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Ep #13: Randy Hunt (Notion & SVA): Speed as a Quality Strategy, Killing the Handoff, and Teaching Design in the AI Era

Jonny ·
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Tom and Jonny sit down with Randy Hunt, Head of Design at Notion and chair of MFA Design at SVA. They dig into why speed and quality were never a trade-off, unpack the weekend build that turned into a two-week code review, and go behind the scenes of how a graduate design programme is rewriting itself around AI.

Chapters

  • 0:04 — Two institutions, one calendar: how Randy keeps both plates spinning
  • 3:00 — Agents that absorb the busy work so he can stay close to the craft
  • 5:29 — Dogfooding vs. knowing the competition: you have to do the work twice
  • 8:22 — One place for everything, or a walled garden? Jonny re-buys Notion
  • 11:10 — Battle-tested vs. multi-model: why living in one suite stops working
  • 13:22 — Good, fast, cheap: Randy refuses to pick two
  • 15:17 — Quality isn't the screen being right, it's how many people hit it wrong
  • 19:05 — The handoff is a telephone game: why passing the baton kills the work
  • 22:52 — Designers were shipping production code before the coding agents arrived
  • 25:42 — He built it in a weekend. The PR took two weeks to review
  • 29:35 — Writing code got cheap. Writing good code didn't
  • 30:46 — Emergent chat vs. written-down skills: making the system legible to everyone
  • 33:07 — Working in the open so you can see how your colleagues actually prompt
  • 35:42 — Build it yourself or wait for someone to sell it: micro tool making
  • 39:04 — The barbell curriculum: what endures vs. what has to stay malleable
  • 43:20 — Directing a photographer vs. directing a model: same skill, different studio
  • 44:57 — Where's the punk rock student who refuses to use AI?
  • 47:58 — He went home for the summer and built an ERP for his dad's warehouse
  • 49:33 — Quick fire: AGI takes over, so what do you actually do with the time?
  • 51:37 — Wrap up, and a promise to come back for the music conversation

Mentioned in the episode

Randy

Companies and past roles

Tools and products discussed

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