Emerging tech, a new way to build across Product, Eng, and Design.
Product, Engineering, & Design practitioners now speak the same language: code.
April 2025. A week inside the new generative tools — Replit, Lovable, Bolt, v0. The question shifted. We started asking what we could build with it.
AI Moderated Research
Research was the first loop we rebuilt. Userology let us drop a Figma prototype into a study, have AI moderate the session with an IT admin on the other side, and get back a synthesized read on themes and pain points by end of day. It joined the weekly cadence — fast enough to guide decisions with quant and qual data.
The PDLC pivot
Every stage — research, spec, prototype, build — assumed an answer took days or weeks. These compressed it to hours, sometimes minutes.
The diagnosis we walked in with — the loop that had always worked, now visibly out of step.
When engineering caught up
For most of 2025, design ran ahead of engineering. Q4 changed that: Cursor licenses rolled out across the org and design picked up seats alongside. Our design system already lived in Vue 3 and React, so we wrote skills, rules, and page templates that taught Cursor how our product was actually built — our tokens, our components, our opinions. Designers built real interactive flows against the production system the same week they scoped the work.
Skills, rules, and usage patterns — the vocabulary we handed Cursor so it could speak in our tokens.
From a handoff to a shared surface.
“The front-end used to separate design from engineering. Now they build in it together.”
The Vision
A streamlined AI-assisted PDLC where everyone works in code and a shared context moves through the stages. That context also generates the help docs, blog posts, and GTM materials.
Three phases, one shared language — each one hands code forward instead of a spec.
Role Evolution
Flexibility in tech has always been the game. Roles shift as capabilities emerge, and this round is no different.
What changed, role by role — every seat at the table moved one step earlier in the loop.
