Design Engineering with Maggie Appleton

A cultural anthropologist turned illustrator turned design engineer, now prototyping at GitHub Next, talks with Gergely Orosz about what agents changed in her work and what they did not. Building is faster: she can hand an agent a Figma file and let it loop overnight until the screenshots match. But she still starts with pen and paper, because the agent cannot see what she sees, and she still ends up adjusting padding and transitions by hand, because the design rules she writes down never quite get applied. Her team’s open question is what a hundred background agents would look like if they were not annoying. She closes on anthropology as a pair of glasses for engineers: how a thing earns trust, which way time flows, and when someone reaches for your tool are all cultural.