What can us, engineers else learn from designers and design engineers? Turns out there’s lots, based on talking with one of the best design engineers in the industry, @Mappletons.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro 03:24 From anthropology to tech 10:18 What does a designer do? 18:23 How Maggie works 24:55 The case for planning with physical tools 31:53 Why Maggie is learning woodworking 33:13 Design engineers and engineering constraints 38:49 How Maggie uses Figma 40:30 Design at GitHub Next 45:12 How has AI changed design 50:37 When models design and why humans are still needed 53:30 UX and UI 58:29 Capability gaslighting 1:00:33 One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment 1:07:21 Craft and AI tells 1:14:17 Visual gardens, home-cooked software, and barefoot developers 1:21:02 Advice for engineers and lessons from anthropology 1:25:34 Book recommendation

Brought to you by:

• @turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic

• @AntithesisHQ – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. https://antithesis.com/pragmatic

• @EntireHQ – every agent prompt, tool call, stored in your repo, and mirrored. Set up with one click: https://entire.io/pragmatic

Hope you enjoy this unusually visual episode - thanks again, Maggie!

turbopuffer x Pragmatic Engineer

Source: https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic turbopuffer is the search engine to connect large amounts of unstructured data to AI. Built from first principles on object storage with an intelligent cache layer, turbopuffer is just as fast as in-memory search engines but orders of magnitude cheaper to run.

We index1T+documents for leading AI companies: