Design Engineering with Maggie Appleton

About this episode

Brought to You By: • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. • 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. • Entire – every agent prompt, tool call, stored in your repo, and mirrored. — 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 chan