Katey Basye

☀️ Senior Staff Product Designer by day
🌒 Family + AI + automation by night

[Slava Akhmechet @spakhm]

How to work with designers:

- when you work with a great designer you will experience a membrane of confusion between you. They don't understand you and you don't understand them. It's kinda like being in a room with a cat
- you may have great taste, care about materials, colors, shapes, object relationships, textures. You may even be close friends. It doesn't matter. They observe the world from a different, alien vantage point you can never visit or inhabit
- this is a great thing!
- collaboration with a designer is a process of discovering a shared language together in order to dissolve the membrane. The final output is a byproduct of this process
- it's unlike working with any other function. You always have to build a shared understanding with new people or on new projects, but you rarely have to discover a new language together. This is because discovering a language is what a designer does

Don't:

- "here is what I want, now make it pretty." Making things pretty is 5% of what a designer does. You can do it this way, but you'd be underutilizing most of their value. If they're good you'll frustrate them and they'll quit. You will also get a much worse product than you otherwise would.
- "I don't like this, move this button here." Again you can do it this way but you'd be underusing what they're good at and overusing what you're bad at. They'll quit and you'll have a worse product.
- expecting a good product on the first attempt. This is not how discovering a language works; it is a process of mutual feedback and iteration and you're both satisfied with the outcome.

Here's what you do:

- explain the problem as you see it. What you're trying to achieve, who the users are, what they want, your constraints, etc
- if they're good they'll ask you lots of leading questions. At this stage you can just let them drive and answer. If there's something you feel is important they didn't ask about, share it
- they'll go back and come up with a draft. Maybe it's a sketch, maybe it's more polished, maybe it's a piece of a sketch. Depends on their process
- there will be parts that don't fit your model of how the thing should feel and work. Do not tell them how to change things. Rather, explain what feels off and why. Explain what doesn't work in your mind, let them come up with a solution
- again if they're good they'll ask leading questions. They'll then go back and produce another draft. Then repeat
- as you go through this process you will slowly bring your vantage points closer and closer together. And the output will be the product
- if they're good they'll question your assumptions. Be flexible and willing to reconsider them. You can be rigid, but the final product won't be as good
- but don't be too flexible-- you need to maintain your core constraints and be open about what doesn't feel right
- stop when you're 98% there. Past that paradoxically the product gets worse

Expectations:

- you should expect them to ask you leading questions
- you should expect them to question your assumptions in ways that surprise you
- you should expect fast iterations and good work. You should feel the vantage points converge
- there will be backtracking, maybe multiple times. This is more common for totally new projects than for smaller changes to existing projects. Budget that in
- ultimately this is more craft than art. You're both there to produce a product for a customer in a bounded amount of time. They need to understand that. If they see themselves as a hifalutin artist they aren't good. (This is true of engineers too)

[Katey Basye @k_basye]

@sweatystartup we home cook our dog food (balanced by a nutritionist)! Quite a chore but don't have to worry about recalls or mysterious illnesses. Peace of mind is worth it!

[Katey Basye @k_basye]

@DanHollick Bless you!

[Katey Basye @k_basye]

@jayneil The culture has to be down with this though and/or the designer does have to know the audience and be judicious about which 70% of the 100% is present and which 30% is missing. I do look forward to the future when it's about ideas and not pixels!

[Katey Basye @k_basye]

Emotinally, @cursor_ai is to present me as Dreamweaver was to high-school me learning about how the web is made 🥹

[Dan Shipper 📧 @danshipper]

the late 2025 vibe is i have to work from my phone because my laptop has Claude Code on it and that’s too distracting

what the fuck is going on lol

[Joseph @JosephD]

Everything that's getting funding is a brute force approach, forever dependent on the LLM at the center of the stack. This is the big mistake in my opinion.

An LLM lets us translate human intent to a lossy medium, text, in a likely-correct way. The problem comes from the response being likely wrong or a regression to the mean based on its training data.

So, let's not worry about the response or even expect it to be good - instead let's use the LLM as a bridge or "human input device" straight to deterministic architecture that's designed to translate the LLMs lossy text into predictable actions. That's the magic that needs to be leveraged.

This is the first time ever we've been able to do that, and we're all so fascinated by the machine that responds to us, we're forgetting the INPUT interface that got to that answer (good or bad) was truly the remarkable part.

It's using LLMs as bridge for deterministic architecture. I think that's the play that brings AI to the every day world. This expectation that we just throw more power and guardrails and tools at AI and keep it at the center feels like beating a dead horse.

[Katey Basye @k_basye]

@TheFoxMatriarch First Ent tomorrow with my v similar girl 😭🤞

[Kyle Corbitt @corbtt]

Every app out there building an AI assistant into its UI is on the wrong side of history.

You will provide a full-featured API, and I will use *my* assistant to get what I want from you. If you refuse to provide an API, I will use your competitor.

Major implications for SaaS

[Dylan Field @zoink]

@mattaningram @DannPetty The most talented designers have a point of view, communicate complex topics in simple ways, pick the right constraints, hold large systems in their heads, empathize with the customer / user, understand business + cultural context, push the craft of design forward, and more

[Katey Basye @k_basye]

@cursor_ai slash commands are delightful ❤️

[Katey Basye @k_basye]

@cursor_ai slash commands are a delight!

[Katey Basye @k_basye]

I've finally vibe coded something to where there's no going back 🥲

A site I've thought of for YEARS is live and being indexed. I even have some impressions and clicks 🎉 I am proud of the robust data pipeline I created, and I'm impressed with how "smart" I can be with scoring and sorting and all manner of other things. Yay

[Katey Basye @k_basye]

One way I can see ai disrupting employment is when you work at a company that’s slow to adopt the latest and greatest while everyone else is speed racing ahead—when you do go to interview you don’t have the work products to prove you can do the latest and greatest.

[Katey Basye @k_basye]

Plus all the follow up and documentation for “visibility” 😭😭😭

[DANN© @DannPetty]

You cannot ask a designer to design and have many meetings during the week.

We need time to deep think, process and explore. Especially with product design.

A simple 30 minute meeting is actually an extra 1-2 hours of wasted potential design time.

Why? Because we’re so lost in our heads thinking through a million solutions, we have to stop designing 30 minutes before, during the meeting, then it takes at least 30 minutes to try to get back into the mental spot and resolve the million solutions to get back to where we left off.

Design is deep thinking and every meeting interrupts that.

It’s one of the biggest challenges designers have when leading a product.

Remember, your 30 minute meeting is actually almost 2 hours of lost design time. Make it worth it.

[Katey Basye @k_basye]

I've become numb to the fact that a typical Wednesday includes furiously Figma-ing my way out of ambiguity while fielding a call from my dad's memory care home on whether he should be DNR or not 🙃 and then getting right back to it.

[Katey Basye @k_basye]

The ultimate level will be dictating to cursor on my phone and getting notified when I need to approve. Right now I’m going to a four-year-old’s birthday, but all I can think about is vibe coding. Would love to build on the go lol

[Katey Basye @k_basye]

I think that future will belong to those who can think in, intuit, and articulate systems

[Katey Basye @k_basye]

Some observations from my breakthrough week of vibe coding:

[Katey Basye @k_basye]

I realize that this is kind of what managers and leaders are supposed to do in an organization, but to expect every individual to do it every day…