Dylan Field

All-In · Dylan Field: Is AI Replacing Designers?, Design is the New Code &…

• Can Everyone Be a Maker With AI?

  Dylan Field says everyone can be a maker. Before AI and after AI, a person chooses whether to consume or create, and whether to take the easy path or climb the mountain. He hopes people use AI to create good and act as a force for it, rather than join the hive mind.

  He sees many people letting AI think for them. He notices less of it at Figma and more of it in ordinary life. He rejects the easy path because his life has been about learning how to think. The path he finds interesting uses AI to understand the world, to learn, and to try work that once took too long or felt too hard to start. Willpower and curiosity decide it. A curious person who is willing to do the work can be brave, speak

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• What Happens When a New AI Model Drops?

  Dylan Field says new model drops put people in an AI psychosis for a few days. Algo feeds aid the moment, because the best results rise to the top and everyone treats the model as everything. A few days later the main tropes are clear. People adapt fast, the novelty is gone, and the model no longer rewards them or fires off the dopamine system. The reaction is that the model always does the same thing, so the next question is how to move past it.

  Dylan Field calls the pattern the continued loop. Models keep getting so good in formal domains. In math and cybersecurity, the IQ points stack and stack and stack. For creativity and for design, progress is very incremental overall. He says a chan

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• What Disrupted Photography More Than Photoshop?

  Dylan Field says the camera phone was the bigger disruption to photography. People stopped buying cameras dedicated to photography because the best camera is the one already on you. Instagram and a phone camera changed how a lot of people treat photography.

  He remembers the early days as an avid Photoshop user. People freaked out when layers arrived, then again when filters and Kai's Power Tools came out. The fear was that software was destroying the art and creativity of photography and erasing the photographer's role. A new toolkit let new artists use filters and layering to reimagine a canvas. Older creatives did not map perfectly onto the new tools, but creativity and human potential ex

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• What Is AI Doing to Digital Creation?

  Dylan Field says AI is lowering the floor for digital production, whether the work is code, motion, video, or design, so more people can take part and creation is more democratized. A few years ago at Config, the annual user conference, he said the ceiling would be raised by AI and people would do greater things. He now says that was wrong. The ceiling has stayed the same. AI is not raising the ceiling. Humans raise it when creatives and designers focus, invest their time, stay bold, and try to do something no one else has ever done before.

  The choice is whether a mean or average result is enough, or whether the work has to show care and go beyond the minimum bar. In software design and pro

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• How Did Cursor Grow Before It Had a Model?

  Cursor grew by obsessing over the user and doing the right thing for the customer before it had a model of its own.

  Dylan Field says Cursor, by all means, should not have grown the way it did. Frontier labs were chasing Cursor with their own models before Cursor had a model of any kind. The team still had incredible success because they obsessed over the user, strategized, and made sure they were doing the right thing for the customer. He calls the result an example that will be repeated across many different types of companies.

  Part of lasting as a software company is being as specialized as possible on a target audience, knowing that audience, and building for them. It is not true that a

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• What Did Figma Offer People Who Wanted to Leave?

  Dylan Field says Figma told people they could leave with a few months pay and stay on good terms. The offer was for anyone tired after working very hard, and for anyone who had joined expecting to work at Adobe and then realized the startup pace was not for them. The only condition was six months before they could reapply and interview again. A small percentage took it.

  On Monday morning he told the company to dial into an all-hands at noon for the full details. A large share showed up on the first day of break. He says the mood was relief because the ambiguity was over. People had been holding two worlds in their heads, and the room felt lighter once the future was clear. He separated that

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