~/posts/moving-into-the-agent-era
Moving Into the Agent Era
Some observations on letting agents take over, freeing space for experimentation and better design.
AI is a broad term these days. I know what it is, I know what it can also mean, and have gotten into different habits in how I use it personally and professionally.
Personally, I’ll ask the browser about a random medical question or have it summarize some bureaucratic process I need to participate in.
At work, my VS Code companion spins up a quick feature while I get up to make a cup of coffee. I come back, test, give more direction, repeat until it’s time for the next phase of the project.
When it comes to decisions around front-end components, past eras usually meant finding a flexible library to ship UX quickly without custom building everything: validation, date pickers, navigation, and the like. If not a library, then snippets of code found in the wild, something that mostly did the thing, tweaked just enough to fit the project. The goal was always the same: avoid building absolutely everything from scratch.
Now, I can hand an agent a set of requirements and have it build a custom library on the fly. I get near-infinite customization, with the ability to iterate as the app grows. I’m no longer locked into the same packages and design constraints as before.
Somehow, that makes designing for the web fun again.