How to Design in the Agent Era
When AI agents do the actual work, what still sets a designer apart? A strategic breakdown of Paper founder Steven Haney's mindset and hands-on workflow — a WOW Mentor teardown.
Contents
- 01
How to Design in the Agent Era
Narration: WOW Mentor
What WOW Mentor breaks down here is a single question: when agents do the actual work, what keeps a designer indispensable? Paper founder Steven Haney built a design tool on HTML and CSS so agents can read and write it directly, and on top of that he erased the very concept of handoff. But his real message is not the technology. Do not ship whatever the model spits out; strip away the AI tells — the bold, the too-many sizes, the purple gradients; and understand that taste and judgment remain a human job. That is exactly where WOW Mentor trains the lens.
- The more agents handle chores like translation and resizing, the more the human's real job becomes judgment: deciding what to keep and what to cut.
- Choosing HTML and CSS as the rendering engine is strategy, not aesthetics. Drawing in a language agents already know saves tokens, runs faster, and cuts hallucinations.