Tom and Jonny sit down with Christine Røde, designer at The Browser Company and the first guest under our new name, Mostly Working. They go behind the scenes of Dia’s Morning Brief, unpack why people now hand their data to AI tools so readily, and dig into the craft a designer keeps when she can ship her own fixes.
In this episode:
Dia’s Morning Brief exists because most people stall at a blank text box, so the browser sends the prompt for you and opens a tab that briefs you on your day.
Christine came back from two weeks’ holiday to a useful prototype that looked like ‘pure slop’, and rebuilt it around hundreds of hand-picked public-domain paintings from the National Gallery of Art.
She designed Dia’s memory flows with lock icons everywhere, then watched user testing show that people were happy to tick the box.
Arc shipped something new every week and ended up with around 35 branded features, whereas Dia builds and tests plenty and ships only what adds enough to the product.
You get eight or nine nitpicks before an engineer has had enough of you, and Christine now ships those fixes herself the week after launch.
A year ago she was asking her head of design whether she’d still have a job, and today she’s enjoying the work more than she has in years.
Chapters:
0:08 — Welcome to Mostly Working, and introducing Christine Røde
0:46 — From a Mostly Working meetup talk to Dia’s Morning Brief
1:21 — What Dia is, and how it has changed as AI has
4:08 — The blank text box problem, and a brief that arrives on its own
5:57 — The first prototype: beige, serifs and ‘pure slop’
7:00 — Finding the imagery: SVGs, big type or public-domain paintings
8:32 — Tom on what design adds to a prototype that already works
11:04 — Signal over volume: why the brief stays short
14:54 — Jonny on promising two or three things, and design reacting to engineering
16:37 — Why AI quality comes before design fidelity
19:01 — Onboarding, and persuading people to connect their tools
20:42 — From WhatsApp-era privacy to ‘you can all just read my email’
24:08 — Trust, and design’s part in earning it
26:45 — Designing Dia’s memory feature for users who weren’t worried
28:53 — What faster shipping does to the quality bar
30:09 — Why Dia ships less often than Arc did
32:01 — Designers shipping their own polish
34:12 — Working in seasons, and the hectic first month
38:24 — Custom tools for curating paintings and sketching interactions
42:08 — Real art as a brand decision, and hiring a painter
45:45 — What it means to be a designer now
48:17 — Quick-fire: free time after AGI, and Lime bikes
50:54 — The part of her craft Christine won’t hand to AI
52:09 — A rooftop garden, and the last 20% of vibe coding
53:31 — Final thoughts, and where to find Christine
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