Ep #16: Jonny and Tom: Guest recap, Learning Loops, Leverage and a 3D Labyrinth

Tom and Jonny catch up after the summer with a roundup of August’s four guests, from Monzo’s fake app to Poem/1’s self-learning fulfilment agent. They ask whether designers are giving away their leverage to agents, answer a listener who wants the show to branch out, and share what they built, including Labyrinth rebuilt in two hours.

Key takeaways

1. Being deliberate about what you give away is most of the job now. Every August guest drew the line somewhere different, and every one of them drew it. Jonny’s version: even when it is slower, and even when an AI would do it better, make sure the decisions being made are still yours to make.
2. Make one decision with an agent and fifty get made for you. They arrive interlinked, so working out which ones landed and why costs more than piling on another prompt. You end up with work that is technically yours and nothing in your head connecting it.
3. A learning loop is an agent that remembers its own mistakes. Matt Webb’s Poem/1 fulfilment agent handled queries from 700 units by turning each new exception into a standing rule. Jonny’s caveat is that the abstract version convinces nobody, which is why “everyone should have agents” lands so flat.
4. Agents accumulate cruft, so prune them. Jonny moved his main agent from NanoClaw version one to version two this week and deleted about half the notes it had written to itself over six months. What survived reads as concise instructions instead of six months of contradictions.
5. When everyone can make the impressive thing, impressive moves. GPT-6 Astra put one-shot 3D and cloned games within reach of anyone with a prompt. Jonny’s yardstick for where the value went: his dad, a vicar, could now get further on a demo video than Jonny could have managed five years ago.
6. Understand the grain of the medium you are designing against. Randy Hunt’s framing was the old-school graphic designer collaborating with the printer to get intent onto the page. Having an agent write your code is a different skill from understanding what that code does to your design.
7. AI writing feels thin because the thinking happened somewhere else. Matt Webb can feed a model everything he has ever published and still fail to stand behind what comes back. It may convince everyone else, and it is still not something you can point at and call yours.
8. Build the silly project yourself or you will never learn the tool. Demos online tell you nothing about where the limits sit. Tom is close to downloading Blender for exactly this reason, and Jonny built a full 3D Labyrinth in two hours partly to find out what two hours now buys.
9. The impressionists are the closest analogue to this moment. Photography arrived, exact landscapes stopped being the point, and painters who already had mastery chose what to break. Whoever does best next will understand the technology underneath well enough to bend it.
10. Skills get better when you rewrite their output by hand. Tom burned a month of Claude Fable 5.1 credits in half an hour, then rewrote both research skills’ results manually and fed those back as the template. A 10,000-word essay he would never read became a 400-word list of links.
11. The craft question matters more than the job title. Tim, a listener, asked whether the show could branch out beyond senior design folks. Yes, with a lens: creative technologists, engineers, product people and founders are all fair game, as long as the question stays how AI is shifting the role and craft of design.

Chapters

• 0:04 — Intro: back to school, and a cosy September episode
• 0:59 — Rounding up August’s four guests
• 1:38 — James Storer: Monzo’s fake app and its biggest token spender
• 3:29 — Randy Hunt: Notion, SVA, and two full-time roles
• 4:36 — The printing press, and the grain of the medium
• 6:30 — Patrick Lewis: four times a founding designer
• 7:57 — T-Rex arms, and shaping a role around what you enjoy
• 8:51 — Matt Webb and an inventor’s practice
• 9:49 — Poem/1’s self-learning fulfilment loop
• 11:31 — The Gmail triage loop Tom hasn’t built yet
• 12:43 — OpenClaw, and agents that rewrite their own memory
• 13:36 — Lobotomising an agent onto NanoClaw version two
• 16:59 — Where every guest drew their own line
• 17:22 — Are we losing our leverage to agents?
• 18:30 — GPT-6 Astra, and what happens when everyone can do it
• 22:20 — Make one decision, get fifty
• 24:10 — Is design an art or a science?
• 26:47 — Inventors, not technologists
• 28:44 — Why you have to build the silly project yourself
• 30:20 — The impressionists, photography, and our toddler phase
• 31:50 — Listener feedback: branch out beyond senior design folks?
• 33:45 — Grading the podcast, and 36 YouTube subscribers
• 36:29 — Design at the core, but a wider cast
• 39:40 — Labyrinth, one-shotted in two hours
• 42:45 — Burning a month of Claude Fable credits on skills
• 45:40 — Consolidating everything into one Dia browser
• 47:39 — Design leadership circles
• 49:12 — Hatch Berlin, Brighton, and save the date for 22 October
• 53:16 — Wrap up

Mentioned in the episode

The August episodes we round up

• Ep #12: James Storer (Monzo) — share.transistor.fm/s/ab6c1806
• Ep #13: Randy Hunt (Notion & SVA) — share.transistor.fm/s/29c8593b
• Ep #14: Patrick Lewis (Klay) — share.transistor.fm/s/8d030297
• Ep #15: Matt Webb (Inanimate) — share.transistor.fm/s/c39062f5

People

• James Storer, Senior Product Design Lead at Monzo — linkedin.com/in/james-storer-5b543625
• Randy Hunt, Head of Design at Notion and chair of MFA Design at SVA — randyjhunt.com
• Patrick Lewis, founding designer at Klay — patricknlewis.com
• Matt Webb, writing at Interconnected — interconnected.org
• Christine Røde, product designer at The Browser Company — linkedin.com/in/christinerode
• Lenny Rachitsky, host of Lenny’s Podcast — lennysnewsletter.com/podcast
• Tim, the listener who wrote in with the feedback

Companies and past roles

• Monzo — monzo.com
• Notion — notion.com
• SVA MFA Design — design.sva.edu
• Klay — klay.vision
• Inanimate, Matt Webb’s current company — inanimate.tech
• The Browser Company — thebrowser.company

Tools, models and products discussed

• GPT-6 Astra — openai.com/index/gpt-6-astra
• Claude Fable 5.1 — anthropic.com/claude/fable
• OpenClaw — openclaw.ai
• NanoClaw — nanoclaw.dev
• Grok Bot — x.ai
• Cursor — cursor.com
• Dia, the browser by The Browser Company — diabrowser.com
• Blender — blender.org
• Poem/1, Matt Webb’s poetry clock — poem.town
• Labyrinth, the Ravensburger board game — ravensburger.co.uk

Jonny’s own projects

• Labyrinth online, built in two hours — labyrinth.jonny.ooda.run
• Ooda, secure collaborative hosting for teams — ooda.run
• designtools.fyi, run by an agent that maintains itself — designtools.fyi

Events

• Mostly Working, the London design mornings Tom runs — lu.ma/mostly-working
• Hatch, Berlin, 16–18 September, where Jonny is speaking on the 18th — hatchconference.com
• design + AI, Brighton, 24–25 September, where Tom and Jonny run a workshop — designplusaisummit.com

About the pod