Anthropic

Jenny Wen joined Anthropic as an Individual Contributor (IC) designer after spending years managing teams at companies like Figma, Dropbox, and Square. She chose to step back from management to stay close to the work during a moment she sensed was transformative for the entire design discipline. "I sort of want to be close to the work. And I think this feels like a really important time to do it before I like ascend the corporate ranks," she explains, noting her doubts about whether middle management as traditionally conceived would survive the AI era.

Claude Codebase didn't materialize overnight. The team had been exploring different prototypes and agent harnesses for months, trying various form factors and interaction patterns. "We tried a bunch of different form factors for that. We tried a bunch of different form factors for the way it presents you different, like multiple choice questions." When the moment came to ship, everything accelerated dramatically. In roughly 10 days, they took all this exploratory work and crystallized it into a launchable product—though Jenny emphasizes this wasn't just "10 days of building" but rather the final sprint after months of direction-finding.

Claude Codebase launched as a research preview, a strategy Jenny advocates for when there's sufficient underlying value despite rough edges. The product "blew up the internet when you launched it," validating the months of exploration. By releasing early and signaling commitment to iteration, they built trust through speed and responsiveness. The team immediately began soliciting feedback through Twitter and other channels, shipping fixes within days based on user reports.

The design process itself underwent radical transformation. Jenny's time allocation shifted dramatically: pre-AI, she spent 60-70% mocking and prototyping; now it's 30-40%, with another 30-40% spent jamming directly with engineers and 20-30% on implementation work. "You as a designer actually like do not have the time to make these beautiful mocks anymore," she observes. The traditional design process—research, diverge, converge—is "basically dead." Instead, rapid prototyping in code, continuous iteration with real users, and vision-setting for 3-6 month horizons replaced multi-year strategic designs. She still uses Figma for exploring multiple directions simultaneously, something code-based tools handle poorly, but most execution happens in Claude Codebase and IDEs.

Jenny now spends her days catching up on Anthropic's internal developments, working with engineers on consultation and implementation, polishing features, and carving out time for future vision-setting. She's excited about evolving Claude Codebase's interaction model—particularly making the homepage feel more like a shared to-do list between user and Claude. Looking forward, she emphasizes that while AI will get better at taste and judgment, humans remain essential for deciding what actually matters and taking accountability for those decisions. Her advice to the design community: embrace resilience, learn to work with AI tools, and develop the skills to execute in code rather than just in mockups.