Currently designing at Ona

Most AI products are designed for the moment of wonder. I'm more interested in what happens after.

I'm Carl Thomas, a design leader with a decade at the infrastructure layer. Currently at Ona, building the interface between developers and their AI agents. Before that: Neon, Kong, Postman, Google, Microsoft.

Case StudiesView all

Neon·Developer Tools

Instant Postgres Playground

Zero-config database environments that spin up in milliseconds. No signup required.

Neon·Infrastructure UX

Console Navigation

Restructuring the mental model for a multi-tenant cloud console.

Neon·Growth

Upgrade Flow Redesign

Reducing friction in the path from free to paid without the hard sell.

Kong·Infrastructure UX

Serverless Gateways

Turning complex infrastructure setup into a zero-to-one experience developers could complete in minutes.

Kong·Developer Education

Learning Hub

A developer-first education portal built to reduce time-to-value across the Konnect platform.

Now

Right now I'm thinking about trust: specifically, how much of it AI tools have actually earned versus assumed. Watching how background agents and parallel workflows are reshaping what engineering work even needs to be real-time anymore.