Designers have not experienced the same productivity gains as engineers because the design process remains inherently messy, fluid, and time-consuming despite AI tools.
Ian Silber explains that while engineers have gained 10-100x productivity from AI, designers haven't experienced equivalent gains because design requires iterative exploration, experimentation, and a messy feedback loop that can't be easily automated. ✦ AI generated
Ian Silber · Lenny's Podcast · 2026-08-16 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 4:42
“If you look at engineering, it's just a completely new job versus a few years ago. I'm curious how that translates to product design.”
Engineers have 10 or sometimes like 100x their productivity but our design team hasn't because the design process still takes time. It's still sometimes you have to try a bunch of things and throw them out. Still very messy and fluid. We had a podcast with head of design cloud code Jenny when she talked about there's been this traditional design process prototype mock test research iterate and now there's just no time for that.
verbatim transcript · starts at 4:42
4:42you know we see that uh uh you know engineers have 10 or sometimes like 100x their productivity uh but our design team hasn't right because the design process still takes time. It's still sometimes you have to try a bunch of things and throw them out right versus maybe working with a coding agent you ask it to do something it's pretty binary now at this point it usually sort of gets it pretty well. Um,
5:08and but the design process is really still very messy and fluid and you think you have a great idea and you try it and it sucks and then you try it again and it sucks and then you you give it to you know users or internal you get internal feedback and it's wrong and you still have to go through that arduous and kind of messy but really fun process. Um, and
5:30that hasn't really comp that it's compressed in that you can get much more ideas out fast, but you still need that that whole sort of feedback loop. There's the alignment of getting many people uh, you know, especially in a bigger company like that still has a lot of overhead. So the point is that I think that it's we're unclear right now like what is expected of a designer and
5:53that lack of clarity I can see totally lead to you know um some some fears uh or some unease I guess. But on the other hand I've seen that I mean our designers what's been what's great I think about at OpenAI is like we're such an experimental company. We are driven by you know research and we treat our company as a research lab and we totally embrace that and that's a new thing that