Designer Fund: Linear caps AI design work at 20-30%, not maximizing it

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.