The New Full-Stack Designer
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.
The gist
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Schwaibold now uses Figma mainly as a scratch pad, sketching rough ideas that Codex and Claude Code quickly turn into working demos.
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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.
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For a grass shader, he used ChatGPT to see why Codex struggled, then DialKit sliders revealed his terrain map had been wrong.
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His advice: treat AI as an infinitely patient collaborator, keep iterating (one carousel took 91 prompts), and learn by copying work you admire.
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Reviewing sites, he urges one clear goal per page, progressive disclosure, native scrolling instead of scroll jacking, and swipeable carousels like the free Blossom Carousel.
"The tooling has definitely shifted a lot from tools like Figma and working with static layouts into more of an AI-driven workflow, where I'll use Figma as a scratch pad for some of the ideas I have, but then very quickly that'll transcend into real demos."
▶ Play at 0:5331 creators recommend it, including Ali Abdaal, Claire Vo, and Jordi Hays.
See all on the Figma page"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 actually easy for Codex to decompile it if it sees it visually. It interprets that image, I think similar..."
▶ Play at 21:0897 creators recommend it, including Riley Brown, Claire Vo, and Dan Shipper.
See all on the Codex page"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 or computer a lot faster."
▶ Play at 1:15108 creators recommend it, including Riley Brown, Liam Ottley, and Peter Yang.
See all on the Claude Code page"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 process like, well, you have to explain to it where the light is coming from and what shadows you're us..."
▶ Play at 22:59159 creators recommend it, including John Coogan, Riley Brown, and Peter Yang.
See all on the ChatGPT page"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 implemented was completely wrong and skewed... DialKit kind of unpacked that for me."
▶ Play at 24:36"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 variations and versions. It comes as stacks on mobile. This is free to use and on GitHub, so any founders o..."
▶ Play at 1:04:19"Yeah, this is great. Everybody should use this. Instantly your carousels will get way better."
▶ Play at 1:04:362 creators recommend it.
See all on the Blossom Carousel pageWhat they recommend · 7 picks
Software & apps
4 picks · Marvin Schwaibold and Y Combinator
"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..."
"Yeah, this is great. Everybody should use this. Instantly your carousels will get way better."
Y, Riley, Greg and Alex agree on 21 things
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3 picks · Marvin Schwaibold ·Marvin's AI tools →
"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..."
"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 ..."
Marvin Schwaibold
6 picks · guest
"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..."
"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..."
Y Combinator
1 pick · host
"Yeah, this is great. Everybody should use this. Instantly your carousels will get way better."
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