When my team moved from Figma to Cursor, we gave things up on purpose. In this episode, I walk through the real ledger: lost visual history, the comment threads that held our why, a rejected pull request, and what we gained by designing with the real product instead of a picture of it.

When your design team trades the canvas for code, what actually disappears, and is what you get back worth more than what you lost?

A few months ago, I designed a full-page drag and drop interaction, cut it for a technical constraint, and then went looking for it a month later when that constraint disappeared. It took me 15 minutes and an AI assistant to dig it out of an old pull request. In Figma, it would've taken under a minute. And if a year had gone by, or I'd left for Costa Rica to take up surfing, nobody would've known it existed. That little treasure hunt is where this episode starts.This is episode three of "What Survives: When AI Comes for Your Design Work," and it's all about the trade-offs. I get into what my team lost when we left a canvas design tool behind: the visual iteration history that came for free, the comment threads that quietly held the why behind our decisions, the blank canvas (which, as it turns out, may have been gone long before AI showed up), and a command line skill set I can feel getting weaker every day. I also take on a fair pushback from a listener named Elena, who argues teams rarely look back at old versions anyway.But it's not a horror story. I talk through the other side of the ledger too: turning six months of Figma work into working, production-ready pages in days, the rejected PR that made me wonder if we were just cosplaying as engineers, and how we found our lane with engineering afterward. If your team has made the switch, or is about to, give this one a listen and then tell me what you traded away.

Topics:

• 03:10 - The foundation nobody sees
• 04:10 - Not a picture of the design, the design itself
• 04:50 - Losing the visual history
• 06:15 - Recovering a decision, not browsing
• 07:40 - Where the why actually lived
• 09:05 - How we kept collaboration alive
• 09:45 - When tooling costs more than a human
• 10:20 - Was the blank canvas ever blank?
• 11:15 - Auto layout was already doing the work
• 12:15 - The skills I'm renting
• 14:10 - The other side of the ledger
• 14:45 - Months of Figma work rebuilt in days
• 15:35 - The PR that got rejected
• 16:30 - Finding our lane with engineering
• 17:25 - Saved time is contested territory
• 18:15 - Engineers weren't territorial
• 19:25 - Designer or UI engineer?
• 20:05 - Back to pen and paper

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This week we dig into belief bias, the reason your team grills the research it doesn’t like and waves through the stuff it already agrees with. Same evidence, two completely different levels of scrutiny.If you’ve ever won an argument at work, how sure are you that you made the better case and not just the more popular one?Belief bias is what happens when we judge an argument by whether we agree with where it lands instead of whether the logic actually holds up. If the conclusion sounds right, weak reasoning gets a pass. If it sounds wrong, suddenly everyone turns into a fact-checker. It’s one of the oldest reasoning errors on record, first noted back in 1928, but the study that set the template came in 1983 when Evans, Barston, and Pollard separated two things that usually travel together: whether an argument is valid and whether its conclusion is believable. People accepted believable conclusions about nine times out of ten, no matter whether the logic held.On a product team this shows up everywhere scrutiny is supposed to live. The design direction everyone already likes gets a thin rationale waved through, while the unexpected one gets picked apart. A sloppy study that confirms the roadmap is “directionally useful,” and a solid one that threatens it is suddenly “not statistically significant.” The same point lands when a senior person makes it and stalls when a junior person says the exact same thing. The fix isn’t to distrust your gut. It’s to grade the reasoning before you look at the conclusion, notice when the hard questions only come out for answers you don’t like, and slow things down when the stakes are real.Give it a listen and catch yourself before belief bias makes the call for you.Topics:

• 00:00 - Same idea, two meetings

• 03:45 - Two research studies, same afternoon

• 05:05 - What belief bias actually is (and where it came from)

• 06:00 - The 1983 study that proved it

• 07:00 - Why it happens: fast belief vs slow logic

• 08:10 - Belief bias is not confirmation bias

• 08:40 - Where it shows up on product teams

• 10:00 - Does group discussion fix it?

• 11:20 - 5 ways to catch belief bias

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It’s a regular Thursday sync until my manager cuts our Figma license and hands the whole product team one month to go fully AI. In this one I walk through who made that call, the surprisingly solid case for it, and the very selfish panic running through my head while I said nothing.

When the tool you spent a decade mastering loses its market value in a single meeting, what exactly are you afraid of losing: your job, or your identity?

This is the episode about the day the call actually came down. I’m at my kitchen counter with a fresh coffee, hopping on a normal weekly UX sync, when my manager announces the entire product team is moving to a 100% AI workflow by the end of the month. And by the way, the Figma license is getting cut. No debate, no “what does everyone think.” The decision was made in a room I wasn’t in, then delivered to a room full of designers who had about a month to deal with it.

I do two things in this one. First, I try to be fair to the decision, because it deserves it. I get into the cost math leadership was staring at in early 2026, the pricing question Bob Baxley raised after I posted about the switch, and why ripping the band-aid off with a brutally short deadline was probably the right move and not the reckless one it felt like. Then I tell you the less flattering half: what was actually going through my head in that meeting. Spoiler, not one of those thoughts was about our users or the work. Every single one was about me, my title, and whether being “the person who knows Figma best” was ever a real skill to begin with.

I also get into the part nobody sat us down to talk about, which is that these tools blur the lines between design, engineering, and product in every direction at once, and introduce the “in the loop, on the loop, out of the loop” question that runs through the rest of the season. If your company hasn’t had this meeting yet, I’d gently suggest not assuming it isn’t coming. Give this one a listen, then let me know about your own version of the kitchen counter moment.

Topics:

• 0:00 The day they cut our Figma license

• 3:00 The cost play: why pay for two tools?

• 4:05 Not my call: where I sit in the org

• 4:50 Nobody said "adapt or quit" (the soft mandate)

• 5:30 The fair case, and Bob Baxley's pricing question

• 7:15 Ripping the Band-Aid: off the dock, into the boat

• 8:40 What was really in my head: "just UI engineers now?"

• 9:45 Kevin the plumber

• 10:50 Watching a decade of skill depreciate

• 11:50 How remote teams process shock

• 13:10 Does engineering even want us in the code?

• 14:00 Every role blurs at once

• 15:10 The walk

• 15:55 In the loop, on the loop, out of the loop

• 17:10 Next time: what we traded away

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