Nick

Design @Xbox. working on Project Helix.

drawer, tinkerer, antagonist.

[Nick @McveyNick]

This has been huge for us. Our web experiences are highly personalized and service driven so getting specific screens used to be tricky.

[Paper @paper]

Snapshot is a game changer for iterating on your live designs, make sure to try it out with Paper

[Nick @McveyNick]

@stephenhaney - voting/polls
- task assignment
- documentation (pinned comments?)
- AI annotation tools

[Nick @McveyNick]

@brian_lovin @CameronFoxly grab and throw him...

[Nick @McveyNick]

@Qwik For a brief moment, Kevin was my skip. He was generous with his time and his knowledge, and he made a real impact on me. When my son was born premature, he reached out and reassured me it was going to be okay and gave me space during a really hard time.

[Nick @McveyNick]

@gokulr I get the efficiency argument, but this feels like a narrow bet. If design collapses into annual system refreshes + AI, you optimize for speed, not judgment. That path ends in very competent, very average products

[Nick @McveyNick]

When everyone chases the same efficiencies, you don’t get differentiation. You get AI slop. Design’s real value is judgment, taste, and deciding what should exist. AI should make room for better ambition, not replace it.

[Nick @McveyNick]

Framing design as an AI casualty assumes design’s value is execution efficiency. Sure, AI can accelerate system updates and production. But reducing design to that is a narrow, pretty unambitious take..

[Gokul Rajaram @gokulr]

DESIGN: THE FIRST AI CASUALTY

I'm increasingly sure that 2026 signals the end of product design as a full-fledged stand-alone function within companies. If so, it will be the first role / function to be eliminated by AI on a go-forward basis.

Instead of hiring FT designers, startups are hiring / will hire design consultants to create a design system that the founder likes (this takes a few weeks max). Once the design system is finalized, PM/Eng feed it into their AI tool of choice to generate prototypes. The design system is refreshed annually by the same consultant.

Larger companies will likely not backfill design roles and will do some targeted attrition to reduce the design department to 20% the size it is today.

If you're a designer, I think you have two choices:
1. Become an entrepreneur: Start a design agency and become the go-to resource for design systems for startups and even larger companies. This can be a good recurring revenue business.
2. Become a builder: Add PM/Eng responsibilities to become a product builder.

Would suggest you embrace this proactively vs waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I'm really sorry about this - some of my best friends and the people I admire most and have learnt the most from are designers - but it seems inevitable.

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

My ideal AI design tool probably something like:

A canvas tool, where you can get any view of your app rendered to edit or use as the starting point for a new view. You can freely explore, duplicate, and make changes visually.

You could start these renders from other tools like @linear. User feedback -> render the screen to be edited.

It would have design language, system and product guidance files that help guide the overall design based on your product.

Each artboard carries metadata, like the origin of the view, who created it, what changes was made when, so you could query things across your whole team.

You could create areas that you want AI to fill or complete. Fill this list, complete the columns with this data or using this screenshot or something.

Edits in the artboard are tracked as a diff. You export those diffs as a plan for a coding agent to build against your actual codebase.

The design tool agents keep check-ins with the coding agent and try to communicate the nuances of the design so it gets built as a prototype.

[uixamjad @uixamjad]

Really ?? Figma 🥳🥳😳😳😳😳

[Nick @McveyNick]

wild to see tooling stacks change overnight.

Seems like @code and copilotCLI are now the main interfaces for our work.

[Nick @McveyNick]

@david_dossett I'm hanging on for dear life.

[Nick @McveyNick]

I love seeing Xbox dashboard redesigns. so many great ideas. The Blades hold a special place in my heart.

[ASHA @asha_shar]

Great start to the morning with Team Xbox, where we talked about our commitment to the return of Xbox including Project Helix, the code name for our next generation console.

Project Helix will lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games. Looking forward to chatting about this more with partners and studios at my first GDC next week!

[kepano @kepano]

taste is a study of nuance, it requires slowing down

[Nick @McveyNick]

Yay to the team! Congrats on the Xbox Ally release! Exciting times for PC handhelds.

[Nick @McveyNick]

Hades2 fanart. Loving the new game. Amazing art direction.

[Nick @McveyNick]

@cap Hot keys I can press while recording to note a section of the recording to edit in post. Sometimes when I'm screen recording I will create edit points between takes in the same recording rather than re-recording over and over. If that makes sense.

[Nick @McveyNick]

I wonder if we'll get to the point where each AI release is like an apple keynote, a big annual release with meaningful changes and capabilities.

[Nick @McveyNick]

@david_dossett Its working now. we got the whole Xbox Design team playing around in it. Great work!