172 Episoden
#166 The Great Role Shift: Design Engineers, Claude Design, and What It Means for You
27.08.2026 | 28 Min.Join the AI Workforce Challenge Sep 07 - Sep 14 LIVE ✨ Build your own agents and skills with Claude: Let's build together
Show notes / sources
AI in Design Report 2026 — Teams chapter
Designer Fund — AI in Design 2026: The inflection point is here
The Rise of the Design Engineer — Our Culture Mag
TechCrunch — Anthropic launches Claude Design
DataCamp — What Is Claude Design?
UX Planet — Why the UX Job Market is changing in 2026
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🎥 Youtube - 7 Day Challenge, build your own AI workforce. Starts 7 September, seven days, one hour a day. 🔧 Sign up here
I work 24 hours a week. If you opened my laptop today you would not find a chatbot. You would find an org chart, built in Claude Cowork: six departments, none of them human.
In this episode I take the whole thing apart. The four text files underneath it, which are the boring part and take an afternoon to write. The six departments built on top, which are the part that actually changed my week. And the one file almost nobody builds, the one that turns a fast tool into something that sounds like you.
What you get: why a prompt library quietly fails and a memory file does not, how to name your departments after your week instead of after the tools, why a narrow role writes better than a general assistant, the one rule that stops research from ever publishing, and the honest cost of owning a system like this.
No code anywhere in it. If you can rename a folder, you can build this.
7 Day Challenge, build your own AI workforce. Starts 7 September, seven days, one hour a day. 🔧 Sign up here
AI for Designers: 5-week Bootcamp 💻 opening September
→ Sign up for the waiting list
👉 0€ Training: Build your first Claude Skill in 10 min 👈
→ Build your first Claude skill in 10 min
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Follow the Future of UX:
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Find Patricia on Socials
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🎨 Linkedin Patricia Reiners
🐦 Twitter @ux_Patricia
📝 My UX Design Blog
🎥 Youtube - Domingo Widen is a Staff Product Designer at Fin (formerly Intercom), where he leads the Frontend Infrastructure team — the team that builds the tools, design system and AI setup everyone else uses to ship. In this episode he opens up his actual workflow: a "Design Playground" repo every designer, PM and researcher can clone, prototyping directly in production, and "Search Intelligence" a persistent knowledge layer that teaches Claude how Fin designs and codes.
We talk about what happens when the Figma file stops being the deliverable: how a complex filtering system got built as a working prototype instead of ten mockups, how handoff turns into a PR plus an auto-generated spec, and why engineers ended up being the biggest users of the design team's skills. If you want a concrete, unhyped look at what an AI-native design team actually does day to day, this one is for you.
Key Learnings
There are two modes of AI prototyping and you need both.
The design system is the guardrail that makes this safe. Because everyone builds on the same components and tokens, a PM or researcher can prototype without producing something off-brand or unusable.
Skills are only as good as the information behind them. Fin's early skills gave mixed results — so they built "Search Intelligence", a persistent information layer that every skill reads from.
Handoff becomes a PR + a generated spec. A "Search Handoff" skill reads the prototype code and writes the doc: architecture, what was built, which workarounds were needed, what broke. The engineer picks it up from there and focuses on plumbing, data and edge cases.
The biggest users of the design team's skills are engineers.
Everyone works in the same medium now. PM, designer and engineer used to live in Google Docs, Figma and VS Code. Now it's one shared artifact — which makes conversations concrete but also creates an identity crisis for designers who defined their value by the file.
Curiosity + critical thinking are the two traits that survive.
Play is back — and it counts. Side projects (a baby sleep tracker, a garden planner that checks on tomatoes) are now part of a portfolio.
Domingo Widen
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/domingowiden
Portfolio: https://www.domingowiden.com
X: https://x.com/DwidenR24
Fin: https://fin.ai
Fin Operator (the tool Domingo prototypes on in production): https://fin.ai/operator
AI for Designers: 5-week Bootcamp 💻 opening September
→ Sign up for the waiting list
👉 0€ Training: Build your first Claude Skill in 10 min 👈
→ Build your first Claude skill in 10 min
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→ Free Weekly UX insights and updates: UX Newsletter
Follow the Future of UX:
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🎥 Youtube #163 The Quarterly: My 24h Work week and What I'm Actually Working On (And What I Got Wrong)
13.08.2026 | 18 Min.In this first quarterly update I talk about the private company cohorts I'm building, the free Adobe Firefly workshop series, and three shifts I saw in the field over the last three months. Plus the honest version of how I actually work: three days a week, what that constraint did to my business, and the one thing I got wrong and waited far too long to fix.
IN THIS EPISODE
Why Claude Code stopped being a developer tool and turned into a research interface
How documentation moved from hygiene to infrastructure, and why designers are well positioned for that shift
What changes in your design work the moment an AI feature acts instead of suggests
Why being an expert in everything is no longer the goal, and what replaces it
How working three days a week made my business sharper instead of smaller
Why design teams rarely struggle with tool knowledge and almost always struggle with agreement
The thing I waited six months too long to fix
RESOURCES
Work with me: if you're self-employed and open to collaborating at some point, fill out this short survey. Completely non-binding, takes two minutes.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSef6hsir1t5StSir8yPVA-0T6YsojyCmfR8X4kidDb8f7wJXw/viewform
AI for Designers: 5-week Bootcamp 💻 opening September
→ Sign up for the waiting list
👉 0€ Training: Build your first Claude Skill in 10 min 👈
→ Build your first Claude skill in 10 min
💌 Newsletter
→ Free Weekly UX insights and updates: UX Newsletter
Follow the Future of UX:
🎨 Linkedin: Future of UX Podcast
📸 Instagram: Future of UX Podcast
🍏 Apple Podcast: Future of UX
💚 Spotify: Future of UX- We are back next week! 😍
AI for Designers: 5-week Bootcamp 💻 opening September
→ Sign up for the waiting list
👉 0€ Training: Build your first Claude Skill in 10 min 👈
→ Build your first Claude skill in 10 min
💌 Newsletter
→ Free Weekly UX insights and updates: UX Newsletter
Follow the Future of UX:
🎨 Linkedin: Future of UX Podcast
📸 Instagram: Future of UX Podcast
🍏 Apple Podcast: Future of UX
💚 Spotify: Future of UX
Find Patricia on Socials
📸 Instagram @ux.patricia
🎨 Linkedin Patricia Reiners
🐦 Twitter @ux_Patricia
📝 My UX Design Blog
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Welcome to „The Future of UX“ - the podcast about the future of UX Design, where we explore how emerging technologies like AI, AR, VR, and the metaverse will impact user experience design. Join Patricia Reiners as they sit down with experts and thought leaders from the world of tech and design to discuss the latest trends, insights, and best practices in the field of UX.
From the ethics of AI to the future of user interfaces, we'll dive deep into the topics that matter most to UX designers, developers, and entrepreneurs. Whether you're just starting out
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