The build was never only the system
01The two jobs
Building the product and owning the problem were treated as separate work. I stopped seeing them that way. The person who can make the system should stay with the problem it is for.
02What designers were missing
They were not short of tools. They were short of a system they could trust while they were still in the work. Search lived in one place. The file lived in another. The agent did not know either.
03What the four years became
A library people could search. A way to turn a screen into a system without leaving Figma. Then a workspace where the agent already knew the product it was designing for. Each one started as a compromise and had to become more capable once people stayed.
04Not a generic harness
A model in a chat box was the easy version. It cannot remember the thread, use a team's own tools, or hold up once people are on it. That was the engineering. The basics still had to be clear. Speed was not a reason to ship the first compromise and leave it there.