State of Play

George Hastings is the solo founder of Unicorn Studio, the no-code tool that turned WebGL and shaders into something designers can touch and play with. 

But my favorite thing about George is that he built it alone, with no VC money, after years at IDEO and AREA17.

This conversation goes deep into deterministic chisels vs stochastic AI design and his advice to designers who want to build their own tools.

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CHAPTERS:
0:00 — Cold open and intro
1:39 — The blank page and building your own inspiration
4:48 — Making things vs building products
6:15 — Falling in love with code: AREA17, CodePen, and the browser
8:12 — Open canvas tools and the tension with code
9:06 — Reverse engineering the happy accident
11:02 — Knowing when it's done
12:12 — A tool or a way of thinking?
13:46 — The chisel vs stochastic design
16:50 — Building at 90% agentic: you're the boss, check the work
18:37 — Why AI struggles with shaders
20:24 — An agent inside the walled garden
21:35 — Charging money and the long closed beta
22:37 — The pixel game, Khroma, and getting the building bug
25:47 — Solo, no VC: "I'm really just trying to be an artist"
26:58 — Advice for designer-builders: solve a sexy problem
28:03 — Selling the workflow, not the outputs
30:15 — Soul, special sauce, and letting the shaders go
32:47 — OpenClaw, MCP, and agents using your tool
37:19 — The controlled agent rollout
38:22 — Orchestrators and mourning the old workflow
40:51 — Outro: go play with it

LINKS:
Unicorn Studio: https://unicorn.studio
George Hastings on X: https://x.com/soulegit

FOLLOW ME:
Newsletter: https://uxtools.co
X / Twitter: https://x.com/designertom
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Jamey Gannon is a creative director and Maven instructor teaching designers how to control AI like a creative director.

She's running brand sprints, directing image models, and building her own tools while she does it.

This conversation covers whether you can actually teach AI taste, the inputs most designers miss when evaluating AI tools, why she took an "AI sabbatical" to get good, and the five-principle framework she uses to direct image models.

Want to become an AI Creative Director? Get 10% off Jamey's next cohort with promo code TOMMY here: https://bit.ly/4tJ9nF7

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CHAPTERS:
0:00 — Cold open: AI is not magic
0:20 — The rise of AI creative directors
1:42 — Can AI learn taste?
4:30 — What most people miss about prompting
7:58 — Brand sprints, speed, and taste
13:01 — How AI fits into real client work
15:37 — A mood-board tool built with AI
22:00 — Jamey's daily creative stack
27:21 — How she found time to learn AI
31:08 — The one-click AI myth
38:39 — Visibility, distribution, and getting chosen
42:00 — The split between brand and product designers
46:04 — Pricing AI-assisted creative work
49:08 — The AI Creative Director framework
56:01 — Why being remembered matters

LINKS:
Maven (AI Creative Director course): https://bit.ly/4tJ9nF7

FOLLOW ME:
X / Twitter: https://x.com/designertom
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Kevin Espiritu runs Epic Gardening, one of the clearest examples of a creator-led media business that became much more than content: YouTube, commerce, products, books, and Botanical Interests.

This conversation covers why Silicon Valley is suddenly fascinated by new media, what Kevin learned from the old SEO and affiliate-marketing era, why creators over-optimize the wrong things, how Epic Gardening thinks about products, IP, TV viewership, brand deals, channel strategy, and what it actually takes to build media that lasts.

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CHAPTERS:
0:00 Media is soil
0:27 Why new media week starts with Kevin
1:38 Silicon Valley discovers creators
3:26 From SEO hacks to durable media
7:03 True outliers are one-of-one
10:19 Why creators get platform-stuck
12:33 Products, IP, and real media businesses
17:25 Brand deals without draining trust
21:03 YouTube is becoming TV
23:22 Format experiments and channel strategy
30:31 Packaging before production
35:07 Scaling beyond the founder
40:03 Tommy's media company, live consult
45:30 Broad vs niche audiences
50:02 Raising money and the next creator companies
56:06 Cultural campfires

LINKS:
Epic Gardening: https://www.epicgardening.com
Botanical Interests: https://www.botanicalinterests.com
Kevin Espiritu on X: https://x.com/KevinEspiritu

FOLLOW ME:
X / Twitter: https://x.com/designertom
IG: https://instagram.com/itsdesignertom
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Tom Krcha founded Pencil.dev after years inside the design tooling cycle, from Flash evangelism to creating Adobe XD, which gives him a rare view of where AI design tools are actually heading.

This conversation covers why agents are best at the first 80%, why designers still need the last 20%, what a headless design tool means, how Pencil is building for swarms of AI designers, and why taste comes from still putting your hands in the work.

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.co

CHAPTERS:
0:00 Headless agents inside design tools
0:31 Why design tools are splitting
1:36 Tom’s path from Flash to Pencil
5:13 Stochastic vs deterministic design
6:16 Why designers still need the chisel
9:18 How Pencil started inside Cursor
10:19 Designer as orchestrator and final authority
12:05 Canvas, tweaker, and headless agents
14:16 What “headless design tool” means
15:52 Context as the portable briefcase
17:09 — Pencil as an agent-first canvas
20:53 Building tools that build tools
24:52 Why users create 50-artboard files
26:26 Agent specialization and subagents
27:35 Why vibe coding feels like Flash
29:38 Can agents create happy accidents?
31:17 The canvas as a crime scene
32:28 Does AI make you a better author?
35:06 What designers do with 60 agents
36:38 Pencil’s roadmap and the future of iteration
38:22 Taste comes from participation

LINKS:
Pencil.dev: https://pencil.dev
Tom Krcha on X: https://x.com/tomkrcha

FOLLOW ME:
X / Twitter: https://x.com/tommygeoco
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Hannah Ahn is designing healthcare in the exact moment AI is making it easier than ever to take control of our health.

She leads design and marketing at Superpower, a health startup building an AI layer across bloodwork, labs, genomics, and medical records. Before that, she came up through product management at Canva, which makes her a useful kind of design leader right now: practical, visual, brand-sensitive, and allergic to treating velocity like the whole job.

We talk about designing trust around health data, why Superpower rolled out Claude Code to the design team in January, how she hires for team composition, and why the most underrated signal in a designer right now is still love of the game.

Join 100k+ designers reading my newsletter:: https://uxtools.co
Come party with me at Config 2026 (June 25): https://luma.com/usxsrlu1

CHAPTERS:
00:00 Designing trust when AI touches your health
03:06 PM to designer was the practical path
06:41 How Superpower runs a five-person design team
10:34 Hiring for composition, not clones
13:55 Love of the game beats credentials
16:46 Rolling Claude Code out in January
21:47 When velocity starts producing slop
24:41 The 1% that makes people trust you
33:23 The junior ladder is breaking
36:31 Designers as architects, not prompt operators

LINKS:
Superpower: https://superpower.com
Hannah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahnhannah/

FOLLOW ME:
X / Twitter: https://x.com/designertom
IG: https://instagram.com/itsdesignertom
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Diego Zaks runs design at Ramp, the most AI-installed company in the world. Not kidding, Anthropic showed up at their office because they were using Claude Code more than Anthropic was.

We talk about how Ramp got there, how design changes when everyone is a builder, what AI fluency means inside their company, and what he thinks design becomes five years from here.

Join 100k+ designers reading my newsletter:: https://uxtools.co
Come party with me at Config 2026 (June 25): https://luma.com/usxsrlu1

CHAPTERS:
00:00 The AI-Installed Company
03:50 The Slack Engineer Who Wasn't Human
10:16 The 4 Levels of AI Fluency
13:27 Make Everyone a Designer
22:17 How Ramp Hit 99.5% Installed
28:54 Anthropic Flew to the Office
31:47 Glass: Why Build Your Own AI
49:30 What Design Becomes in 5 Years

LINKS:
Ramp: https://ramp.com
Ramp is hiring: https://ramp.com/careers
Ramp Builders blog (engineering): https://builders.ramp.com
Ramp Labs on X: https://x.com/RampLabs
Diego on X: https://x.com/diegozaks

FOLLOW ME:
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IG: https://instagram.com/itsdesignertom
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Amelia Wattenberger spent eight years as a front-end developer before the title on her business card turned into "designer" — she's been at GitHub, now she's building Intent.

This conversation covers why developers are mourning their old flow state, the eras of AI coding tools from Copilot to CLI to the app era, why the spec is becoming the new source of truth, and what Amelia means when she says the work is shifting from implementation to intention.

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CHAPTERS:
0:00 — The moment the IDE stopped making sense
2:16 — The ladder of abstraction, and a career moving up and down it
7:35 — Where the abstraction stops: you can't automate eating ice cream
10:29 — Developers are mourning their flow state
16:02 — Eras of AI coding tools: Copilot → CLI → the app
22:43 — Living specs vs. static PRDs
29:38 — Inside Intent: workspaces as desks you pick up and put down
39:02 — Plan, implement, review — and where the medium goes next
42:46 — Advice for people too employed to pathfind
44:33 — Outro: where purpose lives when agents do the rest

LINKS:
Intent: https://www.augmentcode.com/product/intent
Amelia Wattenberger on X: https://x.com/Wattenberger
Amelia's Musings: https://wattenberger.com/

FOLLOW ME:
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IG: https://instagram.com/itsdesignertom
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

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.

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CHAPTERS:
0:00 — Almost fired before day one
1:20 — Falling into design by accident
2:39 — The call that changed his career
4:45 — Why generalists felt broken in traditional orgs
5:08 — The "gumption" trait for AI-native work
6:54 — Housekeeping vs cannibalizing yourself
8:23 — End-to-end ownership when everyone can build
10:54 — Spiking fast and killing darlings faster
13:06 — People who couldn't prototype before now can
15:05 — How Lovable's org actually works
19:44 — When enterprise came knocking
22:45 — Hackathons and making room for throwaway work
25:15 — The email that almost got him fired (full story)
28:09 — Apple blocking mobile vibe coding apps
30:27 — Half our design system is written for agents
31:34 — Agent maxing: background agents failed, linters won
33:53 — Eating their own SaaS stack
37:15 — Who actually owns vibe coding in the enterprise
42:43 — What Lovable looks for when hiring designers
43:28 — Why every designer should be a founder right now
46:54 — Territory Studio uses Lovable for sci-fi UIs
48:16 — Thesis: everything will be interoperable

ABOUT TOMMY GEOCO
I 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 PLAY
Host Tommy Geoco discovers what fuels the internet's most interesting designers and builders.

LINKS:
Lovable: https://lovable.dev
Follow Nad: https://x.com/nadonomy

FOLLOW ME:
X / Twitter: https://x.com/designertom
Instagram: https://instagram.com/itsdesignertom
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Facundo Santana and José Rago run Basement Studio - 35 people in Argentina, working with Vercel, Mr. Beast, and Kid Super. 

They poured actual wine on a surface to get a WebGL texture right. That detail tells you everything about how this shop operates.

This conversation covers how they protect quality as they scale, the R&D lab that spun out BasHub and XMP, why they open-source everything, how 30 people pile into a single Slack channel before anything ships, and why Basement Ventures is quietly becoming a real VC fund.

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Join 100,000+ designers for weekly insights on creative software and the people shaping it: https://uxtools.co

CHAPTERS:
0:00 — They used actual wine to build a website
0:24 — Who is Basement Studio?
1:36 — From a Buenos Aires apartment to 35 people
5:17 — The Kid Super World project
7:19 — "Would you show it to your mom?"
9:49 — Working with Vercel on Geist and v0
13:20 — How 30 people review work in one Slack channel
16:05 — Open source: BasHub, XMP, and giving back
18:06 — The lab that becomes real products
21:32 — How AI is changing creative studios
24:49 — Basement Ventures: from studio to microfund
28:43 — Investing in the tools you actually use
31:14 — Building a studio that outlasts its founders

LINKS:
Basement Studio: https://basement.studio
Facundo on X: https://x.com/falanfantana
José on X: https://x.com/ragojose

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/nv7M79lMEnU

FOLLOW ME:
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X / Twitter: https://x.com/tommygeoco
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Ben Blumenrose runs Designer Fund, which means he doesn't just see one team figure out AI, he sees how 50+ design teams across the portfolio are absorbing it. 

This conversation covers what happens when the floor rises, what AI fluency actually looks like inside companies, why the AI ops role is emerging earlier than anyone expected, and how Ben is thinking about keeping his own kids away from the tools — for now.

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.co

CHAPTERS:
1:05 — Process flexibility and conflicting signals
2:27 — What Designer Fund's portfolio is actually doing with AI
5:34 — Enterprise adoption: Carvana vs eBay
6:40 — The AI ops role emerging at hire #4
9:59 — AI Imagineer and redesigning how designers work
12:12 — Junior designers vs early career talent
16:09 — AI native vs AI fluency
21:05 — The 19% slower problem and the factory floor
22:12 — The T-shaped designer gets wider and deeper
25:21 — Evaluating AI fluency in hiring
28:25 — Where the tools are now vs nine months ago
30:06 — The floor is high but the ceiling still matters
31:29 — Moral panic and the value of exceptional designers
33:27 — Does the designer-founder thesis still hold?
35:28 — VC path in a world where one person = a team
37:13 — Phantom competency: extraordinary person or extraordinary tools?
40:24 — Keeping kids away from AI and the Tin Can phone
45:14 — Closing: the bar is moving sideways

LINKS:
Designer Fund: https://designerfund.com
Ben Blumenrose on X: https://x.com/benblumenrose

FOLLOW ME:
Newsletter: https://uxtools.co
X / Twitter: https://x.com/tommygeoco
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco