Summary
In this episode of Y Combinator’s Design Review, Marvin Schwaibold, who leads the product design studio at Shopify, explains how AI tools have reshaped his design process. He describes moving away from the Figma canvas toward working directly with Codex and Claude Code in the terminal, using Figma mostly as a scratch pad and producing real demos he can test on his phone or computer.
Schwaibold frames the designer’s role as editor and curator. With output no longer the bottleneck, the work is being selective, breaking complex problems into subtasks for the agent, and applying taste that AI lacks. He walks through an interactive project built over 91 prompts, including a side panel that exposes physics parameters such as pull boost, which he says is essential because describing feel in chat alone does not work.
He also discusses Shopify’s design initiative, which covers Sidekick, the AI layer managing the merchant admin, the mobile app, and admin dashboards. His advice for founders, engineers, and designers is to tinker, treat AI as an infinitely patient collaborator, share reference screenshots, color palettes, and animations to imitate, and keep iterating rather than giving up after a weak first result. The episode also reviews viewer-submitted websites.
📺 Source: Y Combinator · Published October 26, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
