AI for interface design

Member lesson

Evaluating what an agent built

Lesson 11 of 11 in AI for interface design.

Simon Willison: Engineering practices that make coding agents work - The Pragmatic Summit · The Pragmatic Engineer
Lesson

Agent-built interfaces fail in a particular way: they look finished and are structurally wrong. Values hard-coded instead of tokenised. A new component where one existed. Accessibility attributes absent. State handled in a way that will break on the second user.

In a neat, finished room, an inspector kneels with a torch and lifts a floor panel to reveal tangled, mismatched wiring and a pipe that leads nowhere. Everything above the floor looks perfect.
The room looks perfect. Lift a floorboard, the way you would read the code.
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Check what stuck

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Members answer these 3 questions and keep the ticket for this lesson. Every lesson has one.

  1. Question 1, locked

    Which of these words means this? “Reading what was produced before trusting it. Non-optional and frequently skipped.”

    • Confirmation bias
    • Coding (research)
    • Synthesis
    • Review
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “What changed. The unit of review for anything an agent touched.”

    • Diff
    • Anchoring
    • First draft
    • Throughput
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “Something that looks correct and is not. The characteristic risk here.”

    • Silent failure
    • Edge case
    • Error state
    • Loading state
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