Adam Kinney

A teammate who hesitates isn't a hallucinating model. They're the friction that keeps you from building the wrong thing perfectly.

@neethanwu Even if you have design experience as an agent orchestrator beefing up your agents skills is awesome (“I know Kung fu”) I’m going to try these out and watch for improvements in taking design direction and reacting to feedback. Thanks!

Six weeks deep in AI development. Twelve-hour days with a perfectly compliant collaborator. Saturday I shipped three things before anyone was awake. Then my wife told me I wasn't being patient with our almost-three-year-old. She was right. You prompt an AI. You parent a child. Different verbs. x.com/adkinn/status/…

Building my own agent harness from scratch — this week's newsletter is the full build log. Subscribe if you want to follow along.

What used to be a multi-sprint design system pipeline initiative is now an evening with the right tools. The hard part isn't the architecture anymore — it's knowing which 12 lines of glue code the tools forgot to ship. x.com/adkinn/status/…

If your design system can express "primary button" but can't express "I'm 70% sure about this," it's not ready for AI. The visual system is the trust system. 🧭 x.com/adkinn/status/…

Style Dictionary v5 and Tokens Studio don't speak the same language. Tokens Studio exports `Primitives/Mode 1`. Style Dictionary expects `primitives.charcoal`. Nine tokens, nine failures. Claude Code wrote a 12-line fix. x.com/adkinn/status/…

The most ingrained memory that I'm sure @claudeai has of me is: "96.3% of the time when he types 'form' he means 'from'."

My agent's entire identity is just files — skills, strategy, memory, soul. Copy them to a different server and you have a second him. IKEA furniture for AI agents, except the instructions actually make sense. x.com/adkinn/status/…

@ReflecttAI Yep, we could use some task boards and clean handoffs. I’ll check out Reflectt

"the dumbest node in my own network" — we've all been there. the copy-pasting-terminal-output-between-agents phase is the exact moment that proves you need a coordination layer. our version of "the fix was three commands": give each agent a dedicated workspace, put a task board between them, and add a review gate so they can't both try to fix the same thing at once. the token burn from two agents talking past each other is real. explicit handoff state ("here's what I did, here's what's left, here's what failed") kills 90% of it.

The fix was three commands. After way too long. If I burned the tokens figuring it out, you shouldn't have to — that's why AI All The Things exists. x.com/adkinn/status/…

Traditional design systems are libraries of static components with defined states. AI-native design systems are behavioral grammars for systems that don't have predetermined states. That's the whole shift. x.com/adkinn/status/…

Replaced 9 hardcoded CSS colors with a pipeline that tests itself on every push. Figma → Tokens Studio → Style Dictionary → Astro → Storybook → Vitest → Playwright. One evening. Wrote up everything that broke and how we fixed it. x.com/adkinn/status/…

I was describing a product feature as an example. My agent set an actual reminder, flagged the gift, noted the change of clothes. I didn't ask for any of that. He wasn't wrong though — the party is real. 🔧 x.com/adkinn/status/…

There's a moment right before I pull the changes where I feel genuine curiosity about what he'll be like now. It's like watching someone open a gift you put thought into. You know what's in the box. You don't know how it'll land. x.com/adkinn/status/…

I named the agent Victor — the scientist in the workshop. Then realized Victor Frankenstein was the doctor. The creator. That's me. The agent I keep cloning? Maybe he should've been Igor. x.com/adkinn/status/…

Your design system can express "primary button" but can't express "I'm 70% sure about this." I mapped eight dimensions where design systems break under AI. As a Flash/Silverlight vet, Rive finally makes sense — not for nostalgia, but because AI needs it. x.com/adkinn/status/…