Jamie Mill

A lot of talk about AI for design is all about the *surface*. But how would AI behave if it was trained to navigate the deeper layers of design, so that it could help you, or help itself, when asked to work on a design project? Made a skill pack for that: layers.jamiemill.com

If you’ve tried the layers skills please let me know how it went. Did Claude get carried away and generate a load of slop or did it help? Should it be more Socratic or is it helpful that it generates output for you? layers.jamiemill.com

I joined the Complementary Podcast discuss my Layers design skills for Claude, and using AI as a thought-partner. Thanks for having me back @KatieLangerman and @hobdaydesign! Listen here: open.spotify.com/episode/7mvHHM…

Update with: `npx skills update` (add `-g` if you installed globally). Still very much a work in progress. Tell me what you'd do differently.

My favourite addition is a principle I've leaned on for years: "push forward, pull back". When work at one layer feels unjustified, probe a layer up (sketch a flow, a screen) to find what the layer below actually needs, then come back down.

Pushed a big update to the Layers design skills (layers.jamiemill.com). After using them on real projects, the problem was obvious: the AI marched through every phase and produced a pile of documents no one was ever going to read.

@eeismann I don’t think it’s measurable in absolute terms. But you can feel if “decisions per day” is improving or not, and compare the decision rate of different teams. The quality of the decisions is out of scope as per your tweet. But the hard part is the scale: not all are equal value.

How do you measure Design productivity? The best I can do is "Overall PRs of the team / Design IC headcount." Any other means of measuring productivity? I'm interested only in measuring productivity, not quality (I have plenty of ways to measure that).

A shared place for agents to work in the open could help - something you’re exploring with Ace @Mappletons ?

The agents have a certain amount of information that isn’t in the head of any human, but only the owner of that agent has the ability to query it.

One weird side-effect of agents is there are now (virtual) team members I can’t talk to. I make a recommendation, a dev passes it to their agent, and then they tell me later “I think my agent handled this that way, let me check”.

@matthewcp Yes, and with Astro of course layers.jamiemill.com

Has anyone built a website for their specific skill yet?

No way! This is gonna be great to use with layers.jamiemill.com which outputs mermaid by default. Pasting into tldraw to get an editable version will be awesome since I’m already diagramming a lot there.

I think the other direction is already well covered by Claude, you make some temporary changes to the component in Figma, give a screenshot or MCP access to Claude and it updates the source of truth in Code. Then re-sync back to Figma so that Figma always follows code.

I’m thinking uni-directional code -> Figma. Build component in code, deterministically auto-translate it to Figma to use it on the canvas to mock up screens. Then if you need to change the component, change it in code and then re-sync it back to Figma.

If I want to treat code as the Design System source of truth, and sync components to Figma, what’s the state-of-the-art for this? Anyone doing it? RTs appreciated for reach!

when I saw this AI plugin, I rushed to add it to my collection of AI skills, great work @jamiemill layers.jamiemill.com up there with @impeccable_ai

@KatieLangerman Thanks Katie! If you try it, let me know how it goes! For instance, one challenge I've found is that it tends to generate a lot of output which can start to get overwhelming. I'm wondering how to fight that.

@jamiemill This is really cool Jamie! I have a good project to try this with. I really love the website you made explaining how it works, too 🙂

A lot of talk about AI for design is all about the *surface*. But how would AI behave if it was trained to navigate the deeper layers of design, so that it could help you, or help itself, when asked to work on a design project? Made a skill pack for that: layers.jamiemill.com

This is my first attempt to explore what AI can bring to those often neglected deeper layers. Fork it, improve it, and most importantly -- tell me what you'd do differently! layers.jamiemill.com

This is not about automating away the designer's job - it's about creating a thinking partner that knows how I like to approach design and speaks the same language.