#01 - A fresh start, building with AI, and a small challenge for you
An invitation to experiment without stakes
Beyond the Build is now Primitives. Here’s why.
Quick thing before we get into the essay. Beyond the Build is now Primitives, and it lives at primitives.blog.
Last year, I joined Atlassian’s design team, where I work on enterprise apps, agentic experiences and design systems. It has been the most challenging and rewarding stretch of my career so far. Hence the 6 month break from writing anything here. You’ll now hear everything I’ve learnt and more.
The old name didn’t fit what I wanted to write about anymore. AI has pulled the rug out from under a lot of what we thought we knew about design and engineering, and a lot of us are quietly going back to first principles, trying to figure out what holds up and what doesn’t. That’s the thing I want this newsletter to be about.
Primitives means basic building blocks of technology, and it also means what we’re becoming again as a society, learning how to live and build alongside something that’s growing at light speed.
If you’re new here, welcome. If you’ve been around since the BTB days, thank you for still being here. Update your bookmarks to the new link whenever you get a chance.
Now, the actual post.
The craft of making software is getting sharper
There’s a conversation that I hear in every design circle - “PMs can build mockups and prototypes with AI. Engineers can do the same. Are we designers going to lose our jobs?”
Wrong question to ask, I believe…
AI is doing something we’ve been asking for since the day cross-functional teams became a thing. It is closing the gap between disciplines, the same gap we complained about for years.
PMs can now prototype rough ideas before a team review.
Engineers can explore visual directions while building.
Designers also can write working code, test logic, research more efficiently, ship things. Somewhere secretly, almost every designer has felt the urge to write code and bring their designs to life. That’s exactly what’s happening.
I’m not just a designer
I am a product designer, sure. That product part in the role is more important, seldom paid attention to. I am a product teammate who happens to contribute most through designs.
But, my contributions don’t (and don’t have to) stop at Figma. I care about technical constraints, I have opinions about landing pages and pricing strategy, I talk about brand positioning, and I love writing content.
The best work I’ve done on product teams is where we operated this way, stepping outside our conventional lanes, and cared more about the outcome rather than the territory.
A few important shifts I’ve noted
Shared language is emerging
When a PM prototypes in Replit and a designer builds with Cursor, suddenly the conversation starts from something tangible, not a slide deck or a canvas. Fewer meetings, faster alignment.
Feedback loop is tighter
Ideas that used to take a week to go from wireframes to working Figma prototypes now take an afternoon. That means more iterations, more explorations, and a better chance to get it right.
Craft is becoming visible, very prominently
When everyone can generate a decent first draft, the difference between decent design and great design becomes pretty obvious. Taste, polish, and attention to detail matter so much more now.
Insecurity is the wrong response
If a PM making a rough mockup threatens your value as a designer, the problem isn’t AI. The work was always bigger than any one discipline. A product is never designed alone, built alone, or sold alone. It needs a team, and teams work better when boundaries are porous.
Why play a zero-sum game? The framing “Design is dead” or “They’re taking our work” is pointless. Nobody wins when disciplines are siloed. The best products come from teams where everyone can contribute beyond their title, and AI is finally making that possible at scale.
This is not encroachment. This is what collaboration was always supposed to look like.
Here’s the challenge—build one thing. Just one.
You can read every article, watch every tutorial, follow every discourse on Twitter/X. None of it will teach you what building one small thing will.
I don’t mean anything ambitious like a startup idea. I mean one thing that’s just for you. Something like a to-do app, a landing page about you, a website to showcase your artwork or photography… anything.
I started with a blog website, quickly realizing how deep I needed to go to actually make it work, but learning about Next.js, React, CMS on the way. Wasn’t perfect, but it was mine.
It taught me so much about prompting better, iterating, breaking things, following Git hygiene, not worrying when errors show up and fixing them. After that, it was a shit load of prototypes at work that looked like real products.
What could count as your “one thing” -
Something you’ve always wished existed, like a tiny tool to track food, calculate daily expenses
Something you already designed like an old app flow from work
Something completely useless but fun, a random joke generator, a quiz
A page for someone’s birthday, a recipe organizer for your partner
The point is not the output, it is the process. The specifics really don’t matter.
I’d love to see you go from “I should try building something with AI 🤔 ” to “I built something with AI 😃 ”
If it turns out terrible, great. You learned something. If it turns out surprisingly good, even better. Either way, you’ll understand something about this moment in design and technology that’s changing how we build software.
Here’s my LinkedIn and here’s my Twitter/X. Post your work and tag me there, I promise I’ll reply.
So, this is the kind of stuff we’ll talk more about in this newsletter. We’ll talk about building apps, prototypes, projects. We’ll talk about software, design, and sometimes hardware if the mood fits right. We will talk about doing better in your role as a product teammate. And we will occasionally talk about life.
I have a lot I want to write about. You’ll hear from me soon.
Thanks for reading.