Ex-banker, now co-founding @blunge_ai. I post what our users actually do with AI design tools, bad numbers included.
Brisbane → Global
Joined February 2026
- Tweets215
- Following62
- Followers12
- Likes98
Pinned Tweet
I'm an ex-investment banker who ended up co-founding an AI design tool. Two years in, the most interesting thing I've learned has nothing to do with models.
Making an image got cheap. Deciding what to make didn't.
Saw the report on AI boosting creative earnings. Matches what we see building a design tool: the people earning more use AI to make ten options and pick the right one fast. The ones treating it as a vending machine are competing with every other vending machine.
Figma's AI agent just lost its free beta and started charging per credit. Every AI design tool hits this same wall eventually: generation is cheap, the real cost shows up the moment someone has to decide if an output is worth paying for twice.
Figma's CEO says design is the new code. From where we sit building an AI design tool, the harder shift is marketers now need taste they were never trained to have. Models keep getting better at execution. Nobody's shipped a faster way to develop judgment.
Figma CEO @zoink predicts "design is the new code" within a year as AI turns coding into raw material and pushes value into taste, product, and judgment:
"A year from now, the same thing I think is very obvious now, which is that design is the new code."
"If you believe that coding models will continue to get better, then it's the decisions you make about how to build a system that matter, not the code itself. The code is material."
"The value rises to the top and that becomes brand, product design, your marketing, your point of view in the world, your judgment calls and strategy. Product design is really at the center of a lot of that."
"Designers will have a bigger role to play if they step up. Not everyone will step up. Some people will be like, 'But I like what I was doing.'"
@figma
Every few weeks a new image model drops promising 2x speed. Cool, but speed was never the bottleneck. I can generate 50 options in a minute and still not know which one is right. The bottleneck is judgment, and nobody's shipped a faster way to have taste...
used to think a launch video meant $3k and a week of back and forth with an agency
gave Claude Opus 5.5 our landing page, logo and a few designs. 2 prompts
it's a launch video for an AI designer, made by a different AI. what era are we living in
“Have you tried AI?”
Yes. It asked what I wanted. That’s the bit I’m working out...
Canva templates and Pinterest give you something to react to.
That’s one problem we’re tackling at @blunge_ai: an AI that proposes on-brand designs, then lets you shape and edit them.
A Canto-sponsored MarTech article cites 77% of marketing teams facing more projects and 45% struggling to meet content demand.
We’re building Blunge to help marketers create and edit on-brand designs with fewer handoffs.
Where does your team get stuck?
This week the same person on our team shipped a bug fix, recorded a video, and chased a visa document. Founders romanticize "wearing many hats."
The real cost of context-switching is unfinished work, not bad work.
What's costing your team the most right now?
Shopify's CEO calling AI output "slop grenades" undersells the design version.
A bad paragraph gets pasted into a summarizer and fixed in ten seconds. A bad graphic is already live on the landing page or scheduled for Monday.
Visual slop often doesn't get caught.
Watching brands start slapping 'human made' on their ads like it's a certification mark. Feels like the free range egg carton moment for creative work. How long before 'human made' means as little as 'natural flavors' does on a label?
Had a call this month where a marketing lead admitted half her own team's slide decks are off-brand because nobody has time to open Figma between five other jobs.
That's the actual market for AI Design tools. Not designers. People who were never supposed to be doing design.
A mentor in the accelerator told us flatly: stop selling to agencies. Most are reselling outsourced labor and don't want a tool that makes the seams visible. Sell to the people stuck doing the work themselves in house. Best GTM advice we've gotten this year, and it stung.
Bob's Red Mill dropped founder Bob Moore's face from the logo, two years after he died. People are reading it as corporate erasing him. Redesign's solid, the mistake was timing. Would you have touched the logo this year, or let it sit?
Instagram quietly updated its wordmark, first change since 2016. Kept the script and gradient, just flattened and detached the serifs. That's restraint, not reinvention. Most rebrands fail by mistaking a refresh for a start-over. Seen one that nailed restraint instead?
Spent part of the accelerator being told who NOT to sell to. Instinct said agencies, they buy tools constantly. Turns out most are outsourcing creative work overseas instead. Reframed our GTM around startups and in-house marketers.
Anyone had a mentor kill your first ICP guess?
New version of Blunge ships next week. Same thesis as day one: making an image got cheap, deciding what to make didn't. This round we spent the effort on the second half of that sentence, not the first. What's the one call you wish a design tool would just make for you?
A few posts today about AI not cutting design costs, just moving them. Makes sense. Generating a version is free now but knowing which one to choose isn't