I’m joined by the imaginative Kyle Zantos, a Seattle-based designer, builder, and musician with over a decade of experience across UX, product, and brand. Kyle’s worked at startups and consultancies, but lately he’s been diving into AI through deeply personal, playful projects that blend creativity, tooling, and experimentation.

We get into:

* Why he shifted from music to design, and now from design to building AI tools

* How he used AI to build a Figma plugin without any coding background

* The tools in his AI stack and how he actually uses them (Claude, Cursor, Lovable, Vercel, and more)

* What MCPs are and how they help Claude "remember" his context across chats

* Why rapid prototyping now beats hours in Figma

* His framework of “Software as a Gift,” building custom apps just for friends

* A look at the Jeopardy-inspired app he built for his trivia-loving best friend

Kyle brings curiosity, technical scrappiness, and real heart to everything he builds. Whether you’re a designer figuring out how to start with AI or just looking to rekindle some joy in your craft, this one’s for you.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction

02:07 Kyle's musical interests and background

06:41 Kyle's journey into "vibe coding"

13:02 From an early course to building som ething functional

20:59 Leveraging MCPs to build smarter

26:26 Software as a gift

36:49 Where AI has influenced Kyle's design process

38:59 How can design org incentivize to close the skills gap

41:29 How to get started with AI

43:15 Closing

Follow Kyle

* Website: https://kylezantos.com

* Twitter: https://twitter.com/kylezantos

* LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylezantos

Mentions

* Jeopardy practice game — Kyle launched (in time for this release)

* Claude (by Anthropic) — AI assistant used throughout Kyle's workflow

* Cursor — AI-first code editor forked from VS Code

* Lovable — No-code AI app builder Kyle uses for software-as-gift experiments

* Vercel — Deployment platform for full-stack apps

* SuperWhisper — Voice-to-text transcription tool

* Ammaar Reshi — Design leader at DeepMind; inspired Kyle's early AI builds

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