Design Engineering with Maggie Appleton

What can everyone else learn from designers and design engineers? As it turns out, there’s plenty, as I discovered when one of the best design engineers in the industry, Maggie Appleton, came onto the Pragmatic Engineer Podcast. She’s a staff research engineer at GitHub Next, where she builds prototypes to explore how software engineers might collaborate with AI in new ways. Maggie is at the intersection of design, anthropology, and web development, and was the first designer hired by AI startup Elicit, and Lead Design engineer at AI startup, Normally. Today’s episode is more visual than usual because Maggie brought her notebook along, so there are peeks inside its pages of prototypes and more: We got into designers’ work and how their design processes are adapting to and changing with AI. We explore why Maggie starts projects with pens and notebooks, what distinguishes design engineers from other designers, and why understanding engineering constraints leads to better collaboration with engineers. We also discuss how Maggie uses jigs to gain more control over AI agents, why human judgment and style still matter when models can generate designs, and how inconsistent AI capabilities can mislead us. — *Brought to you by:* • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. https://turbopuffer.com/pragmatic • O'Reilly Early Release: Scaling AI Adoption in Engineering – a free book on how to adopt and scale AI in a pragmatic way inside of engineering orgs. Complimentary, thanks to Antithesis. https://pages.antithesis.com/oreilly-scaling-ai-ebook-pragmatic?utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=pragmatic_2026&utm_source=pragmatic&utm_content=oreilly_20260923 • Entire – every agent prompt, tool call, stored in your repo, and mirrored. https://entire.io/pragmatic — *The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:* • What is “loop engineering?” https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-loop-engineering • Design-first software engineering: Craft, with Balint Orosz https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/design-first-software-engineering • Are AI agents actually slowing us down? https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/are-ai-agents-actually-slowing-us • Vibe Coding as a software engineer https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/vibe-coding-as-a-software-engineer • How Codex is built https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-codex-is-built • How Claude Code is built https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-claude-code-is-built • From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmani https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/from-chrome-devtools-to-ai-engineering — *Where to find Maggie Appleton:* • X: https://x.com/Mappletons • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggieappleton • Website: https://maggieappleton.com — *In this episode, we cover:* 00:00 Intro 03:24 From anthropology to tech 10:18 What does a designer do? 18:23 How Maggie works 24:55 The case for planning with physical tools 31:53 Why Maggie is learning woodworking 33:13 Design engineers and engineering constraints 38:49 How Maggie uses Figma 40:30 Design at GitHub Next 45:12 How has AI changed design 50:37 When models design and why humans are still needed 53:30 UX and UI 58:29 Capability gaslighting 1:00:33 One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment 1:07:21 Craft and AI tells 1:14:17 Visual gardens, home-cooked software, and barefoot developers 1:21:02 Advice for engineers and lessons from anthropology 1:25:34 Book recommendation — See the transcript and other references from the episode at https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/.