Akta (Pronounced 'Ekta')

UX Engineer, Head of Design - @scrutsocial , ex Founding team - @Spendflo, ex - thegeekslab. Painter, Filmmaker, Super Biker. prioritising mental health always

[Pablo Stanley @pablostanley]

token budget

[Akta (Pronounced 'Ekta') @ektz]

@arpit_vermaniac Slightly? :p

[Akta (Pronounced 'Ekta') @ektz]

lol. I’m flattered.

[DesignUpConf @DesignUpConf]

⏰ Tomorrow’s the day.

DesignUp 2026 Early Bird passes go live in <24 hours.
Super Early Birds vanished fast—this is your next shot at the best price for our 10th anniv in BLR.
Set your alarms. https://t.co/at2AuQMVJB

[Tuomas Artman @artman]

Today is a hard day. I shared this note with the @linear team today: We’ve made the difficult decision to increase our workforce. This is not a cost-cutting exercise or a reflection of anyone’s performance. We’re simply reimagining every role for the agentic AI era. We’re hiring. We’re sorry about that.

[Akta (Pronounced 'Ekta') @ektz]

@JeevanshuN lol. So apt.

[Jeevanshu Narang @JeevanshuN]

Crazy times in design industry. Wanted to write/rant a bit about something i’ve been noticing a lot.

It’s wild seeing people with 🔔 ka real experience with AI, launching AI & design courses.

You learnt the terms like PRs, Git, merge…..only a few weeks ago, calm down. Take time to master things yourself.

……

Saw someone selling a pdf for “how to crack interviews at top design companies”… for companies they couldn’t crack themselves.

The confidence🫡

I remember when things like this used to get called out on design twitter. Now it’s just… normal.

Feels like when things don’t work out or are boring, people pivot to building an audience… and when that doesn’t stick, they start selling courses.

Very few people genuinely post about what they learnt or post their work casually, repost a insightful YT link, share a doodle or wireframe

Mostly, it’s just purpose driven, like

“
- - hey self, i learnt a minor skill today,,, how do i magnify it as as something that people like it and end up giving me money

- - Atleast followers to badhe “

Everyone’s chasing attention. Very few are building actual depth.

And the cost? Early designers who are already anxious about AI and cracking a job end up paying for noise.

If you’re a well learned and experienced designer who mentors and gives interpersonal advice to aspiring designers. I salute you. No matter if your service is paid or for free. You’re taking out time for this, it’s commendable.

For people who are still early and are liking the attention when someone gives you importance coz you have followers and they assume you might know things. Please stop answering and stretching it out as an habit by launching courses. There is a lot to learn. Be responsible.

☺️

[Mark Vassilevskiy @MarkKnd]

https://t.co/MI28q3xTkj

[Kevin ⨀ @kvncnls]

@katarinabatina It comes from a lack of understanding of what design does. The first casualty was actually code.

Devs need to learn how to design because code execution is a speck in the build process now.

They assume design is the same, but it’s not. And this is why AI product slop exists.

[Katarina Batina @katarinabatina]

There used to be think pieces, thought leadership….now we have this, a perfect example of what I’m now calling Thought Rot.

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

I disagree with Gokul (replied in his thread). I agree generally that generalist for startups are good, but at some point there is also a need for specialists.

The point I was making was directed to the example you picked. The situation you describe sounds more like process/management or expectation failure than a design failure.

Senior stakeholder management is a skill which most juniors won't have, and even many seniors are not good at. So my earlier question was that if there was a senior designer in the company and if so why wouldn't they step in, address the situation, and why were you directly working with a junior designer.

I've worked directly with many CEOs and unfortunately their ability to describe needs or design is limited, and juniors have limited ability to realize that, pull the relevant information out of the leadership and be able to communicate their designs in the right level.

Thats why juniors you usually should work more with senior people in their function who can monitor and provide them with the necessary context and not as much directly with senior leadership of the company.

The reason is because it often sets up the employee for failure and makes the leader frustrated which then is unproductive in both fronts.

And now maybe AI can do the work directly how the leader wants, but it remains to be seen if the work is actually good.

I could now make a lot of code that looks like it works but who knows if it is actually good.

Here is what grok has to say about it: https://t.co/V2soqrNT0r

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

A common dynamic I observe with AI: it feels most impressive when you don’t know much about the subject, don’t care or don’t have a clear idea of what the you want.

This applies across design, code, legal, and more. If I don’t know code very well, every piece of code it writes feels very impressive.

Once you know what something should feel or look like, it becomes almost impossible to guide AI there. And you definitely can’t one-shot it.

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

I see many other roles die before design does.

Anyone who makes anything meaningful should never outsource design unless it’s very ephemeral, standalone (brand visual, campaign websites) or contained.

There is even a path where there is just design and software architects (feel and function), and all the other roles disappear.

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

@gokulr I rarely disagree with you, but I do on this. I expect design to become a differentiator as the quantity of software increases. And anyone that’s worked with a design system has seen how much you still need to “design” the product and experience. Great design is hard.

[Akta (Pronounced 'Ekta') @ektz]

@anamhira Neat!

[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.

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

https://t.co/srw9NQMkH2

[Akta (Pronounced 'Ekta') @ektz]

@ShruPosts Lowercase a is the dead giveaway. Geist is so beautifully done though.

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

Our industry keeps confusing the appearance of design with design that actually works well