Remember how, in the Day 1 diary, I said the hard part for me was writing up design requirements well enough to hand off to an AI agent? On Monday, as soon as I got to work, I took that problem to Jun, a colleague who leads the UI/UX team. I showed Jun the app I’d built over the weekend, too. Jun’s a naturally friendly guy, so he complimented it, saying this was already great and so on. I thanked him and got down to business. Here’s my take on his advice:
- Give the AI agent references that inspire you, or ones you’ve liked.
- Under the same conditions, ChatGPT does a bit better than Claude at design work.
- He isn’t pulling in any special external skills or hooking up any tools yet either. He’s getting usable results without them.
The first one? You only say that so easily because you’re the expert. Still, it was advice worth taking to heart and following. Come to think of it, the design I liked most from Day 1 was made exactly that way. It was the one where I searched the internet and asked for something with that kind of feel. I took Jun’s point to be that the reference doesn’t have to be that direct. I’ll keep it in mind next time.
The second one is something money can fix. Once I got home on Monday, I reactivated my ChatGPT subscription for the first time in a while. Image generation works on the free plan too, but ultimately I’d need to give instructions through Codex, and Codex requires a subscription. As a test, I copied the task Breda (our developer agent) had sent to Envy (our designer agent) word for word and fed it to Codex. And the result… There’s some personal taste involved, but at least to my eyes, Codex’s output looked a bit better. Should I swap Envy out for Codex? Or I could add one more designer agent, give the work to both, and pick whichever comes out better.
Silently thanking Jun once more, I headed to work on Tuesday, and Jun had sent me a message, sharing a few personal projects he’d made with Claude, plus a few references he’d liked recently. Now that’s what I call after-sales service. While I was replying, “Thank you so much,” Jun sent one more image.
“I don’t remember it that well, but I put together some assets based on the screen you showed me yesterday.”
Wow… Unbelievable… So this is what a pro’s work looks like. It makes me wonder if Jun was even using the same Claude. This is exactly why you need experts. Thanks again, Jun. I’ll come to you for advice again next time.
