Designing with Coding Agents again!

I’m back teaching my Designing with Coding Agents course! For this iteration I was able to take the thoughts and feelings from the first session and distill them down to one idea: context steering.

A recurring theme from the first session was my students feeling like they were pulling a lever on the slot machine. Context steering is my answer to this. Focusing on teaching them where to put their hands and how to guide the agent toward their desired outcomes. The work happens before the prompt is even sent, in the design system, guidelines, and guardrails that they have within their repos. My hope is that this framing is more durable for students even as the technology continues to accelerate and the harnesses and interfaces catch up.

The Cooper course isn’t running until November, so all of this is subject to change. Still, I am having fun. Teaching a subject where the underlying technology is shifting and learning to go with the flow. To prepare, I’m running a test session internally at The Times. Sharing the learning arc for that now so that I have a snapshot for future references:

Session 1: Writing Context

This session focuses on the context that we give our agents. By using CLAUDE.md and then DESIGN.md we will write guidelines to bring consistency and improve the design skills of our agents. This session is rooted in our company’s Generative Design Lab’s tenents: #1: Conditions are craft. The quality of what emerges depends on the quality of what you set up.

Session 2: Design Systems as Context

This session focuses on the design system. It already provides a shared language for designers in Figma across the org as well as the various engineers we partner with. The agent introduces a third party. With the whole system as context, we can use the agent to design in a generative way: exploring the possibility space of a component, generating every variant of a button. Shifting to treating our components, tokens and rules as parameters to design within. Then we’ll pair it with Figma MCP and see how a tighter bridge changes what’s possible.

Session 3: Building Tools for Context

This session focuses on personal and infrastructural software tooling. We will explore using coding agents to produce tools to help us plan and learn, maintain a design system or DESIGN.md, and bring consistency and pixel pushing to the frontend. The core insight: if the agent can write code, then it can write code that helps you shape the code you are writing.

-Mello