Xavier Armand is the founder of The Vaan Group, a Shopify platinum agency and home of what they call brand conversion design -- the idea that great design and conversion aren't in tension, they're the same thing.

In this episode we get into the practical stuff: why code generation tools keep breaking down on bespoke DTC builds, how Vaan is restructuring the Figma-to-dev handoff to actually take advantage of coding agents, and why Xavier pushes his design team to use AI to deliver better work -- not faster work. We also get into what he learned from building his own Claude environment from scratch, why the first few weeks he kept corrupting his own config, and what that hands-on experience taught him about where AI tooling is genuinely useful inside a creative services org versus where it's still mostly noise.

Good one for designers, developers, and anyone running a team trying to figure out where AI actually fits in a creative production workflow.