‘We just have to experiment faster’: AI’s changed design forever. Now what?

Designers are now coders—or better be. Your interface is a moat—or irrelevant. Inside the dizzying chaos of how AI is upending the design profession, starring its high priests at Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, Krea, and more.

I may have just seen the biggest interface breakthrough in years. Or not. But I think so? 

Things are moving so fast that it’s hard to tell.

Ryo Lu, head of design at the white-hot coding tool Cursor has invited me to their charcoal-hued San Francisco studio. Before anyone says hello, I’m greeted by a pile of footwear in the entry of the no-shoes open office. I suddenly regret my choice to wear my New Balance loafers without socks.

The softspoken Lu, donning the creative-approved uniform of flowy wide-legged pants and a button down, weaves me through desks—past half a sports bar’s worth of uptime monitors and a shelf of knicknacks including a New Jeans record and Bondi Blue iMac.

Maybe you’re a normie and you haven’t even heard of Cursor. That’s okay. It’s an AI coding startup at the vanguard of this movement that many now believe will reshape software as we know it. Cursor is aimed at serious development teams, but as we sit at his desk, Lu acknowledges that strength is also a weakness. If you’ve signed up for Cursor to do some casual vibecoding, you’ll probably find yourself disoriented by the command lines and acronyms that live throughout the software.

Lu proposes he can solve this tension with his new project, something he’s calling “Baby Cursor.” Lu imagines Baby Cursor as the next generation of the company’s software, which first launched in 2023. When he loads it, I see no scary boxes of code. I’m mostly just looking at a prompt. But with a tap, a designer can pull up an app and rearrange its components, which will spit out the updates as code. Or a product manager can load a project summary and translate goals into concrete workflows. Or anyone, really, can pull up a team of agents to coordinate and work while they grab a matcha.

As Lu whirs around his creation, he demonstrates how Baby Cursor can ultimately unfurl to a massive workstation—not unlike how Cursor looks now—or shrink down into an assistant that lives in the corner of your screen. Lu is imagining the future of Cursor as something of an infinite Swiss Army Knife, where every window offers a different facet of the service: an AI with a dozen different faces that all plug into the same engine, offering the perfect interface for any audience. 

“All I’m thinking is make Cursor the most simple thing and the most crazy thing all at once,” he says. 

But the craziest part about Baby Cursor isn’t even the design. It’s that Lu built it in a single week, with just one other person. Read that again: A team of two rebuilt Cursor, currently valued at $29.3 billion, in a week.

While for most of us, the AI revolution has meant little more than conversational search engines, auto-written emails, and endless streams of multimedia slop, in the Valley, it’s completely upending product development. The way software is built has not only changed; it’s hit an exponential acceleration. Now, the designer can be the coder who can be the product manager, in a development process that can go straight from concept to production in a single step.

I’ve visited San Francisco countless times over my two decades of reporting, but during a trip three years ago, I felt the world shift a little. After ChatGPT exploded to the mainstream in 2023, I visited ground zero of the AI revolution, taking a 72-hour tour of startups in an attempt to untangle how AI was going to impact the future of design—and by proxy, the way people would experience this new technology in their lives. 

Just three years ago, designers waxed poetic in deeply philosophical discussions that unpacked ideas like: What, really, is an LLM? What might you do with an omniscient machine other than chat? With AI as the engine behind software, how could its touchpoints change into something we’ve never imagined before?

Then in February, I returned as both a design journalist and AI tourist, and found people were now speaking in far more concrete terms. I took back-to-back meetings at AI giants including OpenAI and Anthropic, and I also checked in with the investors and startups chasing the next big thing. In several cases, I caught up with the same people three years later to see how their views had changed. 

The piece that follows is a synthesis of their perspectives and my own observations. Think of it as a snapshot of the AI zeitgeist, and a forecast into what happens when the designer is also the software developer.

As Jason Yuan, a former Apple designer who founded the social AI startup Future Lovers tells me, “There’s never been a better time to be an auteur.”

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Mark Wilson is the global design editor at Fast Company, who covers the entirety of design’s impact on culture and business.. An authority in product design, UX, AI, experience design, retail, food, and branding, he has reported landmark features on companies ranging from Nike and Google to MSCHF, Canva, Samsung, Snap, IDEO, and Target, while profiling design luminaries including Tyler the Creator, Jony Ive, and Salehe Bembury More

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