Stephen Haney - The 2026 AI Design Field Report (tools, process, and what's working)

There's been a heck of a debate around the future of coding and design tools lately... but what's actually happening inside of today's top teams?

Where is all this headed and how does the future of our tools shape the role of a designer?

Today's episode is with Stephen Haney (https://x.com/sdothaney) who is the founder of the new design tool Paper.

And for the last few months he's studied how design teams actually use AI in their everyday roles... everything from tooling to prototyping to process.

He walks us through some of his key findings and how that's shaping his product strategy for Paper 👇

Some highlights:

- The “designer playground” approach

- How AI adoption looks at startups vs. big companies

- Why designers at big companies aren’t PRing to production

- AI usage being mandated in performance reviews for designers

- The new localhost sharing problem and how teams are solving it

- Why local development is winning over cloud tools for design teams

- Why companies use of AI tools doesn’t match what you see on Twitter

- + a lot more

Basecamp’s “Shape Up” project management philosophy (https://basecamp.com/shapeup)