Designer Fund: Sierra automates infrastructure but hand-draws its mascot

Designer Fund's case study on Sierra describes a two-person design team serving 100+ engineers who moved away from polishing screens themselves, because as Wayne Fan puts it, hand-finishing work for a hundred engineers just adds another pair of hands instead of raising the bar. Instead they build shared components and prototype live in Cursor rather than Figma. But the same team spent hours hand-drawing a 16-by-16 pixel ghost mascot for their Ghostwriter tool, arguing personality is worth the effort even when it saves no one any time.