Design Concept
A rough, rejectable sketch of an approach.
An inexpensive draft of a solution intended to be critiqued and discarded, not implemented. A way to align on direction before committing effort.
Cheap drafts change the conversation from "is this good?" to "is this the right shape?", which is a decision made far more quickly and cheaply.
The value comes from being cheap enough to discard. If a sketch takes a week, nobody rejects it and it becomes the plan by default. Being explicit that it is a proposal, and reviewing it as one, is what keeps the option of a different direction genuinely open.
Killing a concept early
A draft approach is presented for a green light.
Ask what the alternative would have to be true for the concept to be wrong. If the answer is cheap to test, test it before building. The point of a concept is to be falsifiable while the cost of being wrong is still small.
- blogBuilding effective agents ↗
Draws the line between fixed workflows and agents that choose their own process, and names the core patterns: chaining, routing, parallelisation, orchestrator-workers, evaluator-optimizer.
- docsBest practices for using GitHub Copilot to work on tasks ↗
Recommends bounded tasks with explicit acceptance criteria, and names what is a bad fit for unattended delegation: ambiguous, security-sensitive, production-critical or deeply domain-specific work.
Prototyping · Spike
Build the cheapest thing that answers the question.
Spec · Specification
A written description of the intended outcome, before the work starts.
Grilling
Making the model interrogate the plan before building it.
AI-Assisted Development
Day-to-day engineering with a model in the loop.