Software with Taste with Geoffrey Litt | AM Podcast #7

Geoffrey Litt is a design engineer at Notion. Previously, he was a senior researcher at the independent research lab Ink & Switch, and he got his PhD in HCI at MIT. Geoffrey’s work focuses on malleable software and designing environments for thinking.

Outline:

0:00 - Introduction

0:47 - Design Is More Than Better Animation

3:32 - Malleable Software and Coding Agents

9:06 - Human-Software Interaction is a Full-Stack Problem

12:43 - Getting Users On Board and Deeper

15:53 - The Trap of Just Building More

20:27 - Primitive Design Is a Taste Problem

22:20 - Understanding Is the New Bottleneck

27:22 - How To Develop Taste?

34:49 - Productivity vs. Speed

38:10 - Will Better AI Hurt Human-Human Collaboration?

44:34 - Advice for Designing Better Products

References:

Geoffrey’s Homepage: https://www.geoffreylitt.com

Malleable Software: https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/malleable-software/

Understanding is the new bottleneck: https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2026/07/02/understanding-is-the-new-bottleneck

Notion Workers: https://developers.notion.com/workers/get-started/overview

Podcast Links:

Podcast website: https://augmented-mind.github.io/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/augmented-mind-podcast/id1868102170

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/40KculkYTe2tOpqJm6TAYr?si=PU_UncsMT4mXjVNCRwoXog&nd=1&dlsi=6d9bed7a43d64085

RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/10dbf5b7c/podcast/rss

About the Hosts:

The AM Podcast is hosted by Yijia Shao, Shannon Shen, and Michael Ryan, CS PhD students at Stanford University and MIT.