A designer’s guide to AI: Why this designer switched to Cursor | Joel Unger

How do you think about design differently now than you maybe did before?

Initially, I was a little anxious, like, "Is this thing gonna take my job?" But you quickly find out what the limitations are, and that your thoughts and prompts are the only thing driving it, and all it really does is accelerate getting those ideas out of your head faster. Figma is maybe ten percent of the job, and a lot of the rest of it is just thinking about the problems. It's even greater. With AI, you can get right into the gnarly parts of the problems right away.

[upbeat music] Welcome to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI enthusiast, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we're speaking with Joel Unger, design director at Atlassian, who has spent the last decade building great products we all know and love, like Confluence, Bitbucket, and Trello. Joel answers the question, "Are designers really going to code?" with a resounding yes, showing us how he takes his Trello prototypes, puts them into Cursor, and builds interactive specs his engineering team can use to build awesome experiences. Joel is an inspiring combination of designer and engineer, and you'll learn so much from his workflows on how to build products, brand assets, and even illustrated puppies. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Paragon, the integration infrastructure for AI SaaS companies. Are AI features on your twenty twenty-five product roadmap? Whether you need to ingest data for RAG from your users' external apps like Google Drive files, Gong transcripts, or Jira tickets, or build AI agents that automate work across your users' various tools, integrations are key to building useful AI features. However, building every one of these integrations costs months of engineering, time you simply can't afford, given the rapid pace of AI advancement. Paragon is an all-in-one embedded integration platform for AI products. Industry leaders like AI21, you.com, and Copy AI use Paragon to connect over a hundred of their users' SaaS applications to ingest data for RAG and provide their AI agents with thousands of integration actions. They've accelerated their integration development velocity by up to fifty X, allowing their engineering teams to focus on core product features. Want to fast-track your integration roadmap this year? Visit useparagon.com/howiai to learn how. That's useparagon, P-A-R-A-G-O-N, .com/howiai. Hey, Joel, so great to have you here. Before we jump into the demos, and I'm really excited about what you're gonna show us, I know there's a lot of changes happening at Trello, so tell us a little bit about what you're working on right now.

Yeah, I would love to, and I'm gonna demo exactly what I've been using Trello for in preparation for this podcast. So traditional Kanban-style Trello, I'm sure you're familiar with it, uh, cards on a board. Recently, we've been pivoting Trello to become your personal productivity powerhouse, and what that means is you can now quick-capture anything from third-party apps, like from Slack, email, voice capture, notes, right to an inbox. And so that means on the go, all week long, I've been having these thoughts about, what can we talk about on the podcast? And sending them to my inbox from my phone, dragging them into columns, and it's really helping me get set up. In addition to that, I have been using Planner, the new feature that lets you not only capture your tasks, but plan time to get them done. So you can see there's a lot of surfaces that have to play together, and one of Trello's principles is tactile. How can we have drag-and-drop interactions between inbox to planner, planner to boards, boards to planner, et cetera? And this isn't a traditional, like, sidebar toggle system where you can just, like, pop in and out, uh, inbox or planner. There's not really a center to this view anymore. It's... all of these can be up beside each other at any time.