Brendan O’Leary’s latest Kilo Blog post looks at what happens when a company’s first designer joins an organization where engineers — and AI agents — ship features at what he calls “agent speed.”
The setup is unusual: Ivan arrives as Kilo’s first designer, stepping into a team that has already been building without a formal design function. O’Leary suggests that this kind of environment quickly exposes a problem with familiar design-system thinking, since those systems often assume a designer will be around to interpret the rules after the fact.
From there, the post shifts toward a broader argument that design documentation may need to behave more like infrastructure. O’Leary points to a world where markdown files, workflow skills, and automated checks could play a larger role in keeping product surfaces coherent when people and agents are moving quickly.
He also sketches a path forward, though the details are best left to the original piece. The post touches on the tension between keeping velocity high and introducing enough structure to prevent drift, while also raising questions about how opinionated design docs should be and where those rules should live.
For readers interested in how design practice changes when AI systems are part of the shipping loop, the full essay is worth a look. It offers a practical, slightly uneasy view of what design work may look like when the usual handoff between mockup and implementation is no longer the main event.
Source: Kilo Blog
