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Designers must now pick their battles, focusing effort on durable, strategic features while letting AI handle or minimizing design for things that change rapidly.

Silber suggests a new workflow where designers focus on the big picture and durable elements, embracing 'building in public' for rapidly changing features. ✦ AI generated

Ian Silber · Lenny's Podcast · 2026-08-16 · original ↗

starts at this moment · 33:30

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There's been this traditional design process prototype mock test research iterate okay cool ready for engineering build it iterate ship it and now there's just no time for that. Does that resonate?

There are certain features for chatbt where we really obsess and we really spend a lot of time. We try a million things and we throw out you know uh we try 100 things we throw out 99. We finally ship one. um you know uh the like uh the or like the composer is like changing every single day and we try many things we throw them out but or like and you could take that for many different things within chbt um and then there are other things like codecs where um you know I don't know I mean the super app is a good example where we definitely are just like trying stuff really quick I think that we really embrace building in public [laughter] which is a different way of working.

verbatim transcript · starts at 33:30

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33:27world of a designer? >> I think that 100% we we do work that way. It it's it depends. I think for us it depends on like what sort of what stage you're at in the in the uh sort of process or um you know uh how uh maybe how far along the product is. There are certain features for chatbt where we really obsess and we really spend a lot

33:50of time. We try a million things and we throw out you know uh we try 100 things we throw out 99. We finally ship one. um you know uh the like uh the or like the composer is like changing every single day and we try many things we throw them out but or like and you could take that for many different things within chbt um and then there are other things like

34:14codecs where um you know I don't know I mean the super app is a good example where we definitely are just like trying stuff really quick I think that we really embrace building in public [laughter] which is a different way of working. But I think that like when you get comfortable with it is actually really gratifying or satisfying because you can try stuff and get instant feedback both internally and externally.

34:39Um but yeah, I mean it is uh moving really fast and I think it just depends right like some like like I said certain things we really sweat the details and we try um you know and and we do test we AB test we'll do user research um and we kind of iterate and evolve a lot and then other things we uh we take big swings and then we learn quickly um but

35:03yeah I don't know I think you have to like I think the biggest thing is like embracing that the technology might change in like a a month or you know and maybe a certain interaction or or setting or or whatever that you needed doesn't need to exist or now a new one does need to exist or a new capability is there or the latency profile has changed such that you can like rethink

35:30this or whatever all these capabilities are changing or the the intelligence has changed or and so you have to be just really quick on your feet and and maybe not be so precious about it until it's at the point where okay this is kind of hardened like we don't think that this is necessarily going to change tomorrow because of the technology so let's make this the best it can possibly be you

35:52know like we're we're thinking a lot about how we should evolve sort of really think about chatbt becoming like deeply embedded in a per like your personal life and how how should the how should the app feel that's something that we're not going necessarily design and ship overnight and just like put it out there. We're spending we're really thinking about that and we're trying a bunch of different ideas and we're

36:16putting it up on you know uh you know a whiteboard or you know we're doing some design in Figma. We're prototyping it. We're probably going to dog food a bunch of different ideas long before we ever ship something. Um that but that's a bigger project, right? And then there's other things where we're like idea to ship in like, you know, 4 hours. >> This all makes sense. Essentially, what

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