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Ep #19: Big News. Near Future Is Now Mostly Working. Why We're Changing, a Summit at Monzo, and Building a Brand with Claude

Jonny ·
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Tom and Jonny announce that the Near Future Podcast is becoming Mostly Working. They explain why they're closing the consultancy to back the podcast, unveil the Mostly Working Summit at Monzo on 22 October, and go behind the scenes of a new brand built with Claude Code.

Key takeaways

  1. Judge new work on founder fit, ease of sale and energy. Near Future scored well on founder fit, which is why the podcast continues. The other two drifted as clients increasingly asked for AI training, the part of the work that energised neither host.

  2. A career change is a chance to write your own job description. Jonny saw that a successful consultancy would crowd out the building he wanted to do. He chose a small tech company where he reports to a founder and works with a founder's autonomy.

  3. Follow the conversations you want to keep having. Tom's test for big career decisions is where the most interesting conversations happen. For him that points at the podcast, so he's returning to fractional design leadership and coaching to earn a living around it.

  4. In a one-hour build, creativity is now the only limit. At design + AI in Brighton, most of the 30 senior designers worked on Opus 5.5 and few needed help getting started. Ideas ranged from a multiplayer Crazy Eights racing game to an app that makes good photos worse.

  5. People learn this by building, and come back changed. The Mostly Working meetup grew from close to 70 sign-ups at its first event to 160 applications for 30 to 40 places. One attendee who had never used AI agents returned a month later with a product VCs were already interested in.

  6. Showing work to peers turns side projects into team change. Comparing builds with designers who made similar things gives people the evidence to persuade leadership to fund a shared prototyping repo.

  7. Draw the core idea by hand, then let the agent fill the gaps. Tom sketched the Mostly Working mark in Figma, playing on how an M turned upside down becomes a W. Claude Code then built palette tweakers, asset generators, dithering effects and, from a single prompt, a full set of motion principles.

  8. Generate tools, and the output becomes controllable. Flora took 10 to 12 attempts per image to get about 90% of the way. Building the generators himself gave Tom the dials to tune that last 10%.

  9. Agents are a serendipity machine. Like a round of Crazy Eights, Claude returns seven weak ideas and one unexpectedly good one, such as having the new brand play the Near Future logo as the podcast jingle.

Chapters

  • 0:04 — The Near Future Podcast is becoming Mostly Working
  • 1:03 — How the podcast started, 19 weeks in
  • 2:17 — Winding down the Near Future consultancy
  • 3:02 — Where the Mostly Working name comes from
  • 4:30 — Founder fit, ease of sale and energy: why the consultancy stopped
  • 6:53 — Jonny on wanting to build, and joining a small tech company
  • 11:09 — Tom's test: follow the most interesting conversations
  • 13:21 — Thank you to Near Future clients
  • 14:30 — What to expect from Mostly Working
  • 17:24 — Build Your Own Design Tools at design + AI in Brighton
  • 20:43 — Why the workshop builds keep getting better
  • 23:15 — Hatch in Berlin: Paula Scher and Bob Baxley
  • 26:33 — Announcing the Mostly Working Summit
  • 27:57 — How the Mostly Working meetup grew from 70 to 160 sign-ups
  • 31:45 — Summit details: Monzo, 22 October, fireside chats, roundtables and the workshop
  • 36:13 — mostlyworking.co and the new brand
  • 37:20 — Designing the M/W mark in Figma
  • 39:09 — Claude Code generates palette tweakers, motion principles and a logo jingle
  • 43:37 — Building brand tools by voice note from your phone
  • 45:29 — Flora versus building your own image generators
  • 47:22 — Tote bags, feedback and wrap-up

Mentioned in the episode

Mostly Working

Events

People

  • Tom Harman
  • Jonny Burch
  • Simon Amor, co-founder of Morse and co-host of the Mostly Working meetup
  • Paula Scher, partner at Pentagram
  • Bob Baxley, designer and former head of product design at Pinterest
  • Domingo Widen, Fin
  • Ini, Fin
  • James Storer, Monzo

Companies

Tools and products

About the pod

Mostly Working (formerly the Near Future Podcast) is a weekly conversation with design leaders about what they're building with AI. Send feedback to podcast@nearfuture.works, and find everything at mostlyworking.co.