Adam Karnas

Vibe coding and raising a baby until June... then back to being a Design Lead @Google (Meet).Founding Design Team @oscarhealth @joinlevel, Dad, Cyclist, Drummer

[Adam Karnas @AJKarnas]

The most valuable thing designers can do right now might be letting go.

Chatted with @fuegoux about the great divide — and the idea I keep coming back to: there's a huge portion of the internet that's genuinely underserved by good design. That's where our energy should go. The low-complexity work? Let non-designers have it.

But to get there, we have to rediscover the parts of our skillset that actually travel — human-centered design, systems thinking, the stuff they taught you in school that you parked. Those skills aren't antithetical to AI workflows. They're congruent with them.

The shift is letting go of linear processes and adopting loops — ideating *with* AI instead of just feeding it your plans.

That's not a threat. That's the upgrade.

https://t.co/RfkjnxqNyr

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

claude code just shipped routines

you tell it what to do, point it at your project, set a trigger, and it runs 24/7 on their servers with your laptop closed

i immediately thought of larry ellison: "the money is never in the technology, it's in the infrastructure the technology runs on"

the model is the commodity. the trigger is the product. and whoever maps the most valuable real world events to the most specific industry workflows is going to build something massive

here's what i mean by trigger....

a permit gets filed. a customer's usage drops 40% in a week. a competitor launches a feature. a deal sits in your pipeline untouched for 14 days. a contract hits 90 days before renewal. a stripe payment fails. these are all triggers.

some public, some inside your own tools and every single one is a moment where an AI agent can step in and do something valuable before a human gets around to it

the playbook is like this:

map every trigger that matters in one industry → wire an AI agent to each one → sell the outcome. the person who shows up first with exactly what someone needs at exactly the right moment wins the deal every time

and the people who go embarrassingly deep on one industry's trigger map are going to build generational companies

that's the entire game right now for people reading this tweet.

claude routines, openclaw, hermes etc... the infrastructure is all here.

just pick your niche

build audiences/content to get awareness

wire the agents to triggers

start selling

and pinch yourself that this is the greatest time in history to be starting a company

let's go

[Adam Karnas @AJKarnas]

AI continues to floor me.

Needed abstract backgrounds for an iOS app, so I asked Claude to build a custom design tool that blends video with adjustable parameters and exports directly to Swift.

Got it in one shot. The workflow speed is unreal. ⚡️

[Soleio @soleio]

Wake up, designers. While jobs across other functions are surging through the AI transition, design roles are stagnant.

Don’t take refuge in craft and taste. All members of technical staff must demonstrate newfound productivity. If that’s a topic you’ve avoided because it involves shipping or knowing your business model inside-out, you will struggle to make the case for your own field.

When designers can’t articulate their company strategy, it’s usually because they are neither its authors nor its executors.

Seeking new leverage is no longer optional.

[Adam Karnas @AJKarnas]

@lakikentaki: loved your interview on @lennyspodcast . I'll trade you some typography skills for a deep dive on your latest documentation and context workflow 😆

[Adam Karnas @AJKarnas]

Finished my first working iOS app... here's my journey
v1 - n8n email-only (no ui); took me 10 hours (April 2025)
v2 - n8n + Glide UI; 8 hours (June 2025)
v3 - Google AI studio + Sheets backend; 4 hours w/ redesign (December 2025)
v4 - Google AI studio + Firebase backend; 2 hours (Feb 2026)
v5 - Claude + Capacitor; 1 hours (March 2026)

3 subscriptions turned into one. Time reduced by 90%. Quality unbelievably high. This is so fun. More about the project soon...

[Adam Karnas @AJKarnas]

Fewer UX jobs are coming. The ones that remain will be the most exciting places to work.

As @Padday put it way back in 2018 — we got too obsessed with "navel gazing." Not everything can be UXed. Rightsizing supply to demand is necessary, even if it's going to be painful.

[Adam Karnas @AJKarnas]

We (probably) don't need designers anymore.

I know. But hear me out. Big shoutout to @gregisenberg for all the Claude → Figma progress he's been sharing — it's what got me thinking hard about where UX is actually going. Thread 🧵

[Adam Karnas @AJKarnas]

3/4 AI will right-size UX. The artificial demand created by bootcamps and FAANG-era hiring is unwinding. What survives: the designers who went to school, understand human-centered design, do divergent thinking, and get equally excited about beauty AND function.

Design is not decoration. It's differentiated human value in context.

[weisser @julianweisser]

$1.5M ARR in 2 weeks.

Zero (human) teammates.

Solo Founders Podcast is live with @bencera of @polsia, an AI that runs your company while you sleep.

His solo founder rule: 80% AI, 20% taste.

0:00 — How "solo founder" has changed with AI
2:40 — Scoping and trusting AI agents to ship
5:30 — Cloud Kitchens with Travis Kalanick
9:52 — Mount Fuji: Where Polsia was born
13:55 — 80/20 rule: 80% AI, 20% taste
21:24 — Building for yourself, not imaginary customers
23:10 — The game that inspired Polsia
29:55 — Polsia as an economy: The bigger vision
40:59 — How Polsia actually works today
51:35 — Why not just build businesses yourself?
57:55 — Advice for new builders: Push AI to the edge

[Adam Karnas @AJKarnas]

@surayashivji - I love your workflow . It's not artificial. It's emulating how a designer works with other designers. It's familiar and it's powerful.

https://t.co/u9xodRwBTp

[Theoretically Media @TheoMediaAI]

Google Genie is seriously mind bending.
This is a Text To World prompt of a man walking down Hollywood Blvd. I am not only controlling the movement of the man, but also the camera.

This is the World Model we've been waiting for.
More Below!

[Adam Karnas @AJKarnas]

@hobdaydesign Thanks, Anthony!

[Adam Karnas @AJKarnas]

Using Google AI Studio + Whispr Flow together. We’ve arrived.

[Adam Karnas @AJKarnas]

@doctorinigo Are we confident that the 20 year timeline to AD will be consistent among people that are 40-50 years younger? Curious if there is any indication that younger brains are inherently more resilient, and the process to go from T2D from AD would be >20, and if so by how much?

[Columbia Surgery @ColumbiaSurgery]

Comfort comes in many forms. Today our surgeons hosted a Healing Concert that will be shared virtually w/ patients all throughout the hospital.❤️

Here is Dr. Liou (piano), gen surgery resident, & Dr. Dyrszka (cello), orthopedic surgeon.

video @MebrakKahsaiNY #SongsOfComfort

[Adam Karnas @AJKarnas]

👏👏👏 https://t.co/9AyNaVZRs2

[Adam Karnas @AJKarnas]

@FriendlyFires - thank you for returning to NYC, playing with such incredible energy, and proving that a brief hiatus never hurt a soul. Floored.