I design by talking now

I don't design by clicking every single thing myself any more. I design by talking to the agent and pointing it at things.

Language is the new interface.

That can sound like I've handed the work over. I haven't. I love the craft. I'm still doing the process of design: refining, going back and forth, looping around it. I'm doing it with a different tool and in a different way, but it's essentially the same thing.

I haven't stopped designing. The work has just become less about doing the work.

What's different is what comes out the other end. Before, I designed a thing. Now I design a thing, and I decide and document why we designed it that way.

That second part changed how I work.

In the early days, I'd have an agent build me something, then spend hours on top of it. Rebuilding, pointing, designing, making a whole thing. Then I'd ask it: from the moment we started to now, what is the difference? What have you learned? What lessons can you pull?

That was a way to be faced with my own intellect, my own ideas, my own intuition. To understand in plain terms the things I only knew implicitly. It was such a great help.

And every lesson goes back into how the agents work. So the next time, they start closer to what I would do.

If you're a designer worried about these tools, you still design. You just do it out loud now, and every decision gets written down.