do analysis. I expect to ask complex questions, take actions, and even transform the UI—all through natural language. The best companies are creating this expectation for all e.g., ❓ Ask complex questions (e.g, give me talking points for the slides in this presentation Perplexity) 🙋 Perform actions through chat (e.g., buy this baby gift for and address the gift card to <name>) 🔢 And of course reshape the UI itself (Vercel V0, Replit, Lovable) Even established platforms need to adapt! Concourse lets users “chat with NetSuite”—and that’s just the beginning. Soon, users will expect all systems to not just respond… but also to act. If you're building a product in 2025, it's worth asking: How does your UI listen, and even evolve? If you are an "incumbent" - how will you adapt?

193

21 Comments

"Measuring velocity of designers is absolute bullsh*." Sara Vienna, CDO at Metalab, said this in our interview and her candidness was refreshing. We've all felt the pressure to ship faster. But Sara's reframe stuck with me: speed isn't about cutting corners, but about building trust. The faster you demonstrate momentum, the more goodwill you earn. And that goodwill buys you the space for quality. Metalab's "Tarantino process" embodies this: Play out the end of the movie quickly, throw divergent ideas at the wall, kill your darlings. 80% won't work. But you need the space to find the 20% that becomes the magic. Sara's other insight on AI and team structure: Optimist view: Tools unlock capabilities that were locked behind 15 years of senior experience. Juniors can produce senior-level work. Teams get smaller but mightier. Pessimist view: If efficiency becomes the only metric, we create "box-checkers" not craftspeople. The difference at Metalab is leadership that protects creative space while still getting hands-on. Full interview with Sara on State of Play: We cover the Tarantino process, "kind not nice" culture, and why even as CDO she still does hands-on work to fight imposter syndrome.

166

9 Comments

Senior designers who can't code are becoming obsolete faster than they think. I'm not saying you need to be a full-stack developer. But a few months ago I watched a senior designer spec an interaction that would take three months to build. The engineer said "this is technically impossible with our current architecture." The designer had no idea what that meant. Here's what I've learned managing designers for years: you don't need to code. You need to understand what's hard versus what's impossible. I've seen designers request real-time collaboration features with zero understanding of websocket complexity. Pixel-perfect animations that break accessibility. Infinite scroll that destroys performance. Then they get frustrated when engineers push back. The best designers I worked with? They don't write production code. But they understand rendering, state management, API limitations. They know when they're asking for two days of work versus two weeks. AI is making design execution easier. But it's not solving the gap between what designers want and what systems can actually do. If you can't speak the language of technical constraints, you're becoming just a visual decorator. And we already have AI for that. So…you need to become a more technical product designer.

151

91 Comments

What does "Investing in Design" look like for companies? Large companies are Investing in design. Earlier stage companies are saying "Design matters to us". Where does that actually show up? There's a lot of layers this can permeate through. Some broad ways in no particular order; - Design in Leadership roles, working together to steer strategy and impact - Investment in Design resource, what's the head count? - Investment in Design Headcount in specialty areas, Motion, illustration, Brand, Writing, Dedicated Design Systems - Market salaries (don't have to over pay, but definitely don't be under-paying!) - % of Designers work time freed up for play and exploration - Offsites, work trips...bringing Designers together to inspire them and fuel their creative cups - Retention incentives, learning and development stipends, equipment etc etc. - Access to tooling resources (Want them to bolster their ai skills...get them access to ai tools!) What else you can add, I'm barely scratching the surface right? If a company is doing these things - great. Those are quality signals. If they're not, but they say they're "invested in design"... dig deeper and think twice.

30

8 Comments

Last night I was up past midnight coding with Replit. Haven't done that sort of thing in a while. I finished with a working publisher flow, user auth, DB, and (almost) Google OAuth enabled. Total cost $11.50. My perspective on AI tooling remains unchanged: Cautiously optimistic. On one hand it's fascinating that in just under 3 hours I could feed it my designs, ask for immediate changes, and finish with a mostly functional app all for less than the cost of lunch. On the other I have no understanding of the quality and reliability of the code, and I constantly felt uneasy about how this was replacing many interactions I've had thousands of times with very skilled developer friends. One of my sons is a sophomore CS undergrad and you've seen the news about CS grads struggling to find jobs in the wake of AI (not the only reason). To be fair cheaper, faster code has been a holy grail for many years leading some companies to outsource dev to Poland, Philippines, etc for pennies on the dollar. The same issue of quality and reliability applies there. I don't believe AI will outright replace human dev—or design for that matter—just as outsourcing hasn't replaced it. But I do see it akin to the early 2010s when graphic designers were faced with an uncertain future whether to stay in the field or shift to digital design. Many made the shift successfully by choice or by force, many saw their pipeline dry up, and some left the field altogether. So until the AI dust settles the best thing you and I can do is experiment, experiment some more, and be vocal about the consequences along the way. Or fully adopt now if you're convinced this is the future not just for the industry but your career too. I'm not there yet. One thing's for sure: No one, absolutely no one is stopping this bullet train now. But we *can* adjust its switch points and help determine which stations it harbors at along the way, just as we've done with every other disruptive technology. #ai #design #replit

141

55 Comments

With Full Scale, I've learned something that seems counterintuitive about developers: The best ones ask the most questions. The worst ones ask none and just say "yes." This drives some managers crazy. They seem to want order-takers, not question-askers. When I started my career, I talked directly to users. Understood their problems. Built solutions. No product manager. No business analyst. No layers. Somewhere along the way, we put developers in a corner. Turned off some lights. Said "just write code." We built entire systems to "protect" them from having to think about users or strategy. Eventually, devs just disconnected from their work. From why it matters. From the problems they're solving. And now AI is exposing this disaster. If developers can code 2x faster but don't understand WHY they're coding, we haven't solved anything. We've made it worse. If you want better software, stop treating developers like code monkeys! Give them: ✓ Vision - why are we doing this? ✓ Focus - what really matters? ✓ Clarity - what are we building? ✓ Ownership - shared, not siloed ✓ Courage - to speak up and challenge It's not about making introverts talk to customers all day. It's about completing the feedback loop, making sure they know their work mattered (orr didn't in some cases). That's YOUR JOB as a leader. Does your team know why their work matters?

43

14 Comments

Missing form labels, empty buttons, links that go nowhere... Let's stop calling this "accessibility debt." This is just incomplete development. The real issue isn't that accessible code costs more to retrofit. It's that we're calling basic HTML requirements "extra work." A button without text? That's not accessibility debt - that's unfinished code. A form input without a label? That's not technical debt - that's skipping steps. A link that doesn't go anywhere? That's not an edge case - that's broken. These things should be in your Definition of Done already. Not because of WCAG, but because they're fundamental to how HTML works. When we frame basic semantic markup as "accessibility work," we make it sound optional. It's not. It's just good development. Start there. Get the fundamentals right. The rest gets easier once your team stops thinking of working buttons and labeled forms as "nice to have." #WebDevelopment #Accessibility #TechDebt

109

15 Comments