From Doer to Director, Getting Value From AI

This month we dig into whether Claude Design is any good, why so many people feel like AI is costing them time rather than saving it, and what it really means to stop being a doer and start being a director. Along the way we wander into the loss of craft, the ethics of AI, and a joke so niche it needs its own history lesson.

App of the Month

Claude Design is the tool that grabbed our attention this month. It builds out designs for you, and it is genuinely impressive. We used it to rebuild the website for a small UK charity that funds children's education in India, going from nothing to a finished static HTML site in around eight hours, with Claude Design handling the design and Claude Code doing the build. Beyond the standard twenty pounds a month subscription, it cost roughly fifty quid in extra credits, which for a small organization is a no-brainer.

Claude design and code together allowed Paul to create a fully working website in less than 8 hours.

It turns out it does more than websites. It builds presentations too, and exports them to PowerPoint or PDF for offline editing. We put together a fifty three slide deck for a client in about two hours, work that would normally have eaten the best part of four days.

Here is what we liked. It works with design systems, you can import one from Figma, you can make manual edits without burning tokens, and you can select elements visually to tweak them. The things that hold it back are that you can't export back to Figma, there's no easy publish button, and the usage allowance vanishes in what feels like five minutes flat. When you hit the wall it cheerfully suggests you try again on Sunday, which is no use when you're mid project and have already forgotten what you were doing.

One word of warning. If you don't guide it heavily, Claude Design has tells, like a recurring decorative bar under the hero section that serves no real purpose. Then again, every designer has a style you can spot, so we're not convinced that's the criticism people think it is.

From Doer to Director

A lot of people tell us AI isn't saving them time, it's costing them more of it. That confused us at first. How can a tool that turns four days of slide work into two hours possibly slow anyone down? The more we coached people through it, the clearer the answer became, and it has very little to do with the tools. It comes down to how organized you already are.

If you're not fundamentally efficient in how you work, and especially if you've never had to delegate to other people, AI exposes that straight away. The people struggling most are the ones who still want to be doers. They want to be in the code, pushing pixels in Figma, or typing every word themselves. To get real value from AI you have to shift from that doer mindset to a director one.

Be the conductor, not the violinist

It reminded us of the moment in the Steve Jobs biopic where Wozniak asks Jobs what he actually does, given that Woz writes the code and builds the hardware. Jobs answers that he conducts the orchestra. Woz is the finest violinist in the room, but someone has to bring all the players together. That conductor role is exactly the shift most of us need to make.

Running agents in parallel

A real example from this month. Working on a client presentation, we had three things running at once. Notion AI was drafting the outline in one window. Claude Design was studying the client's website to build a matching design system in another. A third agent was drafting video transcripts for a separate project entirely. Three workstreams all moving at the same time, where you would once have plodded through them one after another.

That is a genuinely hard skill to build. The people best placed for it are those with management experience, because they're used to handing work off and holding several threads in their head at once. If you've never worked that way, it can feel distressing, and there's even a name for where it leads, which our reader of the month gets into.

The micromanaging trap

There's a design leadership parallel too. Talented designers get promoted, then can't resist sneaking back into Figma to do the work themselves. The same thing happens with AI. The agent produces something perfectly good, but it isn't quite what was in your head, so you fiddle and fiddle and fiddle, burning the very time you were meant to save. The upside is that you can't hurt an AI's feelings, so just say "no, that's not it" and move on.

Get organized first

The fix is unglamorous. Get organized before the agents fully take over.

• Build the digital playbooks, SOPs and policies we keep banging on about, so the AI already knows how you work and gets it right first time.
• Keep your knowledge in one place it can reference, so you're not repeating yourself endlessly.
• Run a task system it can see, and learn markdown while you're at it. It takes ten minutes and AI loves it.

Tool or output, where's the joy?

We didn't agree on all of this. Marcus prefers using AI linearly and still enjoys the doing, the writing itself, rather than conducting an orchestra. That led us into deeper water about craft. Is the joy in the tool or in the output? Paul has found real satisfaction teaching AI to write in his voice while keeping the part he actually loves, communicating ideas with passion. Marcus worries that stripping away the craft, the genuine ability to play the instrument, costs us something real, and asks how the next generation of designers will learn without the junior grind.

We tested it against Monet, photography and the industrial revolution. Someone recently posted a supposedly fake Monet online and asked people to explain why it fell short of the real thing. They wrote whole essays about flow and composition, until it turned out to be a genuine Monet. So how much of our resistance is legitimate and how much is simply discomfort with change? We don't pretend to know. There are real problems with AI, the blatant disregard for intellectual property and the environmental cost chief among them, and they deserve people shouting about them. But the genie is out of the bottle, and as a species we've never once managed to put one back.

The one takeaway

The single takeaway. Start building your management habits now. Get organized, practice delegating, and learn to hold several threads at once, before that choice gets made for you.

Read of the Month

Marcus brought the counterweight to all that optimism. The article is Life with AI causing human brain 'fry', which introduces a term coined by the Boston Consulting Group.

"AI brain fry" is the mental exhaustion that comes from using or supervising AI tools past your cognitive limits, the sort caused by reviewing endless AI generated code, juggling multiple assistants, and rewriting lengthy prompts over and over.

It hits software developers hardest, since agents now churn out code faster than humans can review it for security flaws and overall coherence. Fittingly, the piece reached us via one of the developers at Headscape, who waved it about as proof that AI is a problem. We agree the problem is real. The article's advice is for company leaders to set clear limits on AI use to prevent burnout, though quite how they're meant to spot the issue without us telling them is another matter.

The catch is that a cynical manager will just point out that their whole day already feels like relentless context switching, so good luck getting much sympathy.

For a related read, Marcus also flagged AI didn't delete your database, you did, a sharp piece arguing that you should take responsibility for what you ship to production rather than blaming the AI when it all goes wrong.

Marcus' Joke

We end, as ever, with Marcus’ joke. This one needs a UK history lesson, so our apologies to anyone under forty.

I guessed orange, but it was chocolate. I guessed toffee, but it was peanut. I guessed strawberry, but it was coffee. I was wrong on so many Revels.

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