Maggie Appleton - How to design for the future of AI products and LLMs (Dive Club Ep. 57)

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 - elicit.com/?redirected=true (they’re hiring)
“How Trello is different” - www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-di…) is where Joel Spolsky explains the differences between horizontal and vertical software
OpenAI’s introduction of ChatGPT-4o - openai.com/index/hello-gpt-4o/
We talked about the product tldraw - www.tldraw.com/
[The expanding dark forest and generative AI - maggieappleton.com/forest-talk Maggie’s talk about the possible futures of flooding the web with AI-generated content
Episode with Soleio - www.dive.club/deep-dives/soleio) where he talks about looking for “time to proficiency” in design candidates

Chapters
0:00 Jitter
0:43 Intro
1:51 Maggie Appleton
3:51 How Maggie got ramped up as the first designer
6:17 How LLMs are impacting Maggie's approach to design
8:43 Designing in the short-run limbo
10:38 UI patterns for interacting with AI
15:40 Age of multi-modal models
16:33 TLDraw
18:58 Why Maggie is more interested in cognitive AI than generative AI
23:17 Maggie's journey with code
25:47 Maggie's thoughts on design engineering
28:52 How Maggie approaches learning
32:30 Impact of AI on Design
34:25 How much technical knowledge designers will need
39:01 How AI will impact the role of a designer
43:16 How AI might impact our roles soon
47:08 How Maggie uses Copilot
48:32 The impact of digital gardening

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