John Bai

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I think at this point, the fundamentals matter way more than a lot of other factors. I think people tend to gravitate towards how quickly somebody works or how many different tools they have in their arsenal, how many skills they utilize or their optimization strategy for the models

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And I think that's why seeing bits and pieces of it shine in the final deliverable matters so much. Like you said, right, the the initial hexagonal guy with two eyes, uh, that's not an art direction. That was something that was a seed that was planted that made his way into the final, you know, brand idea. And it feels good to be a part of that. I think you just can't be precious about your concepts anymore.

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because I tell people this all the time. There's probably no two designers on the cursor design team that has the same process and has the same application of tools in their process.

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I think every idea is backed by a prototype, a working prototype that not only you can present to, you know, on the big screen during a crit, but you can share the link and everyone else can interact with it and decide for themselves whether it feels right to use.

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within cursor, we have a strong culture of unshipping. And I I'm really glad we do because that helped us remove a lot of the complexity and focus on the strengths of the Grockbot app itself.

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being like cursor will make this product feel like cursor and will attract the same audience, the same types of users. The rest of the pie will not be coming to this because it looks like cursor and they're they're already going to be kind of um affected by that perception.

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it became clear to me that like the story that you tell up front is immensely important and you also kind of only get one maybe two first impressions for a user.

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It is much more important for you to learn exactly what this is capable of and how to use it before you're introduced to that first starting screen and you get hit with, you know, action paralysis.

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which is why I tell people all the time like it's not about you know adding a skip button. It's not about letting you just click through click through and jump into the product because these days with AI tools you jump into the product and you're totally confused.

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That is one of the things that I kind of believe in my core which is people will go through onboarding steps if it's engaging and it makes the value of what you're onboarding onto abundantly clear upfront

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when your target audience is engineers that expect something, they pay for something very specific. The exploratory phase becomes the opportunity for a designer to try out some of these more throwaway concepts. And I think you need to go into it expecting to fully throw them away, but to try it and to have fun with it.

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Part of the the game with prototyping quickly is that you learn these lessons early and you use that to inform the next step.

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There's a lot of discourse online these days about like we need to move away from the the chat interface and you know even if I complain about the three column approach to it. I think as I was using it it became clear this is still the right way for us to interact with a fleet of what are essentially agents carrying out tasks that are defined to them ahead of time.

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I think that's kind of the way that we design these days which is you test out a concept and if it feels like it has legs you should flesh it out further but you know if it doesn't then maybe scrap it all together and and don't waste your time

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I think it's still a very useful sketching tool. And I think especially now with agents being able to operate it, a lot of the annoying steps, like not even mentioning renaming layers, but laying out every variant of, you know, some of the stuff that you have to do a lot of typing for, I don't have to do that anymore because I just give the link to my bot and it'll do it according to how I describe it.

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So, I wouldn't say I start with cursor immediately. I think there still is the need for me to visualize it so that I know how in turn to communicate the concept back to cursor.

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I think Figma is still the appropriate place to generate and build some visual conviction around an idea before you start committing to actually prototyping it.