Ep #23: Tom and Jonny: Summit Software, Life After Figma, and Builders vs Editors

Tom and Jonny look back on the Mostly Working Summit at Monzo. They go behind the scenes of the software they built the day before it, compare notes on designing without Figma, and unpack Lily Dart’s two archetypes of builders and information architects.

Key takeaways

1. Good people in a room will find the conversation. The summit bet on roundtables of seven or eight peers over a morning of talks, with no laptops and neither host at a table. More than one attendee said the roundtables were the best part, and of 70-odd people, maybe one left at half time. Telling everyone they had an assigned seat for the second half probably helped.
2. Four themes kept 70-odd people talking about the right things. Each theme echoed the fireside panels and was written to work for a manager of managers and for a founding designer with no other designers around. Grouping people with similar challenges did the rest.
3. Most of the summit’s software was built in the 24 hours before it started. Tom matched people to roundtables by dropping a JSON export of live Luma check-ins into a tool he’d built in Claude, during Jonny’s panel. Jonny built summit.mostlyworking.co, a question asker running on a Cloudflare Durable Object that later revealed everyone’s table, in three prompts with Amp on a crowded commuter train.
4. Cottage software is now a sensible choice for a free event. A year or two ago, a custom table plan generator would have needed real engineering effort. Jonny could have found a free Q&A tool, but building his own meant the questions and the table reveal lived in one place.
5. A Claude artifact makes a surprisingly good live deck. Tom built the deck the day before, pointing Claude at the Mostly Working brand kit so every portrait picked up the moving dot treatment from the social assets, kept deliberately calm. When a wrong URL showed up on screen, he fixed it from his own laptop while Jonny’s ran the display, and the slide updated live.
6. How you hold the tool shapes what you believe it can do. A month into Dex, Jonny found teammates using Claude over a data lake as an on-demand analyst, turning a week-long data request into a two-minute aside. He also found colleagues asking how he’d done things he considered routine. That’s the jagged frontier, up close.
7. Dropping Figma for Paper was easier than Jonny expected. He last opened Figma on his first day. Paper lacks SSO, invite links and private files, which a bigger organisation would miss. Having no shared libraries pushed the team to rebuild real components from code, and a Paper sketch becomes an HTML prototype on ooda in under half an hour.
8. High-quality direction is becoming a core design skill. After an hour giving two founders feedback on a wireframe, Tom turned the Granola notes into a five-minute prompt for Claude Opus 5.5 on max effort. An hour later it came back with a prototype that took on his notes about motion, blur and how the interface unfolds. The round trip that used to take a week or two after a crit happened in an hour.
9. You give feedback on what you can see. Static frames invite notes on alignment, and prototypes invite notes on motion and interaction. Jonny has spent half of his first four weeks on an agent’s tone, where almost nothing is visual and the iterations happen in prompts and models.
10. Claude is good at video. Jonny gave Claude a three-minute Cap recording of another product’s onboarding and asked it to break the flow down and rebuild it in Paper. Five minutes later it was done, and within a couple of hours he’d annotated it, shared it and had a plan. The old way meant pausing every five seconds for a folder of screenshots.
11. Builder works better as a mindset than a job title. At the summit, Lily Dart, design director at Monzo, described two emerging archetypes: the builder, and the information architect who connects things. Tom has come to see building as a bias to making, whether that’s UI or strategy, while someone still needs to own how everything fits together.
12. The more everyone ships, the more a product needs an editor. AI adds a base level of noise, the extra sentences and features nobody asked for. Writers and editors may share most of their skills, yet their roles differ, and someone has to set the bar for what leaves the building. Jonny reckons he is who he is, the designer asking whether it’s the right problem, and new technology won’t change that.

Chapters

• 
  0:08 — Welcome, and looking back on the Mostly Working Summit
• 1:37 — The bet: good people in a room over a morning of speakers
• 4:39 — Why roundtables beat the fireside panels for one attendee
• 5:07 — Four roundtable themes that work for any kind of design leader
• 6:44 — Matching people to roundtables from live Luma check-ins
• 9:17 — Jonny’s question asker, built on a Cloudflare Durable Object
• 10:35 — Revealing the tables, and why almost nobody left at half time
• 11:43 — summit.mostlyworking.co in three prompts on a commuter train with Amp
• 13:06 — Cottage software and a custom table plan for a free event
• 15:05 — Tom’s deck, built as a Claude artifact the day before
• 16:50 — Keeping the motion calm, and prompting data viz on a late-night call
• 18:14 — Claude artifacts as a slides tool, and fixing a wrong URL live on screen
• 19:19 — Could artifacts replace Google Docs and Notion?
• 20:19 — Luma check-ins straight into the deck, and Google Slides still in inches
• 22:10 — Vibe coding a message to the stage
• 23:36 — How the name feels, Jonny one month into Dex, and the jagged frontier
• 26:23 — How you hold the technology shapes what you think it can do
• 27:50 — Jonny’s design tool stack: a dusty Figma file and going all in on Paper
• 30:05 — Designing at the speed of thought, and UI that only looks right
• 30:58 — Why Paper having no shared libraries might be a feature
• 32:08 — From Paper to an HTML prototype on ooda in under half an hour
• 33:24 — Paper’s font video, and a founder call in Granola turned into a prototype
• 36:13 — High-quality direction as a core design skill
• 37:04 — Was it visually good, or the right product?
• 38:45 — Leaving Figma shifts the focus to motion and interaction
• 39:37 — You give feedback on what you can see, and designing an agent’s tone
• 41:09 — What Tom still misses from Figma, and why Claude is good at video
• 44:00 — Try prompting first, still
• 45:17 — Lily Dart’s two archetypes: builders and information architects
• 46:30 — Is builder a role or a mindset?
• 48:04 — Jonny wonders whether he’s a builder after all
• 50:37 — The bias toward adding things
• 51:56 — Writers, editors, and nature or nurture
• 54:01 — Homework, Cassie, Sara and Christine, and good night

Mentioned in the episode

Mostly Working

• 
  The Mostly Working Summit, Thursday 22 October 2026 at Monzo, London
• summit.mostlyworking.co, Jonny’s question asker and roundtable reveal for the day

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