Cut Through The AI Chaos

This post is based on a workshop given on 24th September 2026 at design+AI.

Building a working prototype with AI is easy now: ask Claude to build you something cool and it will. Shipping that prototype, so that it is live and useful and does not fall over, is a different problem. On Thursday I spent a morning in Brighton with a room of designers and product people working through the practices engineers rely on to make that second part possible. We did not write any code ourselves. The agent did all of that. Our job is simply knowing what to ask for.

For a long time I have wanted to hand AI a senior job. When I was a CTO, this was the kind of work I would have delegated to a head of department: take a loosely described outcome, work out what it really needs, split it up, get other people to do the pieces, and come back with something finished while I got on with my own work.

That goal has been elusive for years. Until very recently, the best description of an AI model was an overeager junior. Delegating to one meant giving it lots of context, and then watching it closely. That was fine, but frustrating.