Design Taste Comes From Participation: Tom Krcha

From Flash kid to Adobe XD to Pencil

Tom Krcha starts way before Adobe XD: he grew up around his parents’ design studio, used Photoshop at seven, got obsessed with Flash in the early 2000s, and eventually became Adobe’s youngest Flash evangelist. He describes that era with real wonder — websites that moved, made sound, and felt alive — and you can hear that same energy in how he talks about today’s tools.

The split between stochastic exploration and deterministic craft

When asked whether design is splitting between probabilistic AI exploration and precise hand-made execution, Krcha basically says: yes, and both matter. His framing is simple and sticky: agents help with the open-ended ideation phase, but there’s always a final stretch where you need the chisel, because that’s where designers bring taste and stop feeling disconnected from the work.

Pencil was born out of frustration with prompting UI in Cursor

The origin story is very specific: Krcha was using Cursor on another project and got tired of writing long prompts just to describe a navigation bar or sidebar. So he built a canvas into the workflow, then realized the inversion was even more interesting — not just sketching for the agent to build, but asking the agent to design back at him — which he describes as a “head exploding emoji” moment.

Swarm mode turns the designer into an orchestrator, not a bystander

Krcha compares the workflow to running a design agency: sometimes you delegate, sometimes you jump in and tweak things yourself. Pencil’s swarm mode can produce 10 or 15 variations at once, then remix what’s interesting from one iteration into another, giving designers a way to direct exploration without starting from a blank canvas every time.

His model of the future stack: canvas, tweaker, and headless design agent

Krcha agrees there’s a broader tooling shift coming, but he doesn’t think one super-tool wins it all. His version is a canvas for exploration, a visual “tweaker” for modifying production code, and a headless agent running on the server — which is why Pencil has a CLI that can operate from the terminal, read JSON design files, render offscreen, generate screenshots or PDFs, and even text you a result.

Context becomes the real portable asset

One of the sharpest parts of the conversation is his idea that collaboration shifts away from everyone sharing one canvas toward everyone sharing the same context. Product specs, screenshots, Jira or Linear tasks, codebase knowledge, and design system rules become the “briefcase” designers carry between tools, which is why he’s so focused on open formats and extensibility.

Pencil users are building custom tools inside the tool

Krcha says Pencil’s open JSON “pen” format and scripting support let people generate not just designs, but mini-tools: logo generators, ASCII art generators, waveforms, generative art, even custom plug-ins created on the fly by the agent. His big realization is that the product can’t ship every niche feature itself — but it can let users build the exact tool they need, which matches the broader rise of “brand engineers” and custom AI tooling inside teams.

What surprised him most: agents make people explore way deeper

The biggest surprise wasn’t who used Pencil, but how much they made with it: users in the nearly 10,000-person Discord were sharing files with 30, 40, or 50 artboards. For Krcha, that’s the unlock — agents don’t just speed up execution, they let people externalize more ideas, chase happy accidents through features like “let it cook,” and iterate enough that, in his closing line, “taste comes from participation.”