Blog1 min read
Designing with an AI in the room
How I actually use language models in a design workflow, and the two jobs I will not hand over.
I use language models most days. Not to design, but to get the boring half of design out of the way faster so the interesting half gets more of the afternoon.
What it is good for
- Enumeration. “List forty ways a fielding system could fail a new player.” Thirty-five are obvious. Five are ones I had not written down, and writing them down is the job.
- Adversarial reading. Paste a design doc and ask it to argue against it as a sceptical producer. It is tireless and it does not care about my feelings, which is exactly what a first review should be.
- Spreadsheet scaffolding. Formula structure, named ranges, the plumbing. I still set every number by hand.
- Rewriting for an audience. The same system explained to an engineer, a marketer, and a new designer are three documents. The model drafts the second and third from the first.
What I keep
Two jobs stay with me, every time.
The first is the decision. A model will give you a confident recommendation. It will also give you the opposite one with the same confidence if you phrase the question differently. The decision has to be mine so the consequences are mine.
The second is the playtest read. Watching a person hesitate over a button is the richest signal in the discipline, and no summary of it survives the trip through text.
The habit that makes it work
I write the prompt as if briefing a junior designer who is clever, fast, and has never played the game. If the brief would confuse that person, the output is noise. That rule has improved my briefs to actual humans more than anything else this year.