Ai-native: go back to first principles

AI will generate interfaces from patterns it has seen. It will remix, refine, and accelerate. That is genuinely powerful — and I use it every day. But the next era of product design isn’t about remixing. It’s about inventing the interactions that feel native to AI — experiences that couldn’t exist before, for human needs that weren’t possible to meet before.

Those patterns don’t exist yet. They won’t come from prompting tools. They’ll come from going back to first principles, finding the right metaphor, and building something that makes people say: of course. Why did we ever do it the other way? That’s what I bring. And AI helps me build it faster than ever before.

The old UX/UI patterns will be reinvented to be AI-native. To come up with great designs, it is just about prompting AI to remix the old stuff. It is about coming back to the first principles and invent new patterns.

My edge is thinking from first principles — rooted in psychology — and inventing patterns that didn't exist before, which is exactly what building AI-native UX requires.

My process always starts with the same question: what is this person actually experiencing? Not what does the data say. Not what do other products do. What does it feel like to be this human, in this moment, with this problem? From that question, the right metaphor emerges. And when the metaphor is right, complexity dissolves.

Contextual linking – a UX pattern that accelerates learning

Contextual linking — Developers reading API documentation constantly lose their place moving between reference and code. I designed a two-way live link: click either side, the other follows. Stripe, Google, and Apple don’t have this pattern. It emerged from watching how developers actually think, not from looking at what other portals had done.

The Spotify backend video: a video that brought strategic alignment to the whole company

— 17 years of engineer-only knowledge, made legible to every stakeholder in 7 minutes. The key was refusing to draw rectangles. I drew 3D boxes you could see inside — a vinyl player, a storage room, a switchboard. When you can see what something is, you understand how it works. The video went company-wide and changed strategy.

The queueing widget that lowered churn and protected app rating

Waiting in a digital healthcare app feels unfair and invisible. I didn’t redesign the queue. I drew the people in it — pregnant women, parents with children — so patients could see their fellow humans and feel empathy instead of frustration. Patience went up. Churn went down. No AI tool suggested this. There was no precedent.

An icon system that increased adoption

sychologically, a strong pull for loyalty is identity triggers.

Pet owners don’t just love any dog or cat; they love their dog and cat.

That’s why I focused deeply on the icon system.

Each icon was carefully designed so users could find one that resembles their own animal. When that moment happens — “this looks like my pet” — something shifts.

The product stops being a generic service.
It becomes personal.

It becomes their pet’s app.

This is not just visual design — it’s identity.

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Each pet icon was painstakingly hand-drawn. I wanted it to have enough details but not too many, so it is still generic enough for an icon.

For example, I only used black dots to resemble the eyes, but went to great lengths to draw the shadows of a dog’s face for it to look 3D.

There is another subtle but important choice: expression.

I also intentionally designed them to look slightly unwell. Not distressing, but just enough to signal vulnerability. The goal was to gently trigger care, so the users want to help their pets by talking to a vet.

Set a pet icon for your own pet
(There are generic cat and dog icons for any breed that’s not here)

The mountain graph — a graph that motivates progress

Project progress is always shown as a timeline: milestones on a line. But a line doesn’t show meaning — it only shows sequence. I invented a mountain instead, where every small win is stacked as a foundation layer. You can see what you’ve built. Even a friend saying “this should be a book” becomes load-bearing stone. It’s far more motivating because it shows why each step mattered, not just that it happened.

Emotions as operating system — A short video that did the hardest persuation

To help people understand why psychology matters, I built a metaphor: humans have three layers, just like smartphones. The body is hardware. Thoughts are apps. Emotions are the operating system — the layer that runs everything, that everything else depends on. We teach people about apps and hardware their whole lives and never touch the OS. In a 4-minute video, this reframe sent people who had never considered therapy directly into a therapist’s office. Behaviour change without a crisis. That almost never happens.

The icons become the “soul“ of the UI design