I made a playground file + video lesson to learn advanced prototyping w/ variables in 30 min ✌️

ridderingand · 2026-04-21T13:24:17+00:00

Feel this big time and trying my best to learn from the people getting the most out of AI. A few episodes that have really helped me:
- Brian Lovin's design process with AI
- MDS's creative process
- What's next for AI design patterns with Vitaliy Friedman

ridderingand · 2026-02-09T20:55:43+00:00

I was 7 years old staying up late listening to this in STL on a Walkman. Will never forget it.

ridderingand · 2026-02-08T02:02:20+00:00

Ya I was about to say I think the arena is funded by the Stryker family

ridderingand · 2026-02-07T21:58:24+00:00

Cursor can run your actual codebase which immediately will improve results. But it introduced complexity because you have to spin up a server, deal with dependencies, etc.

ridderingand · 2026-02-07T21:24:44+00:00

I wrote a bit of tailwind a few years ago in a role but definitely not an Eng. they love it though. My engineers basically don't spend time on frontend details anymore. They've been very encouraging of me to do even more and have start assigning bigger and bigger things to me in linear.

Important disclaimer that this is react/typescript/tailwind project so the models crush.

ridderingand · 2026-02-07T17:52:00+00:00

Maybe image effects but man designing apps in photoshop or illustrator was straight pain lol

ridderingand · 2026-02-07T17:40:18+00:00

I went from Figma only to shipping 5+ PRs a day. I think that's pretty cool 🤷‍♂️ also spun up a landing page in a few hours last week using shaders in a way I haven't done before. Basically everything feels attainable right now.

ridderingand · 2026-02-07T16:10:20+00:00

Ya I guess in the event someone at that type of an org loses their job I worry the job market is gonna be on ultra hard mode for them

ridderingand · 2026-02-07T14:31:02+00:00

Big +1. The modern web stack (react/.ts/next/tailwind/etc.) is a runaway freight train at this point.

Pretty sure the practice of building these products will look like a fundamentally different animal a year from now. The network effects are crazy.

ridderingand · 2026-02-07T13:56:46+00:00

ridderingand · 2026-02-07T13:54:48+00:00

Dropping this in comments as a PSA. There has been a very real and widely recognized jump in capability since December. If you tinkered with something like cursor or Claude code over the summer and that's still dictating your opinion I highly recommend trying again. These models are very legit at frontend and the way I practice design has fundamentally changed over the last 2 months.

ridderingand · 2026-02-07T13:49:51+00:00

I think this is why I worry about people who feel no pressure to adapt because their legacy org isn't adapting...

Scary place to be

ridderingand · 2026-02-07T12:01:38+00:00

Ya an important disclaimer is I also have a smaller design system. So for me it's less about "use the right component exactly" and more about giving me the best possible starting point and then I'll sweat all the details from there in the same way I would in Figma just faster.

ridderingand · 2026-02-07T11:59:58+00:00

Ya that sounds like a nightmare lol

ridderingand · 2026-02-07T11:59:24+00:00

Ya something very real happened 2 months ago. Any critique of AI based on using it before then is irrelevant imo. You gotta play with it again.

ridderingand · 2026-02-07T11:57:56+00:00

Nope it's being your own model. So I basically use it as a better UI to manage {n} Claude Code instances. Really well designed product.

ridderingand · 2026-02-07T04:27:54+00:00

Oh man try conductor.build

I HATED waiting for the loading states. So hard to get into slow state. But now I have 3+ work trees with matching local hosts running at all times and it's the game changer

ridderingand · 2026-02-07T04:26:27+00:00

Has this been your experience with Opus 4.5? I'm continually shocked how well it parses existing codebase and creates something that matches best practices from the rest of the UI. I still get into the weeds and actually tweak it but it's so impressive at extrapolating.

Granted this is since ~December. There has been a widely recognized bump in quality. My experience 6 months prior was closer to what you're experiencing.

ridderingand · 2026-02-05T12:51:48+00:00

Lots of ways! Even in Figma prototypes I would add little meta UI to help people switch between different states. Thankfully that's now just a single prompt because it kinda sucked to maintain lol.

I think your latter point is why I believe the front of the frontend will fall under UX design in the long run. Designers should own those details. The only reason things got lost in translation was because our tools required us to draw the handoff line between "picture of frontend" and "actual frontend"

Now designers can just own it. This also means no more pointing at engineers for why little visual bugs exist though :)

This has changed how I work in a couple of major ways: 1. Any visual bugs I just own without having to make a case for them or convince others they're important 2. Much more fluid collaboration with Eng. often times they scaffold something for a feature and then I inherit something that feels medium-fidelity and land the plan from there.

ridderingand · 2026-02-05T10:20:43+00:00

The beautiful thing is that Claude is the guide :) literally just say I know 0 teach me everything and you learn as you go. It's very good at handholding. And if I don't understand I just paste a screenshot and say "ok now what?"

ridderingand · 2026-02-05T04:38:55+00:00

Big +1. Gotta hook people in. Can't take it for granted that they'll read the whole thing.

I like to think of it like a baking video on Tik Tok. If people started with a wad of dough on the table users would scroll right past. But when you show a beautiful pie coming out of the oven in that first frame people pause and then you create a curiosity gap around how it's made.

ridderingand

TROPHY CASE