Writing

Notes & experiments.

Essays on AI design engineering, design systems, and the craft of shipping products. Notes and experiments by Gustavo Girard.

05Oct 202612 min read

How Bay Area Product Designers Actually Work With AI in 2026

Weekly AI use among designers jumped from 54% to 91% in a year, half have shipped AI written code to production, and pay runs from $131K at early stage startups to $389K for a senior designer at Meta. Here is what the data says about the job now, who is rewriting it, and what big tech and startups pay.

04Oct 20265 min read

I Built the Game I Played as a Kid, With AI as My Copilot

One of the first games I ever owned was River Raid on the Atari 2600. I wanted that feeling back, so I planned Black Eagle, designed its first pieces in Figma and built it with Jammes, my AI assistant.

01Jul 20267 min read

Everyone Is Now a Manager of Agents

My mornings start by delegating five to ten tasks to coding agents, and my afternoons are spent reading the pull requests they send back. The job became a loop, and the loop is making me more technical, not less.