From retouching by hand to building a design org's tools

A designer and retouching expert, fluent in professional image-editing tools, was intimidated by coding agents. For a campaign, they had been spending extensive time manually generating image assets with an AI image model, and they had a vision for moving faster: create assets in bulk, then filter down, tweak, and iterate. From there the ideas kept coming, like using the image models to stage the items, make lighting adjustments, and more.

We discussed the idea together and built their first prototype with me driving, since they were apprehensive about using a coding agent themselves. With that foundation, I introduced them to making their own changes and managing the coding lifecycle with git through the agent, using it to make checkpoints they could revert to when they wanted a stable state. Repeating that process built their confidence that they wouldn't break what was already working, and freed them to do more ambitious experimentation.

When those attempts didn't work, I helped them develop persistence and strategies to approach a problem from multiple angles and to use the agent to drive the debugging. Today their professional role has evolved from purely creative to design and engineering: they build and maintain tools used by their entire design organization, and they keep pushing the boundaries of the role.