I’ve been reading a lot about AI lately. The deeper I go into agents, subagents, agentic loops, and teams, the more I think about parenting.
When you build an agent, you’re making decisions about what good behavior looks like. What does it get rewarded for? What feedback does it receive? When should it act independently, ask for help, or challenge another agent? You’re responsible for the conditions that shape its behavior.
That curiosity led me to The Whole-Brain Child. Reading about how children develop gave me a useful lens for thinking about learning, guidance, and boundaries. Parenting is an imperfect analogy for AI, but it raises a question I keep coming back to: what are we teaching these systems through the environments we create?
One of the standouts in my reading was Flash Teams, by Melissa Valentine and Michael S. Bernstein. It explores how human experts can assemble around a specific problem, with technology helping find the right people and coordinate their work. Teams can change as the project’s needs change. Stanford’s interview with the authors
For designers, the implications are exciting. Think Marvel teams. People with distinct abilities choosing a mission, coming together to execute, and bringing in new expertise when they need it. I can imagine more designers organizing around ideas they want to see exist, with greater ownership over both the work and who they build it with.
As AI lowers the effort required to produce something, deciding what deserves to get built becomes a bigger part of the job. A polished prototype can still be a bad idea. Someone has to understand the problem, question the assumptions, and care enough to test whether the result is useful.
That’s where designers can have real influence. Recognize slop. Explain why something falls short. Champion good ideas and help them survive the distance between an early concept and a product people actually want.
The connection across all this reading is responsibility. Building agents means making choices about their behavior and how they work together. Building teams means creating the conditions for people to do good work. And having the ability to make more things means taking more ownership of what we choose to put into the world.