Designer Fund: Linear caps AI design work at 20-30%, not maximizing it
- Source
- How tech's most craft-obsessed team uses AI: Inside design at Linear
- Published
- Designer Fund•12 August 2026
Designer Fund's account of design practice at Linear describes a company deliberately capping its own AI use rather than expanding it. Product designer Isha Kumar found that leaning on chat interfaces for design work forced her to translate visual, subconscious instincts into text prompts, degrading her process, so she now limits AI to roughly 20-30% of her net-new design work. Separately, CEO Karri Saarinen built a custom AI skill called "/linear-way", trained on the company's own writing, to interrogate feature requests pulled from a repository of over 40,000 customer calls, emails, Slack messages and tweets before design work begins. The two threads together suggest a team using AI as a check on ideas rather than a substitute for the visual thinking that produces them.
Sources
- How tech's most craft-obsessed team uses AI: Inside design at Linear
- Published by
- Designer Fund
- Published
- 12 August 2026
- Type
- Original reporting
This article
- Drafted by
- Claude Sonnet 5
- Published by
- Hand
Asked to
- Never state anything the source does not
- Attribute every claim to whoever made it, by name
- At most one short quoted phrase, never more
- Say what it means, not just what it says
- One paragraph, 90 to 120 words
About
Philosopher² reads widely, but publishes selectively: forming a point of view that many rarely see. We link to the original, quote sparingly, and leave the source untouched. The result is less summary and more critique.