The End of the Designer–Engineer Divide
Rio Lou, Head of Design at Cursor, on his mission to turn all designers into coders and why systems-first design beats feature factories.
Why Designers Must Learn to Code in 2025
This is the most important video for designers wondering what AI means for their role. Rio Lou - founding designer at Notion, ex-Stripe, now Head of Design at Cursor - isn't speculating about the future. He's living it.
His personal KPI for 2025: turn all Cursor designers into coders.
Not through bootcamps. Not through forcing people to learn Git. Through AI agents that fill in the gaps. "You actually don't have to care about all the details anymore. Just let the agents fill the gap for you. But now you can actually start coding without knowing how to code."
The insight that designers already have the intuition is key. They understand version control conceptually, they know how files and folders work, they grasp state and interaction patterns. What they lack are implementation details - and that's exactly what AI agents excel at providing.
The design process shift is real: Rio built "Baby Cursor" - a simplified playground version of the actual product - in an afternoon. Not in Figma. In code. With working AI integrations, keyboard shortcuts, hot reloading. He can prototype ideas that would be impossible in traditional design tools: live AI outputs, multiple concurrent agents, dynamic state changes.
The Figma comparison is brutal: "For you to make this in Figma is going to be insane... you would spend forever designing mockups with fake data, with no way to test what it feels like to use it, then wait forever for an engineer to free up."
The systems-first design philosophy from his Notion days transfers directly: "The core concepts are just blocks, pages, databases and the people. Notion is just different configurations of these things - when they get put together they do amazing things that kind of emerge."
At Cursor, the same principle: chat, composer, and agent modes are all "the same agent with different settings applied." The 2.0 redesign didn't add features - it flipped the hierarchy from file-centric to agent-centric. When you open Cursor now, you see a prompt box, not a blank editor. That's a design decision that makes the product accessible to non-coders.
The practical advice for designers is graduated:
- Start with constrained vibe coding tools (Figma Make, v0)
- Hit the walls where those tools can't do everything
- Graduate to Cursor - realize it feels the same, just unlimited
- Build real things, learn by doing, let agents fill knowledge gaps
The meta demonstration is perfect: Rio shows plan mode where you describe what you want, the agent asks clarifying questions (like a PM writing a PRD), then builds it while you watch. He's not writing code - he's having a conversation about what should exist.
The roles are blurring. Designers code, engineers design, the shared language becomes code itself. "Magical things can happen."
10 Insights From Rio Lou on Design and AI Coding
- Personal KPI: designers → coders - Not through bootcamps, through AI agents that fill implementation gaps
- Designers already have the intuition - Version control, state, interaction patterns - just missing implementation details
- Baby Cursor method - Build a simplified playground in code instead of Figma mockups for faster, realistic prototyping
- Systems-first over features-first - Notion's blocks/pages/databases philosophy: primitives that compose, not buttons that accumulate
- Cursor 2.0 design insight - Flipped from file-centric to agent-centric hierarchy; prompt box first, not blank editor
- The graduation path - Figma Make / v0 → hit constraints → Cursor → unlimited building
- 10 months, 20→250 people - Cursor's growth while keeping design team at 4 people, everyone codes
- Plan mode for design - Describe intent, agent asks clarifying questions, builds while you watch
- Code as shared language - Roles blur when designers code and engineers design; conversation happens in code
- Interactive website demos - New cursor.com has live, working code examples you can try in-browser
What This Means for Product Design Careers
The designer-engineer divide is collapsing. Cursor's Head of Design builds working prototypes in code, not Figma - with live AI integrations impossible in traditional design tools. His 2025 KPI: turn all designers into coders. Not through bootcamps, but through agents that fill implementation gaps.
