Dive Club 🤿

Capital, early Cash App, and most recently, X, all have one designer in common — [Brandon Jacoby](https://x.com/JacobyBrandon).
In this episode Brandon is talking about how he’s combining his years of experience designing with fresh, high-functioning teams and is now launching an all-new independent practice to help founders push past good enough.
He shares some really interesting thoughts on taste, being creative with AI, and how to thrive in a 0->1 environment.
Some highlights:
- The types of designer who get most amplified by AI
- What it takes to thrive while designing a 0→1 experience
- How Brandon is positioning himself as a new independent
- The difference between "seeing taste" and "creating taste"
- What Nikita (X Head of Product) taught Brandon about onboarding
- + a lot more

- John Lasseter (Pixar director) quote - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFbOOjAC_Fg
- Tolan app (mentioned as example of creative onboarding) - https://www.tolans.com/
- Owen Jennings at Block (Brandon’s mentor for 4 years) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/owenbrittonjennings/
- Nikita (former Head of Product at X) - https://x.com/nikitabier

When it comes to tools and workflows, Brian Lovin (https://x.com/brian_lovin) is someone I pay very close attention to.
He’s actually the one who first got me hooked on Conductor (https://www.conductor.build/).
But times are changing (again 😅)…
So today’s episode is a deep dive into his design process and all of the ways he’s iterating on his approach to both using AI tools as well as building AI tools at Notion.
If you like getting into the weeds of how the best designers are wrangling AI then you’re going to love this episode.
Some highlights:
- Why his first Notion design offsite was so impactful
- How Brian built Notion’s prototyping playground
- Why Brian has started using Cursor again
- Practical tips for prompting AI more effectively
- Behind-the-scenes of Brian’s new side project
- How to stay relevant as a designer in an AI world
- + a lot more

- Agentation and Dialkit for frontend ([https://agentation.com](https://agentation.com/), https://joshpuckett.me/dialkit)
- Cursor and Conductor for coding ([https://conductor.build](https://conductor.build/))
- Brian’s side project Shiori ([https://shiori.sh](https://shiori.sh/))
- Max Schoening nerd snipes Brian (https://x.com/mschoening)
- Karri’s issue tracking is dead article (https://linear.app/next)

If you're like me you gotta be curious... what's it like designing at OpenAI?
So I’m excited to share today’s episode with you :)
It’s a deep dive with OpenAI’s Head of Product Design, Ian Silber (https://x.com/iansilber).
Some highlights:
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- The traits of the best systems thinkers at OpenAI
- What makes the design culture at OpenAI unique
- The vision for OpenAI's dynamic interface library
- What it's like designing around chat as a primitive
- What makes designing with AI as a material so unique
- How tools like Codex are changing the practice of design
- + a lot more

- Mike Matas and Brandon Walkin (creators of Origami) https://mikematas.com/ , https://medium.com/designatmeta/introducing-origami-live-and-origami-2-0-a68116294e65
- Cursor and Codex (AI coding tools) https://cursor.com/ ,(https://chatgpt.com/codex/?c_id=23226110534&c_agid=188421385415&c_crid=800871103650&c_kwid=kwd-111182835&c_ims=&c_pms=9017288&c_nw=g&c_dvc=c&gad_campaignid=23226110534&gbraid=0AAAAA-I0E5dO-SVXduV4xJjtnqTNMNrAP)

Remember when the Carl Rivera (https://www.dive.club/deep-dives/carl-rivera) told us about his vision to create the new Shopify Product Design Studio?
Well in this episode I got to sit down with Marvin Schwaibold (https://x.com/MSchwaibold) from Molly studio who Shopify recently acquired to bring that vision to life.
We go deep into creativity, Marvin's journey with Molly, how he's building his ideas with AI, and a lot more.
Some highlights:
- How to become a well of creative ideas
- How AI unlocks how designers work at Shopify
- What design differentiation looks like at Shopify
- What Marvin has learned diving into Claude Code
- How designers at Shopify create and leverage internal tools
- Behind-the-scenes of redesigning the famous Collins website
- + a lot more

- Jaytel - Marvin’s design partner from Molly studio https://x.com/Jaytel
- Brian Collins - legendary designer who worked on the Collins website redesign https://wearecollins.com/
- Carl Rivera - Shopify’s Chief Design Officer (referenced previous Dive Club episode) https://www.dive.club/deep-dives/carl-rivera
- Design Fluid Interfaces video from Apple’s Human Interface team (2019) [https://developer.apple.com/br/videos/play/wwdc2018/803/?time=1551](https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/808/)
- Claude Code - AI coding tool by Anthropic https://claude.ai/login
- Artifact - internal Shopify tool for showcasing design work https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jaytel_this-was-meant-to-stay-inside-shopify-but-activity-7422739773561384960-oqiU/

Flora Guo (https://x.com/floguo) has one of the more impressive career trajectories of anyone I've interviewed on this show.
She's currently the founding design engineer at Paradigm. But before that Guillermo (Vercel CEO) personally DM'd her to join the Vercel team.
So we're going deep into career growth, design engineering, what it's like being a founding designer at an AI-native startup.
- What it’s like being a founding design engineer at Paradigm
- The challenges of designing AI-first products that work at scale
- Flora’s experiments with new design tools like Paper and Variant
- What Flora learned working alongside top design engineers at Vercel
- How Flora evolved her workflow with Claude Code over the past year
- Mental models for using AI as a learning tool rather than just a task executor
- + a lot more

- Tokyo Design Forum (February 2026) - https://www.tokyodesignforum.com/
- UI Engineering 101 by Mariana Castillo and Derek Briggs - https://maven.com/pixeljanitor/uiengineering-101-for-designers
- We talked about Rauno Freiberg's portfolio (Vercel design engineer) - https://rauno.me/
- New tools: Paper - https://join.dive.club/paper-ad-email