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 developer
• Why Maggie feels like she’s in a short-run limbo
• Strategies for improving your technical literacy
• How writing online has impacted Maggie’s career
• The AI-native tools that Maggie is drawing inspiration from
• How advancements in AI will redefine her role as a designer
• How Maggie’s new understanding of LLMs is shaping the way she designs
• Why Maggie is more interested in the cognitive applications of AI rather than generative AI
• Maggie is currently leading design at Elicit (they’re hiring)
• “How Trello is different” is where Joel Spolsky explains the differences between horizontal and vertical software
• OpenAI’s introduction of ChatGPT-4o
• We talked about the product tldraw
• The expanding dark forest and generative AI: Maggie’s talk about the possible futures of flooding the web with AI-generated content
• Episode with Soleio where he talks about looking for “time to proficiency” in design candidates