2026-04-26 08:00:00
Gokul Rajaram broke design Twitter yesterday. The man knows how to get attention. He said there won’t be any design roles anymore. People will rely on outsourced designers to come in, set up a design system. No permanent design roles in companies.
Engineers and PMs will design going forward.
If you have worked with good designers, you know this is not happening.
This whole AI psychosis pandemic has turned every role into a funeral. People vibe code a landing page using the latest Claude model and declare that Figma is dead.
Designers are dead. Front end engineers dead. PMs dead. Everyone is dead except the guy posting the thread. That guy is safe. Because they are doing something that AI can’t do. Of course.
They believe front-end engineering is just generating static components. They think designer’s job is creating a design system. Then whenever there is a requirement, they just open Figma, pick a button from their system, choose a card component, send it to the developer, and call it a day.
IMHO there are at least four layers to designing a product.
First, there is product design. What problem are we even solving? Who has the problem? Why does it matter? What is the smallest thing we can ship that actually changes user behavior?
Then there is interaction design. What is the flow? What happens when the user taps this? How do we give feedback on the user’s action? What are the edge case? What happens when the user has bad internet?
There is visual design. The actual screen. The hierarchy. The spacing. The type. The contrast. Yes, you can use a design system for this. But even then it is a judgement call on which components to pick.
And then there is aesthetics. Delight. Wow. Whatever you want to call it. It is Emil (great animation course by the way) adding some animation that makes the screen come alive. It is Benji going deep into delighting the user with every interaction in the Family app.
I read an article somewhere, I think it was by the Boring Apps guy, that said the best apps are games. In other words, there is a layer of design that turns an app into a game. You can call it the fifth layer.
You start from the highest abstraction and keep going lower.
Yes, you can start with code. You can start with Figma. You can start with a paper sketch. It does not matter. The tool is not the point.
20 years back the tool was Photoshop. Then it was Sketch. Then Figma. It can be Claude Code tomorrow.
The job of a designer is turning an abstract problem into a real solution that reaches the end user’s device.
A design system helps you ship the artefact faster. It does not tell you what to build.
And Figma will obviously get agents soon. It is inevitable. A lot of the boring operational work will get automated. You will describe a screen, and Figma will generate the first draft. You will ask for states, and it will create them. You will ask it to clean up spacing, align components, maybe even create a prototype.
But this does not mean that designers disappear. The best designers will just get more leverage.
The same thing is already happening with developers. Good engineers are now not paid because they can write functions. They are paid because they can think through tradeoffs. Architecture. Scale. Reliability. What to build now. What not to build. Where to be careful. Where to move fast.
The actual code writing is slowly becoming less important.
While judgment (dare I call it taste) is becoming more important.
Design will go the same way.
I have been writing about this for a few years now. Tech is going down the high-finance path. Smaller teams. Higher leverage. Fewer people doing more work. The middle gets squeezed. The best people get paid absurdly well because one good person with the right tools can now do the work of five decent people.
I know this well because when I left my job last year, I bought a lot of design books. I even posted a photo of all my books stacked together. It went viral.
I read most of them. I spent time in Figma. I bought 3 courses. Emil’s. Rauno’s. Josh Puckett’s.
I have created tons of landing pages. Components. Posters. Random brand explorations. I got better. But incrementally.
There is a big difference between someone who can make something neat and someone who can make something great. I can make things neat. I can’t create great.
Maybe someday.
The best designers don’t just make neat things from standardised design systems. They make things feel great. They know when to add tension. When to remove. When to make something quiet. When to make it loud. When to break the grid. When to respect it.
There is a famous design head in India who apparently says during design reviews, “Ismein sex nahi hai. Mazza nahi aa raha.”
Crude, but accurate. He is talking about the missing element. The thing that separates neat work from great.
Most AI-generated design today has no sex. Because today’s models mostly generate the highest-probability output. They give you what the internet has already agreed a thing should look like. That is useful when you want speed. When you want a design system. It is not enough when you want wow.
The wow often comes from breaking away from the obvious output.
And yes, models will get better. Much better. They will generate more options, understand taste better, but everyone will have access to the same models. And everyone will get the same results.
There was a time when every SaaS company had the same friendly vector illustrations. Then everyone used the same pastel blobs. Then everyone discovered the same serif fonts. Then everyone used the same Bento grids. Then everyone started using Instrument Serif. All of these felt fresh initially. When everyone adopted them, it became slop.
AI will accelerate this cycle. A style will become popular. Everyone will prompt it. Then users will stop feeling anything.
That is why taste matters. And not design systems. And why there will still be designers. And they will be paid very well.
2026-04-19 08:00:00
There are 2 types of Twitter famous.
There are 2 types of Twitter famous.
I read Will Manidis’ Against Cynicism. It was directly addressed to another SF Twitter account that dunks on people every day. Let’s call him Milo. If you scroll Milo’s profile, you mostly see him complaining about how the world is unfair, how everyone is a scammer, how everything is broken. It gets tiring after the first 10 tweets.
Now, being Milo is not bad. A lot of people will cheer you on. Any dunk on a person above you in the status hierarchy will get you likes.
But it is soul-crushing in the long term. People may like your salty tweets, but good people will not want to work with you.
A few years back, when I decided to meme more, I posted some absolute bangers. I grew my account from around 3k followers to 30k through a mix of being type 1 and type 2 famous. Type 2 mostly came from Figma and a bit of humour.
Even then, I felt my ratio of sarcastic posts to value was too high. As someone who wanted to work in leadership roles, I was not sure I would even hire myself.
After a while, you get bored too. How many times will you meme on a popular person? How many times will you jump on the hot topic? So I stopped.
I am not a saint. I still dunk occasionally. I still lash out from time to time. But I felt much better when I started indexing again on type 1 fame instead of type 2.
Why am I sharing this?
A lot of people DM me on Twitter. Many of them are type 2 famous. And I almost never want to work with them.
One of my tests for hiring is the same online and offline: if I meet you, do I come away with more energy or less? If I scroll your Twitter, do I feel more optimistic and energized, or do I feel like you will bring that same negative energy into the workplace?
We are being judged constantly, whether we like it or not.
It is the same reason I used to get very upset earlier in my career when HR people questioned why I changed jobs every year. Later I understood it. Hiring is a long-term decision. It costs money and time. You do not want to keep hiring for the same role again and again. So people optimize for the kind of person who sticks through.
Most companies are hard. Early startups especially. You do not want people who get bored fast or bail at the first difficult moment.
Yes, every point has a counterpoint. Some smartass will say there is no loyalty in tech, just do what is best for you at the moment.
But Twitter, like career, is a game theory problem.
In the short term, everyone optimizes for themselves. In the long term, they realize this is not a one-time payoff game. Life is long. Career is long. In iterative games, it makes sense to optimize for the long term. Being against cynicism is part of that.
This is also why managers who join a new company often bring their best people with them. Your favourite people from Twitter will end up collaborating on projects. People will hire type 1 from Twitter much more readily than type 2.
And if you really want to be type 2, it is better to be Roon or TBPN than Milo.
2026-04-13 08:00:00
Prediction markets do not just have a product problem. They have a branding problem.
The product is useful. It may even be better than polls, pundits, and the best truth seeking instrument out there. But most people still place it in the same mental bucket as sports betting.
In 1954, Marlboro had a similiar problem. Filtered cigarettes were seen as feminine. The brand’s slogan was “Mild as May.” The packaging was designed to hide lipstick stains. Men wanted filters, because the early health data was starting to trickle in, but they didn’t want to be seen holding a woman’s cigarette.
Leo Burnett, the ad man Philip Morris hired to fix this, didn’t try to educate men about filter technology.
He didn’t run charts about tar reduction. He didn’t appeal to reason at all. Instead, he put a cowboy on a horse in the American wilderness and stuck a filtered Marlboro between his lips. Within two years, sales went from $5 billion to $20 billion.
Leo’s genius wasn’t associating Marlboro with cowboys, but resolving a specific tension the customer already felt. Men wanted to do the sensible thing: use a filter, but didn’t want to feel less masculine for doing it. The cowboy gave them permission. He turned a health concession into a strength signal.
Prediction markets have an eerily similiar tension right now. And nobody has solved it yet.
Right now, the category asks the user to cross an awkward social gap. The user wants to feel sharp, independent, someone who is willing to put money where their mouth is and take non-consensus positions. But the product still risks making them look like a gambler. All the language around “event contracts” and “forecasting tools” falls flat. People don’t want to listen to another podcast of Kalshi founders explaining PvP vs House and the business model of exchanges.
The category has utility, but no clean archetype.
The current category is muddled because it signals too many things at once. Investor. Trader. Bettor. Forecaster. Political obsessive. Crypto speculator. None of these fully works as the public face of the product. Some are too cold. Some are too degenerate. Others are too niche.
In a world full of cheap opinions, there is real status in being willing to attach consequences to a view.
That is why the best prediction-market branding will not focus first on regulation, market structure, or financial language. It will focus on self-image. What kind of person uses this product, and what does that say about them?
Marlboro worked because it turned a potential weakness into a strength signal. Prediction markets need to do the same. The breakthrough will come when using one feels less like placing a bet and more like showing that you are willing to stand behind your view.
2026-04-12 08:00:00
There are pull jobs and then there are push jobs.
In a pull job your work starts when someone asks. Someone needs data, analysis, approval, context, a deck, a bug fix, a report. And they pull it from you. You respond. You check the box.
In a push job you create forward motion without waiting to be asked. You ship the code. You make the decision. You write the update before someone chases you for it. You spot the problem, frame it, and make progress on it without anyone following up with you.
Pull jobs can still be valuable. Plenty of important functions are structurally pull-oriented. Support tickets, compliance reviews, certain reporting cycles. They keep the machine running. But they usually have a ceiling.
If your contribution only appears when someone remembers to ask for it, your leverage stays limited. You become a function people call when they need something. An API endpoint.
While Push jobs compound. They change the pace of the team. They reduce coordination cost. They create momentum others can build on. When someone writes the spec before the planning meeting or fixes bugs without being asked, they don’t just do their job, they make everyone around them faster and better too.
A real example: You have an analyst who is extraordinary at pull work. Ask for a revenue breakdown by cohort and you’d get a perfect sheet in thirty minutes. But that analyst never once comes to you and say, “Churn is spiking in this segment. Here’s what I think is causing it. Here are three things we could test.” An analyst who pushes vs pulling is 10X more valuable.
The question you should be asking yourself: is your work shaped by demand, or are you creating movement? And if it’s demand, is that because of your role, or because of you?
That answer tells you a lot about your ceiling.
(A senior engineering leader at Gojek first shared this framework, and it has stayed with me.)
2026-02-27 08:00:00
Twitter is still undefeated for hiring.
We just closed our Founding Designer because he saw a tweet and DM’d. Now we’re hiring developers the same way. One of the best recruiters in India told me his conversion rate: 1 hire for every 50 conversations. For us it’s probably 1 in 100. We want to keep the team small and only work with the best.
But this post isn’t about the open role. It’s about how we think about hiring in 2026. Because I think the rules have changed and most companies haven’t caught up.
Let me start with a story.
6 months ago I was chatting with a friend. One of the sharpest devs I know. CTO-1 at his company. Someone who’d be running the entire engineering org at a startup eventually. Back then he was thinking about his career path. Manage more people, become a CTO, get more equity. The usual career ladder climbing stuff.
I talked to him again 2 weeks ago.
He has removed all reporting lines. Zero direct reports. All he does now is manage agents. Junior devs just slow him down. He doesn’t think layers of management will exist in a few years.
He went to his founders and said “let me just build with agents full time.”
He told me he’s scared too. He doesn’t know what happens to software engineering from here. So his short term play is to operate at the highest level of abstraction possible and let agents handle everything underneath.
This is one of the best devs/EMs I’ve worked with in my career. And he’s restructuring his entire role around AI.
If the best devs I know are already worried about the future. If companies like Block are laying off 40% of their workforce. Then what kind of people should an early stage startup even look for?
Here’s how I think about it.
There’s no “1 month KT” to ramp up anymore. You can have an agent explain the full context of a codebase in an afternoon. Most dev docs now let you chat with them. Cloudflare rebuilt Next.js in a week. (Okay, experimental. But agentic coding only gets better from here.)
The things that used to matter, years of experience in a specific stack, deep familiarity with a codebase, knowing where all the bodies are buried, those things are getting commoditized fast. An agent can get you 80% of that context in a day.
So what actually matters now? I keep coming back to three things.
We recently hired our founding designer. Here’s what stood out.
I told him upfront that we will hire only a full-stack designer. Product design. Visual design. Even illustrations sometimes. The craft isn’t in pushing pixels anymore. The moat is taste.
I give open ended assignments to test people. To him, I gave the task to think through our brand and homepage. He came back with a dozen different directions. Different IA, different themes. Working on details no one would expect from a take home assignment. He kept following up. Kept trying to understand what we’re building.
That alone was impressive. But what sealed it was the follow-up chats.
He’d tried every AI design tool out there. He also follows all my favourite designers. Vercel’s team, Linear’s team.
Every cool landing page I had bookmarked, he had them in his bookmarks too.
I think about developer hiring the same way now.
The job has changed. You’re not just writing code anymore. You’re managing a fleet of agents while having the technical depth to architect systems. You need to operate at every level of abstraction. System design one day, debugging agent output the next.
The developers I want to work with are already using AI coding tools. Claude Code, Cursor. Codex.
They’re excited about where this is going, not threatened by it. They learn fast. They bring energy and optimism. They make the people around them better. They have taste. They know what great software feels like because they’ve studied the best.
I don’t think this is just how we hire. I think this is where hiring is going for most startups.
The resume, the years of experience, the specific tech stack. All of that matters less every month.
Slope. Energy. Taste. Agency. That’s all that matters.
2026-02-17 08:00:00
Before I worked with him, I had met good designers. People who are the absolute best when it comes to interaction design, the kind who would sit and think through every possible way you can interact with a component on screen. Then there are people who are brilliant at visual stuff but have no idea about basic interactions. And of course, there are people really good at the product design stuff: thinking holistically about why a feature is built, what it does, what kind of things you should ship. Almost working like a pseudo PM. If you look at fidelity, there are different levels you can work with. Low, mid, high. I’ve worked with people who are now designers at tier-one companies who refuse to turn their mid-fidelity wireframes into visual designs. They rely on a design system and expect some visual designer to turn their concepts into reality. They don’t want to worry about margin and padding.
But Vaibhav? He’s the guy who would be jamming with you on a whiteboard on very complex user problems. From concept to different levels of fidelity to pulling ideas from completely different domains to shape the product.
I have a similar interest in design. I’ve read dozens of books on product design, branding. I spend time on Midjourney figuring out abstract ideas. I like sitting on Figma doing random posters. But I am probably 60% of everything. And you can’t get to a tier-one product by being 60%.
But I know what needs to be done. I’ll sit on Google Stitch and iterate multiple designs for a product card. I’ll use Claude Code and iterate on a dozen different ideas for a homepage. Style transfer is pretty easy with AI now. In today’s age, I don’t think you really need to sit on Figma and grind out every detail. It’s very easy to move between fidelity levels. You can jam with Claude, build a skill around how to think through branding, open up the branding guidelines of five great companies: Wise, Square, Klarna, whatever. Figure out how they do typography, how they’ve done colors, how they think through the brand. You can study how other great brands have been built, what they stand for, and come up with what you want the user to feel when they use your app and what kind of users you want to attract. But even though I have the ideas, it is very hard for me, as someone who is probably not even 60% when it comes to branding, to produce the actual artifacts. BTW Gojek had one of the best brand books ever. Kudos to Abhinit and gang who came up with it.
When I talk to designers now, they are rigid. They want to do only interaction design. They don’t want to think about working on, say, your logo because they think it’s a different skill, a different craft. And sure, they should focus on being spiky in one dimension. But the reality is that roles are compressing. Even though you need 99th-percentile talent and skill across all these things, in the early stage, you want people who do everything.
Forget early stage when we were a public company, Vaibhav was working on killer decks for the product features we shipped.
And that is what I really miss.
I miss working with someone who would be excited about jamming on an idea late at night. Someone who has the taste and agency to turn it into a wireframe where you can jam more on a specific direction. Then the taste and the craft to bring it to life. And more than all of that. Someone who doesn’t think creating a deck to highlight a feature is beneath them because they’re now “Head of Design.”
There are very, very few people like that. Trust me, I have tried. The only other designer who came close was another designer who was even better in terms of craft. But for some reason, he was insanely hard to work with. One of those mega-talented people (with extremely bad people skills) who are just difficult to collaborate with. But Vaibhav was a gem of a person to be around too. Kind. Happy to give more than he takes. So it becomes very hard to compromise.
So yeah. This long rant is really about one thing: we need a tier-one designer. We raised one of the biggest seed rounds in India last year. Backed by tier-one VCs. We’re building a product in the prediction market space. Initially remote, but happy to discuss relocation to Dubai. We’re willing to move for the best talent. Happy to pay the best salary — but it depends on where you are on the experience curve, the skill curve, and what you bring to the table. The more skills you have, the more willing you are to push yourself, the better. We grind a lot. So we expect you to also.
That’s why this is a cultural fit only if you’re the kind of person who likes trying out the latest design tools the day they launch. Someone who keeps a mood board for typography, designs, colors. Who loves spending time on Cosmos. The kind of person who tried Variant AI the day it dropped. Not the kind of person who rates themselves 5 out of 5 on interaction design with no proof of work to back it up.
And definitely not someone who thinks building a deck or spending 15 minutes on Figma to create a hiring post is beneath them.