Happy Friday.
Writing this from NYC. I've been at Ramp's office the last two days — talking to their design team, had a few conversations I'm excited to share with you. This is a 99% agentic company.
And our survey says these types of designers are more satisfied with their work.
And earlier this week, I dropped my episode with Nad Chishtie, Head of Design at Lovable, who shared how they’re approaching design systems. It's live now.
– Tommy (@designertom)
TOGETHER WITH DSCOUT
The bottleneck isn't running the research. It's everything around it — finding the right people, designing the study, getting to the insight before the sprint ends.
Dscout is an AI-powered research platform built for teams moving at this speed:
Recruit finds qualified Scouts in hours, not weeks — filtered by real behavior, not just demographics
AI Moderator runs unmoderated studies with smart follow-ups, so you get depth without the scheduling overhead
Dscout AI Study Creator helps you design and launch studies in a fraction of the time
Three parallel realities
We ran the first quarterly State of Prototyping survey. 1,478 designers, 18 regions, collected in March. Same survey the US DOJ cited when auditing the Adobe-Figma acquisition. Annual snapshots stopped keeping up — everything's moving too fast.
43% of designers spend most of their building time vibe coding. 37% have never done it once. Not occasionally. Zero.
The tool stack shows it. Claude is now the second most-used weekly design tool, behind Figma. Claude Code is at four, ahead of FigJam. An AI coding terminal is more embedded in designer workflows than the most popular whiteboard on the market. That shift happened in twelve months.
The satisfaction data tracks the same line. Designers doing zero AI coding average 5.9/10 on career satisfaction. Heavy vibe coders: 7.4. Nearly linear across every level of adoption.
I'm not claiming causation. The counterarguments are loud and I've heard them. But a gap that consistent, across 18 regions, that many respondents — it doesn't disappear when you look harder.
There's also 18.5% in the middle. Dabbling, not committed. That group decides what this chart looks like in six months.
The video breaks down who's in each group, what's actually blocking people, and one number about managers I didn't expect. Watch it here.
The full dataset is open — CSV, filterable — at survey.uxtools.co.
Run your own analysis. If we got something wrong, you'll have what you need to show it.
There's another video I've been editing at the hotel — separate from the prototyping data. It’s all about agents and harnesses.
If you have a question about those that you want me to answer in the video, reply and let me know.
See you next week,
Tommy
