A manifesto for Human-Augmented Design — and the product we are going to prototype.
Every AI design project I've watched fail in the last twelve months has failed for one of three reasons. Drift. Governance. RAG. They are the Three Witches of the AI Design Apocalypse. This is the manifesto for getting them right, and the spec for a product we are going to prototype — Human-Augmented Design, with a master designer at the heart.
Every AI project I've watched fail in the last twelve months has failed for one of three reasons. Drift. Governance. RAG. They are the Three Witches of the AI Design Apocalypse. Get them wrong and the most expensive stack in the building produces slop.
This is the manifesto for getting them right. And the spec for a product we are going to prototype.
It starts with a man called Takis.
I've worked with Takis for twenty years. He is my designer. Together we have built over a hundred projects. The relationship has always worked the way good creative work works. I give him a brief. He comes back with options. We sit with them. We find the angle we hadn't seen. What if we did that? He goes away. He iterates. He comes back with the keeper.
Takis is a master designer. He reads the type foundries. He watches the awards sites. He knows what CSS does on a hero. In every sense that matters, he has been my design AI since long before there were AIs.
But it always got sticky. Takis isn't a web designer. He isn't a brochure maker. He isn't a printer. The hand-over from beautiful design to finished article took ten days. Sometimes more.
This morning I showed him a website we designed in minutes.
Tony Stark on his own is a brilliant engineer who can't fly, can't lift a tank, and can't survive a fall. The Iron Man suit on its own is an empty exoskeleton. Tony Stark inside the Iron Man suit is a different category of operator.
That is what we are building. Takis is Tony Stark. The agent chain is the suit. Together they are Iron Man. Apart they are two things that don't ship work that converts.
Drift. Across a chain of agents, the output drifts away from the brief. It drifts over time too. The first agent's output corrupts the next agent's input. By the end of the chain, the thing on the screen has no resemblance to what was asked for.
Governance. Each agent in the chain does things outside its brief. It assumes. It summarises. It hallucinates rather than flags. Governance is the guardrail that forces each agent to do what it said it would do, and only that.
RAG. Retrieval-augmented generation. If you want a designer to do work like a designer, you have to train it like a designer. That means a specific library of design reference the agent retrieves from. Without RAG it reaches for a billion bad pages on the internet. With RAG it reaches for the references a master designer would actually open.
Without those three, every AI design project in this market is one of the ones that fails.
Takis at the heart. Three named AI roles around him.
Brief-taker. Reads the client conversation, extracts the brief, presents it back in the shape Takis works in.
Junior designer. Takes Takis's locked idea and iterates mood boards, variants, formats.
Output producer. Takes the design and produces the finished article. Website. Email. Brochure. T-shirt.
Each role is governed. Each is RAG-backed. Each is locked to its brief.
A master designer at the centre. Three disciplined agents around him. No drift. No freelancing. No slop.
This is Human-Augmented Design. It is what we are building. It is the gap the rest of this market has not closed.
— A.