S6 | E7: Maggie Appleton - Becoming an AI-native designer

This week’s episode with Maggie Appleton is a deep dive into designing for AI products and LLMs. Maggie shares about her experience as the first designer at Elicit (an AI assistant for research papers) and all of the unique challenges surrounding helping users interface with LLMs.We also go deep into:How Maggie’s grown as a frontend developerWhy Maggie feels like she’s in a short-run limboStrategies for improving your technical literacyHow writing online has impacted Maggie’s careerThe AI-native tools that Maggie is drawing inspiration fromHow advancements in AI will redefine her role as a designerHow Maggie’s new understanding of LLMs is shaping the way she designsWhy Maggie is more interested in the cognitive applications of AI rather than generative AIMaggie is currently leading design at Elicit (they’re hiring)“How Trello is different” is where Joel Spolsky explains the differences between horizontal and vertical softwareOpenAI’s introduction of ChatGPT-4oWe talked about the product tldrawThe expanding dark forest and generative AI: Maggie’s talk about the possible futures of flooding the web with AI-generated contentEpisode with Soleio where he talks about looking for “time to proficiency” in design candidates