Last December, Cursor announced their visual editor—a way to edit UI directly in the browser. Karri Saarinen, the designer who co-founded Linear, saw it and called it a trap. Ryo Lu, the head of design at Cursor, pushed back. The Twitter back-and-forth went on for a couple days until they conceded they mostly agreed. Tommy Geoco digs into what the debate actually surfaced.
The traditional way we talk about design tools is floor versus ceiling—does the tool make good design more accessible, or does it push what’s possible? Geoco argues the Saarinen/Lu exchange revealed a second axis: unconstrained exploration versus material exploration. Sketching on napkins versus building in code.
Saarinen’s concern:
Whenever a designer becomes more of a builder, some idealism and creativity dies. It’s not because building is bad, but because you start introducing constraints earlier in the process than you should.
Lu’s counter:
The truth only reveals itself once you start to build. Not when you think about building, not when you sketch possibilities in a protected space, but when you actually make the thing real and let reality talk back.
Both are right, and Geoco’s reframing is useful:
The question is not should designers code. It’s are you using the new speed to explore more territory or just arriving at the same destination faster?
That’s the question I keep asking myself. When I use AI tools, am I discovering ideas I wouldn’t have found otherwise, or am I just getting to obvious ideas faster? The tools make iteration cheap, but cheap iteration on the same territory isn’t progress.
I think about it this way—back when I was starting out, sketching thumbnails was the technique I used. It was very quick and easy to sketch out dozens of ideas in a sketchbook, especially when they were logo or poster ideas. When sketching interaction ideas, the technique is closer to a storyboard—connected thumbnails. But for me, once I get into a high-fidelity design or prototype, there is tremendous pull to just keep tweaking the design rather than coming up with multiple options. In other words, convergence is happening rather than continued divergence.
