Rustin Banks

Rustin Banks is a Google Labs product manager working on Stitch, an AI-assisted design platform, and the cofounder and former chief executive of TapInfluence. His work on coding agents and design tools focuses on giving people clearer ways to direct, evaluate and coordinate automated software creation.

Banks taught himself C++ as a child and operated a bulletin board system on salvaged computers. After earning a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Utah State University, he designed satellite systems in the aerospace industry before becoming a software entrepreneur.

In 2009, he cofounded BlogFrog with Holly Hamann, initially helping bloggers build online communities. The business evolved into TapInfluence, a platform connecting brands with creators and automating influencer-marketing campaigns. Banks subsequently became chief revenue officer at DNSFilter, a cybersecurity company using machine learning to detect malicious domains, before joining Google.

At Google Labs, he worked on Jules, an asynchronous coding agent that operates on GitHub repositories inside cloud-based virtual machines. His AI Engineer World’s Fair session outlined two distinct applications of parallel agents: distributing independent tasks and testing competing solutions to the same problem. Using a conference application, he compared Jest and Playwright testing approaches while assigning agents calendar integration, session summaries and accessibility audits. His emphasis was operational: parallel execution requires clear success criteria, repository context, automated tests, code review and a workable merge strategy.

More recently, Banks has shaped Stitch’s AI-native design environment, where designers can start with business goals, visual references or intended emotional effects, then generate and refine interactive prototypes. His product philosophy preserves human creative direction while giving software agents enough context to explore useful alternatives.

Banks has also championed DESIGN.md, an open format for communicating visual rules and design intent across tools and AI agents. His announcement of the draft specification argues that design systems should remain portable between products instead of being trapped inside individual platforms.