This told essay is based on a conversation with Nitya Kumar, 25, an Adobe employee living in India. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I graduated from college in 2022 and immediately started a product design role at Meta. By 2024, I saw the industry pivoting towards AI and wanted to learn new AI design skills.
In this process, I stopped thinking of my career as a ladder focused on moving up. In my opinion, all work and no play will keep you away from big tech offers, so I started treating my career like a science lab and giving myself the freedom to experiment. This helped me overcome my fear of learning new technology and land the role. Working on AI at Adobe.
Embracing my inner “mad scientist” helped me land an AI job at Adobe
I went to art school in America. And I had no formal machine learning background. stole the AI I took my education into my own hands, learning through YouTube videos and friends.
Rather than trying to learn everything about AI at once, I focused on experimenting with Cursor with friends who held me accountable. I treated this process like it was official. 1 hour of Cursor per day + 7 days = a working AI prototype.
Kumar learned AI skills from YouTube and friends. Courtesy of Nitya Kumar
I love dancing, and by the end of the seven days, I had created a fun game that could detect and track the gestures of people dancing in a room. This helped us develop a vibecoding workflow that uses different AI tools for each process. I started with Gemini and Cursor, but gradually gained confidence in other tools such as Figma MCP.
In addition to using AI to build secure case studies, I unleashed my inner “mad scientist.” For example, we created a tool that generates matcha recipes. I used Gemini to develop and refine the prompts Claude would enter to vibecode his products.
I think these quirky experiments helped me understand the current state of AI and the tools that exist, which helped me stand out in the interview. They made the interviewer laugh and we started discussing matcha flavors and trying out a tool I had created.
After about 4 months of intentionally experimenting with AI, I landed a UX design job at Adobe and joined the company in November 2025. I love that this role involves developing agent-based AI experiences, including conversational AI assistants.
My “science lab” strategy helped me support others
When I joined Adobe, I still had a lot of skills I wanted to learn, but experimenting with AI gave me confidence. After about three months, I wanted to share my skills with the design team.
Every other Friday, I lead an AI Playground workshop for other designers at Adobe India. We come together online to try out new tools and share how we use AI-assisted workflows in our daily work. We are collaborating on how to stay ahead of this technological change that we are all facing.
Designers come to me for help debugging problems and building prototypes using AI. As I help them, my toolkit and confidence grows. It was a good way to develop my leadership skills.
By treating my career like a science lab, I was able to not only transition into an AI role without any machine learning experience, but also thrive there. I feel like I learned vibe coding, stimulated my creativity, and became a better designer.