3 ways product designers use the canvas agent for craft, speed and expression

The first week a team gets an agent, it tends to use it for the dullest thing it can find. By the third week, the interesting teams have stopped asking what it can do and started asking what they want to keep doing themselves.

We spent a month with three studios to see where that line ends up.

1. Clearing the table before the real work

Every file accumulates debris: detached instances, layers named Rectangle 412, colours one hex away from the token they should be. The studios we visited all start the day by asking the agent to tidy, and then review its diff like they would a colleague's.

"The agent doesn't have taste. It has stamina. Our job got smaller in the boring places and bigger in the interesting ones."

2. Exploring wider, then narrowing by hand

Instead of three directions, the agent drafts twelve. Designers pick two and take it from there by hand — the agent widens the funnel, people close it.

3. Making the expressive parts more expressive

The time saved went somewhere. In every studio it went into motion, illustration and typography — the parts of the work that make a product feel like somebody made it.

Illustrations by Juno Park.