Craft, Code, and Designing for Developers

Xiulung Choy is Head of Design at Graphite, a developer tools startup reimagining code review with AI-native workflows. Before Graphite, Xiulung spent his career at the intersection of creativity and technology, leading design at Nest where he helped bring smart home products to life, managing design teams at Adobe Creative Cloud to build extensibility and AI-driven experiences for millions of creators, and working at Google on experimental products in Area 120. He joined Graphite as the founding designer with a mission to build not just a product, but a design team and culture from the ground up. His perspective on where designers should work, how AI changes collaboration, and what craft actually means is shaped by seeing what works across companies at every stage.

At a glance

* Startups are best for designers with strong foundations looking for ownership, not designers still building skills.

* Graphite Agent helps engineers ship code faster by reviewing changes, answering questions, and merging without bottlenecks.

* The team designed their Agent as a distinct entity in the UI to match user expectations and trust levels.

* v0 lets designers build hyper-specific tools for narrow problems, from testing diff colors to exploring animations.

* Graphite’s Agent interface shows intentional design decisions about where AI lives and how users control it.

* Design and engineering work in parallel toward the same end state rather than sequential handoffs.

* Designers don’t need to code, but understanding how software is built is critical.

* Portfolios should showcase taste and what you would have done with full control, not just what shipped.

* Keep developing your craft even when the job market is tough, because specialized skills stay in demand.

Topics

Designing at startups

Xiulung thinks startups are great for designers who have a really strong foundation and tool set and are just looking for more ownership and responsibility, but most designers are still looking to grow their design skills, and at a startup if you’re the first, second, or third designer, everyone is so busy working on the product that they don’t have time to mentor others. At agencies, you have specialists like the motion design person, the copywriter, the strategist, the color expert who’s honed their craft into narrow aspects of design, and you get to learn how to do it at a very high level. At large companies, you probably have an experienced design manager and other principal or staff designers who can participate in crits and show you the ropes, but at a startup, everyone’s frantically looking for product-market fit and trying to execute on the next feature. Xiulung says it’s always easier and less painful to learn from other people’s mistakes than your own. If you’re a staff or principal designer with a great foundation looking for an environment to have more impact, startups are perfect for that.

What Graphite does and why code review needs AI

Xiulung explains that Graphite is a code review platform built for this modern age where engineers are using AI to ship a lot of code, but all those code changes need to be tested, reviewed by co-workers, and merged into the codebase. They have Graphite Agent as an AI code reviewer, a first-in-class code review experience to help co-workers understand code using AI to find answers and formulate responses, and a merge queue to merge everything while making sure it passes tests. The value has only increased as engineers adopted more AI tools to write code changes faster than ever, which puts a bottleneck on code review. Xiulung thinks of AI as an always-awake, super intelligent co-worker who’s ready to jump in and give you answers, especially for teams remotely distributed across time zones where you might wait hours before anybody is awake to review your pull request.

[Demo] Inside Graphite Agent’s interface: designing where AI lives in the product

Xiulung walks through Graphite Agent’s interface and explains the key design decisions. They experimented with having the Agent show up as a reviewer just like any other human co-worker, but that felt too hidden and didn’t match user expectations, so they ultimately decided it should show up separately and be clear about what it is, what it’s done, and give it its own affordance to rerun. The interface shows what the Agent has access to, what it knows about, and what it’s able to do, and it analyzes the pull request to suggest specific prompts the user might want related to that PR. Users can add comments to chat and ask Graphite about them, which helps short-circuit the round trip between authors and reviewers. Xiulung also shares a concept called code tours, which annotates the pull request with natural language explanations about what the code is doing, almost like having a guide tour you through all the changes so reviewers can understand what’s happening and why.

[Demo] Earning trust by being honest about what AI can and can’t do

Xiulung thinks earning the trust of engineers is similar to designing for any user base in that you really need to show you understand what they’re trying to accomplish, but engineers are very opinionated and they understand the technology, so they can see through marketing speak. Graphite tries to be very honest with their user base not only about capabilities but also limitations, and they try to show they understand what engineers are there to do by being predictive and providing things before they even ask for it. For instance, if a pull request is failing CI, Graphite has an action card right at the top that encourages someone to fix it then and there, and that pulls up the Agent panel which showcases the changes it’s proposing to fix CI so it passes. They keep the human in the loop, making sure they’re in the driver’s seat and still the ones to click apply changes after reviewing.

[Demo] Using v0 to build hyper-specific design tools on the fly

Xiulung describes how he recently wanted to update some diff highlighting colors but Figma doesn’t have the best color picker, so he jumped into v0 and asked it to give him syntax highlighting themes so he could switch between a bunch and see what looked interesting, then asked for a bunch of red and green color options to flip between really quickly. He had it add HSL sliders so he could fine-tune them to exactly what he wanted, and it gave him a way to quickly build a very specific design tool for the exact problem he was solving. Xiulung thinks you’re now able to design the ideal tool for the job where a lot of design tools are still general purpose trying to do everything, and sometimes you just want something very specific and hyper-optimized for one thing. Using AI to prototype a design tool lets you have a very customized tool to accomplish a very narrow ask, but perhaps gets you to the end result a lot faster.

How design and engineering work in parallel when AI makes iteration cheap

Xiulung explains that at Graphite, engineers have leaned into using AI and as a result can ship code changes a lot more quickly, and the engineering org has grown quite a bit, so they found design being a bottleneck and asked how they can change not only the design process but also the goals of design when the cost of engineering iteration is much faster and cheaper. What they do now is have design, engineering, and product get in the room together at the beginning and define the big pieces, the mental model, the rough shape of the end state they’re working towards, forgetting about polish and how it’s actually going to look but focusing on the scaffolding and foundations. They’re much more comfortable with being 60 or 70 percent confident and thinking the solution is somewhere in this realm, so they just start building toward it and refine as they go. That unblocks engineering to kick things off while design works on the ultimate end state, sometimes working backwards to meet engineering at various points for beta releases.

Should designers code? Not necessarily, but they need to understand how software is built

Xiulung says throughout his career he’s heard many things designers should do, like designers need an MBA, need to know strategy, UX copywriting, marketing, need to become PMs, and he thinks there’s some level of insecurity where designers almost always feel like designing is not enough. If you ask whether designers who don’t know how to code will be out of a job in a year or two, absolutely not, and there’s going to be continued value in being really great visual problem solvers. On the other hand, if you’re designing a software product as most designers are, it’s really critical to understand how that software is built, so even though you might not be coding or shipping code, it’s critical to understand how your designs get translated into code. Part of that is experimenting with AI, with v0, with Lovable to understand how these tools translate Figma frames into code. Xiulung thinks when he considers org structures and division of labor, he currently doesn’t see designers as being the owners of the codebase.

What to look for when hiring designers: craft, taste, and creative problem solving

Xiulung says they look for designers who can creatively problem solve, ideally in a very visual way, can talk through tradeoffs, and show they really understand the context they’re designing for. They heavily weight portfolios and case studies and try to ignore what company you’re at or what school you went to because designers can come from all sorts of backgrounds, but they look for people who are naturally curious and creative. Xiulung thinks a lot of designers feel held back on the job because of real world constraints like timelines, existing design systems, existing patterns, or engineering bandwidth, and he sees designers say if they had it their way they would do things differently. Your portfolio is your opportunity to showcase that, to showcase your taste and what you would have done if you had 100 percent control over how the project went, so Xiulung encourages designers to showcase their own case studies or modify them to highlight what their ideal would look like. He doesn’t care if it never made it through to production, what he cares about is you being able to design a great result and solution.

Advice for designers in a tough job market: keep developing your craft

Xiulung knows it can be very tough out there in the job market right now, but he also thinks things are looking up, and he’s heard from other companies who are really looking hard for designers and hiring. For context, when Xiulung came out of college in 2012, things were still recovering from the economic crisis, design teams were eliminated, and people were on hiring freezes, so he knows it can be tough, but he’s also seen really great designers emerge who carved their own way through. Xiulung says keep learning about your craft and really develop it because it’s going to be high in demand even if not immediately today. There are so many different shapes of designers, and it’s really important to have a perspective on what type of designer you want to be, so figure out what you’re passionate about, what you care about, and the skills you want to continue developing. Xiulung believes as long as those skills are developed to a high degree, you’re going to be in demand somewhere.

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Xiulung Choy - Head of Design at Graphite

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