This week’s episode with Maggie Appleton is a deep dive into designing for AI products and LLMs. Maggie shares about her experience as the first designer at Elicit (an AI assistant for research papers) and all of the unique challenges surrounding helping users interface with LLMs.
We also go deep into:
- How Maggie’s grown as a frontend developer
- Why Maggie feels like she’s in a short-run limbo
- Strategies for improving your technical literacy
- How writing online has impacted Maggie’s career
- The AI-native tools that Maggie is drawing inspiration from
- How advancements in AI will redefine her role as a designer
- How Maggie’s new understanding of LLMs is shaping the way she designs
- Why Maggie is more interested in the cognitive applications of AI rather than generative AI

Maggie is currently leading design at Elicit (they’re hiring)
“How Trello is different” is where Joel Spolsky explains the differences between horizontal and vertical software
OpenAI’s introduction of ChatGPT-4o
We talked about the product tldraw
The expanding dark forest and generative AI: Maggie’s talk about the possible futures of flooding the web with AI-generated content
Episode with Soleio where he talks about looking for “time to proficiency” in design candidates

News 01/21: Windy // HEY // Sizzy // App Tracking Transparency // Docker BuildKit // type-fest