the transcendental object at the end of design
i don't think the quality of AI design is currently better than humans, but when you get used to eval-driven design, ephemeral contextual design tools, and the insane things agents do to verify design, the future is very plain to see
evals, ephemeral tools & verification. these three concepts have been instrumental to my workflow the past month:
eval driven design: when working on systems that design systems (that design systems) that design, instead of tweaking prompts and params and skills and iterating by re-rolling just define what you want as evals and get your agents to figure out how to meet your criteria. you could do this for Normal Design Processes, but it shines when working on infinite design machines. start with the Transcendental Object at the End of Design and learn how to backtrack to a machine that makes it so, rather than prompting forwards
ephemeral & contextual design tools: this summer i shared a number of demos about what I was calling Compostable Interfaces: ephemeral design tools spun up as sidecars to agentic design harnesses specifically to solve the problem you're currently working on. almost every design tool till now has exposed the same parameters: font families & weights, fills & strokes, heights & widths.
instead of a new generation of design tools optimizing similar interfaces to meet the needs of Every Designer and Every Design Project, I expect to see more harnesses and workflows that generate ideation, iteration & decision-making tooling contextual to the moment you are at in your project.
verification and stuff: i've been alternating between queueing up hours of agent-team work across all of the workstreams i'm on and then taking a walk until they need me, and sitting and watching the tool-calls and thought processes. balance. one thing that is striking to me today is how my tools—might be Astra and Fable, might be some of my skills & prompting, might be some specifics of omp, not sure—write their own ephemeral tests & verifications for what they're working on. no matter how much of a designer-who-codes you are, the ability of agents to programmatically explore every combination of state & possibility in a blink of an eye is truly dazzling and an incredible unlock.
combined, i see the threads of design-future braiding: introspectable and human-guided agentic design processes that blend agentic visual reasoning & parallelism to explore large combinatorial spaces and find their own way towards the outcomes we want
on designer career anxiety
the visions of the horizon—to me—are entirely an exciting thing if you're a designer who likes Design more than you like the fact that design most recently that happened to be intermediated via the discretionary nudging of rectangles. I really like Design. in the biblical sense. I've been ambivalent about our tools for a really long time. I do think big changes are coming to our process and industry, but I see them as liberartory, energizing & empowering. if you've been exhausted by what seems to constitute AI-native design in 2026 ("we go from Figma to prompting Claude all day"): me too, and I think a much bigger revolution is coming.
more soon 💖 jem