The design industry and the tools we use have been evolving constantly. 7 years ago I helped my team transition from Sketch to Figm, an emerging competitor to Sketch and Adobe products. We had to rethink how we worked, because the plugins and accelerators we used day-to-day didn't translate one to one. We were thrilled to leverage Figma components and auto-layout to spend less time maintaining files and more time designing. The transition turned out to be a great opportunity to refresh our processes and unlock faster design development then we had previously with the old software.

At Teal Health, I've been leveraging Gemini and chatGPT to explore side projects, such as aligning our organization on slack usage to make it a more usable space for us to work and collaborate. Gemini helped me build a starting template of tips, which I expanded and customized to meet our specific use case.

I've used chatGPT as co-developer helping me build Posthog insights with hogQL that weren't possible with their standard GUI. It sometimes took some trial and error, but I have been able to get clear answers for complex questions using our product data.

I've started using Cursor and some foundational front-end understanding to work directly with our Patient Portal code. Initially, I started to pull PRs to my local device to do final testing and make simple fixes myself before handing it back to engineering. My team loves me being able to take that off their plates so they can focus on more complex debugging and feature adds.

I've also gotten comfortable enough to write some "easy win" enhancements fully myself. I was a little hesitant to post my first PR, but haven't had any issues and great documentation from the engineering team allowed my local agent to easily follow their git best practices. It's been really cool to be able to bring an idea to production quickly, only needing a little oversight from the engineering team. They've been excited to see me step more into their world and I'm definitely learning more about how my work in Figma comes together in code. I'll also add that folks outside of the product team have really enjoyed the accelerated timeline as I slip these small additions to production outside of our standard sprint process.

I really enjoy being able to build my online portfolio myself. In the past, I'll admit that my limited skills prevented me from executing on every idea that crossed my mind. With recent updates to my portfolio, it's been awesome having Cursor to help execute on my ideas. I also noticed how having an agent to work with changed my development flow from a linear figma-to-code pipeline to instead be a more fluid back and forth working in parallel to arrive at the final product. It's been fun to have a random thought driving home or get some specific feedback from a friend and be able to pretty quickly try it out, testing the idea out live. This has helped me push through roadblocks and iterate consistently to build out this space.