Proof of Concept

I keep hearing the phrase “software factory” as teams adopt agents and more automated development workflows. I understand the appeal. A factory sounds efficient. It suggests repeatability, throughput, quality control, and a system that can take a clear input and produce a reliable output. That metaphor works when you already know what you are making. Most interesting software starts earlier than that.

For years, the laptop meant freedom to work anywhere. My first Mac was the black 2006 MacBook I paid for it myself and took it everywhere. Later, a second-generation 13-inch MacBook Air was the workhorse when I lived nearly a year when I lived in Paris and Barcelona for nearly a year. Now, more of my work involves directing agents and reviewing what they make. I don’t need to sit at a keyboard for every step.

I love ecosystem design because it forces you to consider design beyond the product boundary and its interface. Instead, you work through the conditions and capabilities needed for people to be success on your platform. I’ve ben fortunate to see this take different shapes throughout my career. At ExactTarget, the ecosystem formed around enterprise marketing teams and the client services agencies who helped them operate at scale.

In software and product development, the ledger of work is not a new concept. Software developers have used Source Code Management (SCM) tools for decades to track and memorialize decisions of work. There are also tools such as Jira that are a System of Record (SOR) that capture work. Despite various systems existing, Design hasn’t made progress on recording their work. The artifacts for design have changed with AI. As a result, the ledger and proof of work has evolved.

On a recent flight, I rewatched one of my favorite films: Michael Mann’s Heat. It is firmly in my top five and a reminder that the perfect runtime might be three hours. The 1995 film is now regarded as one of the great crime sagas. It was also the first time Al Pacino and Robert De Niro appeared together on screen. Both were in The Godfather Part II, but their characters lived in different timelines and never shared a scene.

Two weeks ago, I saw The Odyssey in IMAX. It was epic (get it?). I’m still reflecting on the movie and my take on it. Kris Puckett recently made a fun app called The Definitive Nolan Ranking. Christopher Nolan is the second-best director working today, and his body of work is impossibly hard to stack-rank. You can’t go wrong. It inspired me to do a similar exercise for the creative technologists and design engineers out there: ranking essays and talks by Bret Victor.

Designers and software makers are familiar with user experience: the overall experience a person has with a product, system, or service. For decades, the “user” was assumed to be human. With the rise of agentic AI, that is no longer always true. Agents now discover tools, interpret context, and act within many of the same systems people use.

In American football, quarterbacks are taught a technique called Climbing the Pocket. I’ll quickly provide an overview of this concept to ensure non-football watchers resonate with this. In football, the quarterback relies on five very large men on the offensive line to create a pocket to ensure he has enough time to throw the ball to a receiver. On the other side, the defense has five (also very large) men breaking through the pocket to take down the quarterback; called a sack.

When people say taste and judgment are the differentiators in this AI era of design, nobody really tells you how to develop them. Training your design senses is rigorous work, no different from training as a boxer or musician. The foundations are harder to establish now. Giving a designer an agentic toolset without those foundations is like giving a pianist-in-training a DJ set instead of a piano. The answer seems obvious: be highly generative and make a lot of work.

I’m not a person to make a declarative statement or hot take on the spectrum of options. That’s why my life principle is, “Have your cake and eat it.” I do this with life, especially food: the Arnold Palmer, Cronut, and Ramen Burger are abundantly clear examples of this principle in action. This also applies to technology, software design, and company building. Recently, Peter Yang posted online regarding an interesting tension about agents on the cloud or run locally.