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What your AI co-designer can’t infer from your hex values

Context files I create every time I start a new client project, to onboard Claude and maximise the output quality

It took me embarrassingly long to understand the one thing about working with design agents that now shapes how I set up almost every project. And the moment I realised what I was missing, it was almost annoying how simple it was.

When you use AI to generate a design (or create flows, or mental modals, etc) an agent hands you something that is both good and generic at the same time. Clean design, usable and user-friendly, clearly made by something that knows what it’s doing. But then you realise — it’s missing the empty state, leaning on colour alone to carry meaning, reaching for a pattern you’d specifically decided against three weeks ago and using specs don’t belong to your project. The truth is, that none of this is the agent being careless — it did a completely fair job of the brief it actually had. However, the brief was so much thinner than the one in my head.

As a fractional designer, working half-time and managing several clients at the same time, I rely on AI on multiple occasions:

• Initial prep — identifying flows, brainstorming mental modals, competitive analysis, strategy…