Marvin Schwaibold leads the product design studio at Shopify, where his team is rethinking some of the company’s most important products for the AI era. Before Shopify, he co-founded the design studio Molly, working with companies including Apple and Google and building a reputation for highly crafted, interactive design. In this episode of Design Review, Marvin joins YC’s Aaron Epstein to show how AI has changed his process, from using Figma as a scratchpad to building working prototypes directly with tools like Codex. He explains why designers are becoming more like editors, how AI is making them more full-stack, and why taste and judgment matter even more when the tools can build almost anything. Then they review viewer-submitted websites and break down how hierarchy, motion, typography, and restraint can make a product feel more intentional. 00:00 — Inside Shopify’s Design Studio 00:30 — Designing With AI 01:44 — Designers Are Becoming Editors 03:25 — How Design Works at Shopify 05:58 — From Molly to Shopify 08:55 — Designing for Exploration 10:22 — Why the Details Matter 11:33 — Designing the Future at Shopify 13:24 — Prototypes Beat PRDs 15:29 — Rethinking Shopify With Sidekick 17:52 — Designers Are Becoming Builders 21:58 — Recreating Reality 24:33 — Dialing In AI-Generated Design 28:31 — Raising the Bar 31:04 — Website Review: Endstack 35:02 — SkillSync 40:49 — Instaplay 45:34 — Mintlify 51:42 — Knowlify 58:34 — Instinct Space

Thanks @aaron_epstein and @eve_bouff for having me on the Design Review at @ycombinator and letting me talk about carousel spring animations, grass shaders and some of the new work we’re cooking up in the design studio at @Shopify

amazing things are happening in the claude desktop app

Designed, engineered, and made in America

What a ride. 6 years. Remarkable team. My heart is full. The future is bright. Thanks for a career highlight @tobi. Long @Shopify 🖤

introducing @inflight the missing feedback layer for prototypes ⇢ works with any agent ⇢ supports pinned comments + video ⇢ turns feedback into next steps for Claude

i've had a hard time trying to describe what i'm feeling working with the models right now. they're so damn good at implementing anything you ask. but often what you ask for isn't necessarily what you want holistically. as you build, you shape the thing into something else, and perhaps what you initially implemented is no longer right — meaning it now has to be reconciled with the new reality of what you're building. what's beautiful is with enough shaping, QA'ing, refactoring, and relentless iteration, these models can build really, really fantastic software through just sheer attrition.

with vision, decisions API is pretty much flawless at captchas

Never getting rugged by Spectrum ever again 🙃

Training Data

Dear @claudeai, you have amazing models, and you probably have even better ones available internally. Could you please ask your Super Intelligence to simply copy the UX of the Codex desktop app? Their app is obviously better. Your quality bar for UX/design is much lower than Codex’s or Cursor’s. It would be amazing to fix that. So far, you have a competitive advantage in the design community: your models are simply better at motion and design, so I still have to use your app for certain tasks. But it’s extremely painful to use your application after experiencing better alternatives.

this is one of the coolest things i've ever seen

well... there goes that one

Impressive that this is the best they can try to attack the @ndstudio for thedailybeast.com/trump-goon…

openai launched Notion?

new phrase: “let’s not uninvent the wheel” for when people are suggesting bad alternate solutions to a solved problem

hello