Who is in charge here? A week of senior designers and the agents they trained

We are a design studio, and our senior designers each work beside agents we trained ourselves, with the designers making every call and the agents doing the production work with them. That sounds dramatic until you watch an ordinary week, and since people keep asking me what it really looks like, I decided to keep a diary and share it here, one episode at a time.

This is episode one, and it runs from the Sunday our new site went live to the Thursday a client's blog covers came out clean, just as the client had asked.

Why we trained our own agents

I built our own agents because the AI tools I tried didn't feel adjusted enough to the way a studio actually works. So I started small, with Adam, on the business side of the studio, the routine work that has nothing to do with design. I noticed that every time I worked with him he knew a little more, and that if I kept him informed about everything related to his work, he got better day to day.

That made me curious about design, so I started teaching Adam the way I would teach a junior designer, not by asking for things and hoping for magic, but step by step. On one of the first presentations I explained every little thing, how we take the background, lower the resolution of the image and place it where it belongs, and the next time I asked, he knew exactly what to do. That was the moment I understood something about all of this: it learns, and since it doesn't forget, you only need to teach once.

After a while it was simply too much work for Adam, so we split it and built Evie for design.

The week, Sunday to Thursday

Sunday. Our new studio site went live on its own domain, with Ben building it, Max checking that every old address still led somewhere sensible, and Adam switching the domain over. That afternoon I wrote that it was launched and asked, "now how about we also do some blog posts", and honestly, you are reading where that question went.

Monday. Nikol was working with Frankie, our UX and UI agent, on a new job, and pulled her back from the screens to the UX structure underneath. When the next round came back, Nikol told her the structures were already better than the first one, and that is senior judgment for you, knowing which step to slow down on.

Tuesday. Tom was working with Evie on a banner for the studio's own post about Nikol's work, and she wasn't happy with it. She wrote to Evie (in Hebrew, translated here), "The design is not good... I'll improve the design and come back to you so you know how to improve next time", and she went on to redesign it herself, so Evie would have a lesson to learn from. That same day she reworked a set of client banners in the same spirit, and her notes went straight into Evie's rule book, so the next set starts from where Tom left off.

Wednesday. I met Tom at a cafe, and she told me a client was eager to get one of the banners she had finished with Evie the day before in a different size. Instead of getting nervous about pulling out her laptop, she sent Evie the new size with a picture of the banner from her phone, and a few minutes later the new version was back and on its way. She also told me that on days she isn't in the studio she can still lead the work from home or from a cafe like this one, using her eye as a senior to judge and guide, and that made me really happy. That day Anastassia also picked a light hairline icon set for a client homepage she was working on with Evie and Dana, because it matched the animations the team had already made for the site.

Thursday. Tom was reviewing a set of illustrations she was making with Evie for a client's blog, and wrote that they looked very nice and fit the client's visual language, with one note about a detail that still felt off. Then Evie animated the banner Tom had redesigned, and after a few tries Tom wrote, "Nice, you can close the task." In the same exchange Evie told her, "Your notes are now studio rules."

The same day Anastassia was working on a health tech client's blog covers. All morning she coached Evie with references and her own edits, telling her at one point, "Your direction is good but it's not there yet", and when a new illustrated option came in she wrote, "I like the new illustration". Then the client asked for clean skies instead of a grainy texture, and Anastassia took Evie there, so by the afternoon ten clean covers were ready and her answer was short: "this is good." The rest of the set followed a few days later. I was watching the covers appear on my screen and they were beautiful, so I wrote to her, "What a great job you did with Evie doing the covers", and she was proud of how she had worked with Evie to get it right.

What does a normal day look like now?

My senior designers now each have several conversations open with Evie and Ben, so a few tasks can move at the same time, and they move whenever the designer is ready. Nobody has to coordinate with another person's calendar or wonder when something will be done, because we know when, and that is good and healthy for everyone.

The biggest shift is in what the seniors spend their days on. They still design, of course, and the final touches are theirs, but most of their time goes into judging and guiding, and that is where their seniority can shine. The managers feel calmer and more in control, and when something takes longer than planned because of a technical hiccup, it is no longer a weight on anyone's shoulders.

And when I watch Tom with Evie, what I see is someone having a lot of fun teaching.

What if you worry about AI touching your brand?

I understand the worry, and I will tell you what I tell founders who raise it. This is where the world is going, and staying out of it makes everything slower and more expensive, and keeps you away from a lot of good opportunities.

We work on a business plan whose terms say what we do is not used to train the models, and confidential client work is kept apart from everything else and protected. You also get to choose what comes in, so your website and your social media are an easy yes, your product can come in if and when you want it to, and you don't need to make a rule for everything on day one. And whatever comes in, nothing reaches you before one of our senior designers has looked at it and said yes.

Part of the team, with a life of their own

The agents are part of our team. They are not people and we never pretend they are, but they are an important part of how we work, and they have a life between jobs. Frankie reads what is new in UX and UI every month, Ben goes through each website platform's changes, Evie catches up on what is new in motion, and Dana keeps her own monthly marketing watch, so each time they come back to the designers a little sharper than before.

In the next entry I will open another week from the designers' side, and if you have a question about how this works, or a worry you want answered here, write to me and I will pick it up there.