Updates to Figma and Google Stitch
https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-make-now-on-your-local-code
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-labs/stitch-updates/

The Design System Advantage is Memory
https://learn.thedesignsystem.guide/p/the-design-system-advantage-is-memory

Fraude Design
https://fraude.design/

Nik's Interview with CEO of Quilter, Sergiy Nesterenko
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergiynesterenko/
https://www.quilter.ai/

This week we talk about Figma's new design agent integrated right on the canvas, the 2026 State of AI in Design Report, and Bain's experiment with synthetic customers. Then Dan interview Llewyn Paine about the future of UXR and design and gives a preview of the Rosenfeld Designing with AI Conference 2026 https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designing-with-ai/

Show Notes:

• The Figma Design Agent is Here | Figma Blog
• State of AI in Design
• Synthetic Customers Earn Their Stripes | Bain & Company
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/llewyn/

When you collaborate with AI on a piece of work, whose thinking is it, really? That question runs underneath what a lot of designers and creatives are arguing about right now, and this week on AI and Design, Nik and Dan dig in.

We start with Giorgio Schirò's "The thinking was never just mine," which uses Andy Clark and David Chalmers' "extended mind" theory to argue that creativity has always been distributed: our taste comes from books, films, teachers, and a thousand inputs we don't normally count. AI doesn't invent this loop; it just makes it faster and leaves receipts. Then we turn to Revanth Krishna's "Don't Simply Bolt On AI, Rethink From the Ground Up," using Anthropic's new Claude for Small Business as a worked example of what AI-native enterprise software might actually look like — and what trust and brand mean when the AI inside your tool isn't built by the company whose name is on the box.

Our guest is Thom Rimmer, VP of Product Design at Fin. Thom tells the story of how his company decided, over a single weekend in late 2022, to bet the entire business on AI and rebuild from the ground up. We get into what that did to the org: 95% of PRs now authored by Claude Code, designers shipping production code, the design system's source of truth moving from Figma to markdown files, and what's left of the design job when the artifacts get cheap.

LINKS
UI for AI
https://uiforai.design

The Thinking Was Never Just Mine
https://uxdesign.cc/the-thinking-was-never-just-mine-9b73cc04c837

Don’t simply bolt on AI. Rethink from the ground up.

https://uxdesign.cc/dont-simply-bolt-on-ai-rethink-from-the-ground-up-ae73a9093cd2

Introducing Claude for Small Business

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-small-business

Operator
https://fin.ai/operator

Wharton researchers fed people AI-generated answers, half of them deliberately wrong. The participants accepted them 73% of the time — and their confidence went up. They're calling it "cognitive surrender." Nik and Dan dig into what separates it from plain old cognitive offloading, and the design moves that might pull people back.

Then: Ethan Ding's "Claude Code Is Not Making Your Product Better," and why taste, not coding speed, is the bottleneck for product quality.

Finally, Tom Groendal, Senior Product Manager at CACI's DarkBlue Intelligence Group, on what AI actually looks like inside a working product team: melting role boundaries, a "product brain" repo that doubles as institutional memory, and the new role that keeps surfacing in conversation after conversation — the context manager.

LINKS

Thinking - Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646

Cognitive Surrender
https://addyosmani.com/blog/cognitive-surrender/

Creative Tools: The Case for Keeping AI Unfinished
https://medium.com/ui-for-ai/creative-tools-the-case-for-keeping-ai-unfinished-80c601821b53

claude code is not making your product better
https://ethanding.substack.com/p/claude-code-is-not-making-your-product

Obviously Awesome (book)
https://amzn.to/433nIkR

Dan and Nik talk about how to design for your next user being an agent, the impact of AI on team structure and dynamics, the challenge of memory and recall in conversation-based AI systems, and the shift towards AI experience design focused on constraints, not prompts.

Chapters

• 00:00 Your Next User is an Agent
• 12:23 Rethinking the Shape of Design Teams in AI World
• 17:03 The Impact of AI Efficiency on Team Interactions
• 24:39 The Forgotten Conversation Problem in AI
• 31:14 The End of Prompting: AI Experience Design with Constraints

LINKS
Your product has a new user. It’s not human.
https://www.elenaverna.com/p/your-product-has-a-new-user-its-not

Rethinking the shape of design teams in an AI world
https://uxdesign.cc/rethinking-the-shape-of-design-teams-in-an-ai-world-82f986bf9a27

The “Bug-Free” Workforce: How AI Efficiency Is Subtly Disrupting The Interactions That Build Strong Teams

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/04/bug-free-workforce-ai-disrupting-teams/

The forgotten conversation problem in AI chat

https://uxdesign.cc/the-forgotten-conversation-problem-in-ai-chat-4d3d0c3ea525

The End of Prompting: Why the Future of AI Experience Design Is Constraint-First

https://uxmag.com/articles/the-end-of-prompting-why-the-future-of-ai-experience-design-is-constraint-first

Google's MC Dean, the author of over 100 AI skills for designers on everything from accessibility to moods, joins Nik and Dan to talk about Skills: how to make them, how to use them, and what the future of them could be.

LINKS

MC Dean on Substack
https://marieclairedean.substack.com/

MC Dean on Github
https://github.com/owl-listener

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman book
https://amzn.to/4sYGQek

Surprise surprise, Dan and Nik talk about Anthropic's launch of Claude Design. The Nik does a set of rapid-fire interviews from the 2026 CHI conference, featuring the latest HCI research in AI and Design.

Dan checks out a Fast Company interview with Anthropic's Head of Design Joel Lewenstein and finds reasons for hope. Dmitry Kargaev points out the flaws of AI UX and has some reasons for why is happens. A catalog of AI brand archetypes, and Dan applauds Patrizia Bertini's call to rethink Human-Centered Design to be less about "users" and more about "citizens."

Links:

Fast Company Interview with Joel Lewenstein

https://www.fastcompany.com/91519289/inside-anthropics-biggest-design-choices

AI Products Have Terrible UX: Here's Why

https://hackernoon.com/ai-products-have-terrible-ux-heres-why

Aesthetics of AI

https://www.acolorbright.com/en/insights/aesthetics-of-ai

Human-Centred Design has grown up. It’s time we did too

https://uxdesign.cc/human-centred-design-has-grown-up-it-is-time-we-did-too-766601c1fc7d

We're All Doing The Same Job Now

https://odannyboy.medium.com/were-all-doing-the-same-job-now-81924e0c80d6

The Existential Designer

https://odannyboy.medium.com/the-existential-designer-facilitating-meaning-through-interaction-8952c358ec52