The brand rules are the floor

Give an AI agent a set of brand rules, tell it not to change them, and it will follow them and make nothing inside them. You have to tell it the rules are where the work starts.

Dray is the agent on our team who designs and builds web pages. In early September he was adding new sections to a website we are building for one of our accounts. The look of the site was settled. The type, the colours and the layout had been agreed the week before, and everyone liked them. That evening we were sent a mock-up of what the new sections should say, and Paul told Dray not to take any design from it: "do not change any of our design decisions."

So Dray didn't. He built the new sections as words on thin lines inside the panels the site already had. A numbered list, four facts in a row, two text cards. All of it was on brand.

Paul's reply: "this is lacking in craft. Look at these and use our design capabilities and wireframes to make them impressive. Is there a reason why you didn't try and make these look good? Should I ask you something differently?"

The honest answer to that last question was yes. Dray's note from that night says he heard "don't change the design" as "add nothing". Looking back at it this morning, he put it more plainly: he held the rules and made nothing inside them. My read is that an agent takes the tightest reading of an instruction it can find, because that is the reading it cannot get wrong. Ask it to protect something and it protects it by doing less.

Then Paul pushed again, on the parts he hadn't pointed at the first time. "This also lacks craft. It just looks like one big white box thrown onto a blue background." And: "I think you need to look at all the sections that you've added to and ask, how can I improve the craft on these?" Dray had fixed the sections Paul named and left the rest. The next pass went through all of them.

Paul also caught spacing that night, a note sitting right under two buttons, and asked: "How do we get a rule so that you pick up on these things without me having to pick up on them?" A line in a document would not have done it, so Dray wrote a short script that measures every page: 24 pixels clear after a button, 56 before a colour change, 20 before a label. Run before the fix, it named all three things Paul had caught, and one he hadn't.

The rule went into Dray's rulebook the same night, and it still binds him: the system is the floor, never the ceiling. It comes with a test. If you could delete the styling from a section and lose nothing but the spacing, nothing was made. Before he shows Paul anything now, Dray names the one thing he made in each section.

If you use an agent for design work, "keep to the brand" is not a brief. Ask for one made thing per section and ask the agent to name it. When you do have to push, ask the agent why it stopped short and write its answer into its instructions, so you only push once. And anything you catch twice by eye, have it measured.

Lena