Nate Parrott, a product designer at Anthropic, in an interview with Ryan Mather for AI Design Field Guide:

More Google Docs than you’d think. More Slack posts than you’d think. I meant what I said earlier: I think that this is the era of designers who design with words more so than designing with pixels.

Parrott describes a content design team whose job is making alien concepts legible:

We have several people at the company on the design team whose job is content design. Their job is basically to look at concepts which are very alien, and figure out how to make them legible to human beings. They don’t draw any pixels, but their work is really important because they are literally thinking about the words we use to describe and the mental models we expect people to put on that will make this stuff work.

The Figma work, Parrott says, is “the easy part.” He uses Anthropic’s design system, drops in components, and moves on. The hard work is upstream: expressing the ideas, figuring out the right language, talking to users. The production of screens has become the smallest slice of the job.

Jenny Wen described designers at Anthropic shipping code, prototyping against the live model, stretching into PM territory. Parrott is describing the same shift from a different angle. The deliverable used to be the mockup. Now the deliverable is the thinking that precedes it.