The New Full-Stack Designer

Y Combinator · · 1 hr 6 min

Marvin Schwaibold, who leads Shopify's product design studio, shows how he designs with AI tools like Codex and Claude Code. He argues designers are becoming full-stack editors, then reviews viewer-submitted startup websites.

Watch the episode 1 hr 6 min · YouTube

The gist

  1. Schwaibold now uses Figma mainly as a scratch pad, sketching rough ideas that Codex and Claude Code quickly turn into working demos.
  2. He says AI can write code but cannot judge what looks good, so designers curate, break work into subtasks, and pitch with prototypes over documents.

What they recommend · 7 picks

Software & apps

4 picks · Marvin Schwaibold and Y Combinator

DialKit Strong yes

"We installed DialKit into this demo... Exposing the underlying structure would also show me where I had made mistakes. The original version of the terrain map that I had impleme..."

"We have a carousel kit actually... called Blossom Carousel. And Blossom Carousel is basically a carousel that swipes and scrolls and it comes in a multitude of different variati..."

Marvin Schwaibold ·2 creators recommend it·Marvin's software & apps →

"Yeah, this is great. Everybody should use this. Instantly your carousels will get way better."

Y Combinator ·2 creators recommend it·Y's software & apps →

Y, Riley, Greg and Alex agree on 21 things

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AI tools

3 picks · Marvin Schwaibold ·Marvin's AI tools →

Codex Strong yes

"It's more of a scratch pad to like map out ideas and I give those ideas to Codex. And I use the scratchpad because it's easier for me to decompile something, but also it's actua..."

97 creators recommend it

"It's definitely more of a world now that includes tools like Codex and Claude Code and being in terminal a lot and just getting to an output that I can use and test on my phone ..."

108 creators recommend it

"I would screenshot this and my original video. I would open up ChatGPT and I gave it to another agent there... And that ChatGPT then helped me kind of like understand my own pro..."

159 creators recommend it

Also mentioned

6:10 Molly · "Yeah, Molly was a design studio in Brooklyn that I was running together with J Tal, my studio partner. We..."
8:17 Primal · "We used to call the system Primal. It's a way to just basically understand content on a website, digest..."
13:26 Sidekick · "Our studio exclusively operates within Sidekick, which is the AI infrastructure layer of Shopify... through..."
27:28 Mike Matas · "This is inspired by Mike Matas. He's a design leader at LoveFrom, and his portfolio carousel works in this..."
29:53 Cosmos · "Give it a screenshot from Savee or Cosmos of something that you think looks really beautiful."
31:56 Nstack · "From a visual perspective, it's very overloading, right? You have a lot of content in the sidebar... It's..."

What do Y and experts like them all swear by?

21 things in common

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