The Rosetta Stone of Design Engineering
A deeper look at how design and engineering meet, overlap, and translate meaning — and why a shared language of making and why a shared language of making is the only way to build real shipping velocity. PUBLISHED ON NOV 20, 2025 Before we dive in, you can watch the original talk during Granola's Design Engineering Night #4 that inspired this piece. It’s up on YouTube if you want the live version. I’ve always imagined design and engineering as two rails on the same track. They run in parallel, supposedly toward the same product, but they rarely sit at the same spot. Design debt on one side, tech debt on the other, shifting priorities somewhere ahead, and the occasional giant “wait what are we building again?” boulder in the middle. This is usually where collaboration breaks: handoff trap: design wanders ahead for weeks, convinced it’s at the finish line, waving mockups at engineering like “hey, just build this.” We all know how this one ends. “my Figma is better than production” fork:
The Rosetta Stone of Design Engineering by Yann-Edern Gillet — Yann-Edern Gillet Yann-Edern Gillet Software Designer The Rosetta Stone of Design Engineering A deeper look at how design and engineering meet, overlap, and translate meaning — and why a shared language of making is the only way to build real shipping velocity. Nov 20, 2025 What people thought about this Latest notes AI and the Rosetta Stone How AI turns translation into runtime and why preserving intent between human ambiguity and machine precision is now the real craft. Mar 17, 2026 Faster loops, bigger playgrounds, stronger craf
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