HOW TO BRIEF AN AI CODING AGENT BEFORE IT STARTS BUILDING
A practical brief for AI coding agents: the person, useful result, behaviour, boundaries, evidence and checks, with a worked example and reusable template.
GAVIN ELLIOTT
Lead Product Designer at Deel. I write about design leadership, growing teams and building products with AI.
"Gavin is one of the best design leaders I have ever worked with. Everyone wants to work with him, for him, alongside him."
MATTHEW SOLLE, HEAD OF DESIGN
MOST DESIGN SYSTEMS ARE OPTIMISED FOR THE WRONG THING
Design systems were built to give humans consistent options. Agents do not want options, they want a single correct answer. That turns the design system into constraint logic rather than a component library.
BUILDING FOR YOURSELF VS BUILDING FOR USERS
Most of the features I have shipped across solo projects were ones I wanted, not ones anyone asked for. Building for yourself is a brilliant starting point. It is a terrible finishing line.
MOST AI FEATURES ARE PLACED IN THE WRONG PART OF THE PRODUCT
AI features often fail because of where they sit in the experience—not because the technology is weak. Placement, timing, and flow matter more than raw capability.
CLAUDE DESIGN ISN’T REALLY A DESIGN TOOL
Claude Design collapses thinking, design, and early building into one flow—not just faster UI. What that structural shift means for teams, and where people miss the point.
IT'S GETTING HARDER TO BREAK INTO TECH, AND I DON'T THINK WE'RE TALKING ABOUT IT ENOUGH
Junior routes are thinner, expectations stay high, and remote work made informal learning harder. Until we adapt how we develop people, the entry-level gap will stay—and building real things can be one path you control.