In this episode of Engineering Evolved, Tom sits down with Amelia Prasad, Director of Product at Concept to Cloud, to trace how AI has reshaped the day-to-day of UX and product design. Amelia — who came to product from astrophysics and climate science — walks through the shift from manual research, whiteboards and "back-of-the-napkin" sketches to building zero-to-one products directly in Claude Code.
It's not a hype reel. Amelia is candid about the friction: learning version control from scratch, bloated six-thousand-line files, the designer-to-developer handoff problem, and the diminishing returns of heavy token usage in tools like Claude Design and third-party wrappers such as Lovable. Her current answer is a marriage of tools — passing work back and forth between Claude Code and Figma via MCP — so prototyping speed and real usability, accessibility and design-system rigour can each live where they belong.
They close on what the next 12 months might hold: more human-led user research, not less, and why juniors and design intuition still matter in an industry tempted to hire only senior builders.
Chapters
- 00:00 — Welcome & introducing Amelia
- 02:53 — From astrophysics to product design
- 03:33 — The pre-LLM UX workflow: manual research & competitive analysis
- 05:23 — Old-school tooling: Figma, Miro, Maze, pen & paper
- 06:56 — The lost art of napkin sketches and paper prototyping
- 07:57 — Meeting at Princeton: first exposure to LLMs
- 08:52 — AI workflows before AI building: the interview note-taker
- 11:02 — Stepping into Claude Code as a non-developer
- 13:45 — Handing off code on a small team: value and limits
- 15:17 — Guardrails, context and the handoff problem
- 20:02 — Lovable, Cursor and the trouble with wrappers
- 21:05 — Claude Design: token cost and diminishing returns
- 22:45 — Figma's MCP and the two-way handoff
- 24:50 — A suite of tools: knowing when to hand off to which
- 29:06 — Why active engagement in Figma beats waiting on the terminal
- 33:02 — The next 12 months: user research, systemic processes, robustness
- 38:16 — Will design jobs disappear? Juniors, intuition & human-in-the-loop
- 41:27 — Wrap-up & thanks
Key takeaways
- AI adoption in design was gradual — automating admin and research before it could build whole products.
- The real skill now is orchestration: knowing which tool (Claude Code vs. Figma) does which job best.
- Speed doesn't replace craft — usability, accessibility and design systems still need a designer's hand.
- Human intuition and user research grow more important as products become AI-native.
- Cutting junior roles is short-sighted: today's juniors build the intuition tomorrow's products depend on.
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