Two Designers Walk Into a Production Repo
About this session
When the Claude Figma integration dropped and tech influencers everywhere screamed that product designers were dead, we panicked. It was enough to make two experienced product designers seriously question where our careers were heading.
So instead of walking away, we decided to experiment.
We spent the next month stress-testing AI coding models inside highly complex, heavy-logic enterprise codebases. What started as curiosity quickly escalated. We went from designing interfaces in Figma to navigating repositories, working in Ruby on Rails, opening massive production pull requests, and shipping parts of the experiences we designed ourselves.
Our engineering team didn't exactly applaud.
We leaked API keys. We burned through expensive AI tokens. And suddenly, two designers were touching parts of the architecture they had never been expected to touch before.
Somewhere inside that mess, we became builders.
We could move from understanding a user problem, to designing the experience, to getting into the repo, using AI to build it, and working with engineering to actually ship it.
That transition forced our entire team to rethink ownership. What can designers safely own in a production codebase? Where does engineering need to set boundaries? What guardrails does AI need? And what happens when the line between designing and building starts to disappear?
In this session, we'll share what actually happened when two product designers walked into a production repo: the mistakes, the production scares, the fight for repository access, the workflows that worked, and the collaboration model that eventually emerged between design and engineering.
And the experiment is still going. We're documenting our transition from designers to builders through our podcast, sharing what we're learning, what breaks, what works, and how our relationship with design, code, AI, and engineering continues to evolve.
You'll leave with a practical look at what it takes to move beyond AI-assisted design and actually build inside a production codebase, including the guardrails, workflows, and collaboration patterns that made it possible for us.
Two designers walked into a production repo. We came out builders.
Speakers
Key takeaways
- Learn how product designers can use AI to move from Figma into real production codebases, contributing to and shipping the experiences they design.
- Learn the guardrails, workflows, and boundaries we developed with engineering to let designers build safely while protecting backend logic, architecture, and security.
- See how AI changes ownership across product teams, and how designers and engineers can create a new collaboration model when the line between designing and building starts to blur.