Short, practical dispatches from testing tools, designing workflows, reviewing artifacts, and turning examples into lessons.
Dated dispatches from real experiments in this project. Notes that outgrow the format graduate into full articles.
We wired agenticdesign.school so that DESIGN.md, the components folder, and the live pages continuously rebuild a file-backed OpenPencil canvas: token layers, shadcn primitives, custom components, and full-length page snapshots, regenerated on every watched change.
The same payload that rebuilds the OpenPencil canvas also targets Figma: a generated canvas payload, a local plugin that writes native frames and page snapshots, and a remote MCP path that is partly blocked. This note documents what worked, what is blocked, and the workaround that ships today.
A growing share of agent-assisted design work ships as a single self-contained HTML file: prototypes, slides, review boards, even motion studies. This note re-grounds that signal for designers — when an HTML artifact is the right deliverable, and when it quietly becomes unreviewable debt.
New agent tools can pull a live site's tokens, type scale, spacing, and brand assets straight from the terminal. That is genuinely useful for audits, migrations, and competitive teardowns — and it raises rights questions a designer should answer before the extracted system touches production work.
What field notes are, how they differ from the long-form articles, and the five-part spine every note follows: signal, what we tried, what changed, evidence, next test.
What changed when an agent was given real design constraints.
Reusable operating loops for briefing, critique, revision, and QA.
Before-and-after examples from product work, books, and prototypes.
Workflow templates, tool tests, critique examples, and practical updates from the school.