Stripe design manager Kris Puckett, speaking on Michael Riddering’s Dive Club, spent the first half of the conversation demoing metal shaders, custom ocean animations, and a full iOS reading app he built with Claude Code. Then he stopped himself:

AI native has to be beyond just “I made a really cool shader” or “I made this dither effect that every other person is making.” I was doing that today and then I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is… why am I doing this? There’s a hundred of these that are way better than what I’m making right now.”

So what does AI-native design actually look like? Puckett’s answer is “soul”—the quality that makes work feel specifically, unmistakably yours:

I think what people are going to be desperate for is more of that human side of things. They’re going to be longing for […] an era they’ve never experienced because they’re younger, that MySpace generation where your MySpace page was deeply personal to you. My MySpace page was complete custom Kris Puckett perfection at that time. And I think that we’re going to want to see that come back. And I think people are going to want more of those—your portfolio looks and feels like you.

“Soul” is doing a lot of work as a concept there. What Puckett is describing sounds a lot like taste—the ability to make something that feels intentional and specific rather than procedurally generated. His workflow backs that up. Being contrarian, he explicitly rejects the “let the agent run” approach:

I want off that cycle. I do not want to be riding that bike race with anyone else because that’s not how I view these things. They are a force multiplier, but I want them to be focused. I want it to be something that I feel is still authentically me.

What unlocked all of this for Puckett wasn’t technical skill—he’s a designer, not an engineer. It was admitting “I don’t know” and starting anyway. He’d been dreaming of building his own software for 20 years. Claude Code’s blinking cursor was enough to get him started.