Protecting the Thinking Behind Great Design | Inside Linear's Design Team

Linear has become a benchmark for software craftsmanship. But as AI makes it possible to turn an idea into working software almost instantly, the team is asking a harder question: how do you make sure speed doesn’t replace the thinking required to build something great? For Linear, AI is most useful when it expands a designer’s capacity to think, rather than doing the thinking for them. Co-founder and CEO Karri Saarinen and product designers Charlie Aufmann and Isha Kumar share how they use agents to understand problems, gather context, pressure-test ideas, and accelerate execution, while keeping judgment and craft firmly in human hands. In this case study, they share: ◼ Why Linear sees design as a search, not a production pipeline ◼ How Karri uses AI to interrogate customer requests instead of taking them at face value ◼ How designers use agents to surface customer feedback, codebase history, and past decisions ◼ Why Isha deliberately keeps AI out of parts of her creative process ◼ How Charlie used AI throughout Linear’s major interface refresh without skipping the design work ◼ Why deciding what deserves to exist may become an even more important part of a designer’s job AI in Design 2026 is the second annual research project from Designer Fund and Foundation Capital on how design teams work with AI. Alongside data drawn from a survey of 900+ designers, we're publishing case studies on how design happens at companies like Anthropic, Sierra, Stripe, Notion, Shopify, Linear, and Framer. Explore the Linear case study: https://stateofaidesign.com/cases/linear Explore the AI in Design 2026 report: https://stateofaidesign.com Designer Fund: https://designerfund.com | https://x.com/designerfund Foundation Capital: https://foundationcapital.com