I'm a builder.

I find the term “designer” limiting. I prefer the term “builder.”

I’ve built products, businesses, and houses. I get excited about building stuff and seeing things come to life.

I still remember the first time an engineer showed my design working in code. It was thrilling. My design was alive and it responded to user input. But then he took his laptop away to hack on the code. And I was back at my computer staring at flat, lifeless mockups.

Software design has been in stasis for the past five years. But there’s a seismic shift happening in our industry driven by AI.

I can see your eyes rolling. But the hype is real.

I’ve started building a lot more software by myself. I use Figma to sketch out an initial concept and then jump into development ASAP. And I’ve been coding less and prompting more. This will become the norm for how we build software. Designer efficiency needs go way up.

I feel energized about building again.

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P.S. Micro SaaS is dead. You can solve your minor software annoyances with an hour of prompting.

P.P.S. I also feel energized about learning again. I’m revisiting design-adjacent topics: programming, animation, 3D graphics and data visualization. Prompting allows me to focus my learning on exactly what's relevant to my current project. Just-in-time knowledge > Just-in-case knowledge.

P.P.P.S. A quote that’s been on my mind recently: “We wrote our own textbook, because there was no other text about space.” — Katherine Johnson.