Karl Koch, Design Engineer at DuckDuckGo, published 11 custom skills to the Figma Community, ported from his open-source dxe set. Run /dxe orchestrator and you get his whole design engineering review in order: intent (write-first-design, subtractive-design), platform (semantic-html-first, modern-css-html), feel (fluid-design, interface-affordances, product-delight), bridge (design-engineering), then shipping (ai-output-judgement, prototype-to-production).

“It’s hundreds of little decisions done right. How you do anything is how you do everything.” Dennis Brotzky wrote a reflection a year after Wealthsimple acquired Fey, the highest craft investment research app he built with Tom Russ and Thiago Costa. The three of them were dropped into a thousand-person org, and within a year they had killed the last AngularJS route, shipped a new art direction, and replaced the old Patchwork design system with Mint, built on Base UI and designed AI-first with agent skills so that ​“the defaults carry the taste.” Worth reading if you have ever had to argue that the unglamorous foundation work is the design work.

“Instead of individual assets, you design systems.” Justin Jay Wang, designer at Cursor and before that the person who grew design at OpenAI from 0 to 1, on code as a creative medium for brand work: graphics, charts, posters, logos, animations. Define an idea as a set of rules and you can generate endless variations, dial in parameters, and converge on the strongest one.

Rauno Freiberg, a design engineer widely respected for his UI craft, keeps a running collection of short notes on the small decisions that make interfaces feel right. One entry works through why an animation delay meant to highlight a scrolled-to message backfired and felt more awkward; another walks through the redesign of cards. It’s the kind of thinking-out-loud that can teach more than any tutorial.

Paul Bakaus has packaged 23 design commands into a single agent skill that teaches Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Gemini CLI how to actually design. Type vocabulary, color systems, motion, spatial logic — the foundations most prompts miss. The Live mode that writes accepted variants back to source is where it gets genuinely interesting.

Jakub Krehel launched Interfaces, a paid magazine for design engineers built around interactive demos and source code, not text. Initial issues cover gestures in motion, gradients, OKLCH, and shared layout animations.

Once your design system is in Figma Make, you can really reap the benefits of working with design and code side by side and start actually using your system. This article walks through the specific technical problems of pulling a design system out of a monorepo to make it accessible in Figma Make.

Ridd shares his mental model for deciding which tools to reach for when coding with AI. Also available as a Dive Club video.

Jakub Krehel shows how he uses AI every day as a design engineer. My process is very similar, but I still picked up a few things!