Alonzo Canada

Life is a gift, let's get the lead out and make a dent. Design Leader, husband, and father of two. Mo’ ☕️🧘🏼‍♂️⛷ 🚴✈️

[Alonzo Canada @acanada]

This was a fun one. Great collab with @createwithplay and @framer

[Framer @framer]

Check out @attaapp’s brand-new website, made in Framer. Data never looked this good 👇

[Alonzo Canada @acanada]

This is a new superpower for designers.

“Human judgment and intuition + a machine that can summon taste and selection criteria no human operator alone could ever construct. We bring the lived experience and the ‘why it matters.’ Machines bring a vaster set of references and the ability to know what lands in the wild.”

Designers collaborating with machines is an entirely new design capability. One no generation before us has ever had.

[Soleio @soleio]

Most confusion about the future of software design stems from a confusion in terminology.

My view: production design will increasingly be automated. The economic logic is self-evident — training machines to mimic and refine existing production practices is cheaper, faster, and more reliable than training humans to do the same.

Strategic design, or “what at are we doing and why,” will look very different. The mediums will broaden: from pencil and paper all the way to automated experiments running in production, iterated on by agents while we sleep.

The inputs and systems we create to find opportunities will reward the most intrepid problem-finders. Design stops being a method of sitting and ruminating on possible forms or solution spaces. Design becomes active, research-based, and built around speed of discovery and expression.

Exploratory design will undergo the greatest shifts. Historically this has been the domain of the artist and the inventor. What existed in the world sprung from the imaginations of people with waking hours to spare and the technical chops to give form to their ideas.

But soon agents will join the mix. Humans and machines alike will generate novel ideas and expressions, building on a vast combinatorial space of possibility. Humans and machines alike will be capable of bringing these forms to market.

The key difference? Humans sleep and have finite, socially agreed upon vocabulary. We may be intuitively suited to know the desires of our fellow man. But machines will have a vaster set of references to draw from, and methods to choose what's most effective in the wild — using taste/selection criteria no human operator alone can summon.

These forces are not mutually exclusive. But they DO operate on a common landscape of global demand—of Desire in the grandest sense.

No matter how much we might wish otherwise, human designers and creatives are not divorced from the logic of desire — nor from unit economics, opportunity costs, or the ever-evolving ways we probe and understand an open-ended set of markets made up of humans and agents alike. Creativity has no bounds. But desire underpins it all.

Design itself will not be recognizable from what exists today. Imagine describing NYC to an ancient cave dweller. Agents today are like the most primitive forms of seafaring trade.

Instead it will be defined by the designers who build new systems and methods for understanding, channeling, and feeding desire in all its forms.

[Alonzo Canada @acanada]

@karrisaarinen "It is in the gradual understanding that comes through doing the work." - 💯

[Alonzo Canada @acanada]

"It is in the gradual understanding that comes through doing the work." - 💯

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

https://t.co/srw9NQMkH2

[Alonzo Canada @acanada]

Luv this. Great explanation of craft with examples of how it moves the needle

[Ethan Eismann @eeismann]

https://t.co/eqPhJTrV5y

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Jevons paradox is happening in real time. Companies, especially outside of tech, are realizing that they can now afford to take on software projects that they wouldn’t have been able to tackle before because now AI lets them do so.

We’re going to start to use software for all new things in the economy because it’s incrementally cheaper to produce. Marketing teams at big companies will have engineers helping to automate workflows. Engineers in life sciences and healthcare will automate research. Small businesses will hire engineers for the first to build better digital experiences.

And as long as AI agents still require a human who understands what to prompt, how to review when an agent goes off the rails, how it guide back, how to maintain the system that was built, how to fix the ongoing bugs, and more, we will still have humans managing these agents.

This is why all the advice you get of not going into engineering is wrong. The world is going to increasingly be made up of software, and the people that understand it best will be in a strong economic position. This will happen in other roles as well where output goes up and demand increases.

[Alonzo Canada @acanada]

Me too. I agree!

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

For me the best way to think about this: snorkel, don’t scuba.

Diving too deep is a bit dangerous, and people get lost down there. Take glances at what’s beneath (lots of pretty fish!) from near the surface, and then get back to work. Wherever your motivation comes from (revenge, fear, competition, love of the game, learning, impact) is fine - harness it and get moving.

I personally do some journaling (appreciations, write out goals, figure out what I want to get done tomorrow, etc) but then stop procrastinating and get after it.

[Alonzo Canada @acanada]

Atta's toolbar needed a haircut ✂️

Reorganized canvas actions into primary, secondary, and tertiary tiers with smooth toggle transitions.

Small details, big difference in how a tool feels.

Mocked in Figma → built in Cursor.

[Alonzo Canada @acanada]

My workflow now looks nothing like it did a year ago.

Fire up Cursor agents → new feature heading to production.
Open Figma → start exploring the next design.
Check on Cursor. Nudge the agents.
Back to Figma. Brainstorm with Claude on the design direction.
Check on Cursor. Guide. Redirect.
Iterate the design. Share with Claude for critique.
Guide agents more.
Finish the design in Figma.
Push the PR from Cursor.

Design and production aren't sequential anymore. They're parallel. The exploring feeds the building. The building pressure-tests the exploring.

This is what designing with AI agents actually looks like. It doesn't replace the craft, but compresses the loop between imagining something and shipping it.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

This is the way

[Alonzo Canada @acanada]

@AndrewCurran_ @attaapp what's a better way to visualize this chart?

[Alonzo Canada @acanada]

@stats_feed @attaapp what’s the percentage of EV’s in the US?

[Alonzo Canada @acanada]

@omarshaikdev @attaapp 😂

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

If you thought your company's edge was "how fast you ship", you're in for a rude awakening.

Everyone can ship fast now. Obviously, not everyone can ship tastefully, with quality and restraint in mind. That's the new edge.

[Alonzo Canada @acanada]

@AravSrinivas @attaapp what has been the rate of frontier model development for the past 5 years?

[Alonzo Canada @acanada]

@dan__rosenthal PDF

[Alonzo Canada @acanada]

@deedydas @attaapp show me a ten-year projection based on this chart

[Atta @attaapp]

@omarshaikdev @kris https://t.co/PAE4ykNpRr just sold for $70 million, more than doubling the previous record. OpenAI bought it for $11M two years ago

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

Every Monday I get a deep AI analysis of our metrics across every product area to enjoy with my coffee.

Anomalies, growth, trends, recommendations. AI spots patterns human analysts easily miss. I can @ the agent for further questions.

AI will soon be running every company.

[Atta @attaapp]

@omarshaikdev Maye had better numbers across the board but Darnold threw way fewer picks. The Super Bowl storylines write themselves