2026 AI Design Field Report

There's been a heck of a debate around the future of coding and design tools lately... but how are today’s top teams actually using AI?

Well, Stephen Haney  (founder of the new design tool Paper)  spent the last few months talking with teams like Shopify, Notion, etc. to find out and he shares it in this Dive Club episode.

Here are my takeaways 👇

1 — AI Mandates

AI usage is being explicitly evaluated in performance reviews at many of today’s top companies. For designers, using tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Lovable, etc. is no longer optional.

2 — Prototyping > Production

Very few designers at large companies are actually PR’ing into production. Handoff still exists. Designers are just sending over fully functional prototypes with way more context than a static mock ever had.

3 — Forking Production

Most companies now have some level of top-down AI investment, which often means forking production so designers can have their own copies of the repo to use as a playground.

Stephen talks about the “new friction” involving environment variables, local databases, linting, deploys, etc. These are the hurdles designers regularly need help clearing (especially on larger teams).

Interestingly, this is exactly what Dessn gives you out of the box (we covered this in last week’s episode on prototyping in prod ICYMI).

4 — Tooling Trends

Stephen is seeing far more teams gravitate toward Claude Code and Cursor over standalone prototyping tools like v0 or Replit.

There’s real value in using your current app as a starting point rather than spending time recreating production UI from scratch.

5 — Startups vs. Big Companies

The operational gap between startups and big companies has never been wider. In early-stage roles, designers are already coding and shipping PRs as part of the job.

I can attest to this as both Kyle and I ship Inflight PRs daily. At this point, we’re all builders.

6 — The new localhost problem

Transitioning from Sketch to Figma was a no brainer because all of a sudden we went from working in local files to web-based collaboration.

But as more designers start coding with tools like Claude and Cursor, we’ve actually taken a step backward in how we share work. So much so that a couple teams have started building custom tooling around it.

Stephen admits that “we’re back in local space”

My last 4-5 design artifacts were created entirely in Claude Code so I feel this big time.

Sharing coded-prototypes and getting feedback is surprisingly tricky. So much so that it’s quickly become a problem we’re focused on solving with Inflight. More to come :)

Until then you can watch the full episode with Stephen here 👇