“A visual designer turned out to be one of our best prototypers. An animator turned out to be one of our best prototypers. And what it seems like is these people are like great directors. They have huge context. They can describe all of the things. They are vulnerable and they try things without worry of failing.”
How I AI · AI Builders · October 2026
Claire Vo asks who prototypes most with the AI prototyping tool Reddit built in-house. Metcalf says every designer and product manager uses it, more than 150 people. The surprise stars were people who could describe what they wanted, like a director, rather than the most technical people.
Transcript
Right. So internally, they're all public. That's amazing. Yeah. We need to add that. We should add some. So you can work under the skunkwork.
…the radar. I don't know. I kind of like this idea of like everything's public. You can kind of see what people are messing around with. I'm curious who is prototyping the most? Like our designers prototyping the most? Our product managers prototyping the most? Like who is prototyping the most?
Yeah, so it's a mix of designers and product. We have 100% adoption in UX and product, but there are like some surprising folks that show up. Like a visual designer turned out to be one of our best prototypers. An animator turned out to be one of our best prototypers. And what it seems like is these people are like great directors. They have huge context. They can describe all of the things. They are vulnerable and they try things without like worry of failing. But yeah, it's a mix. It's almost a perfect mix over design and product, over 150 people.
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Right. Yeah. And so this is a part that we're working on also. But long story short, these go into like leadership reviews. Leadership uses them, clicks through them. And, you know, you're getting feedback live. You're getting feedback in Slack. But we want to add, you know, you can comment live on…
Got it. And so, do you feel like this has changed? What has this changed in terms of, you know, is it velocity? Is it quality? Like, craft? Where do you feel like the impact to how you build products has been felt the most?
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