Agents with Taste

My new course called aiforui.dev is in early access! 6 days left to join. An engineer has never been more leveraged than today thanks to a fleet of agents. But when it comes to more visual work, like animations, coding agents don’t quite know what great feels like. My way of getting there is to create a skill file for each aspect of the interface. If you know what great feels like, describe the rules, then give them to your agents so they can follow them. The result is an AI that has your taste and knowledge and can produce significantly better results, like the interactive Linear logo I made with Claude Code: With enough experience, you can not only tell what feels better, but also why. By then you’ve not only built your taste, but also the ability to articulate it. The correct animation below feels right, because it animates from a higher initial scale value. It makes the movement feel more gentle, natural, and elegant. scale(0) on the left feels wrong because it looks like the element comes out of nowhere. A higher initial value resembles the real world more. Just like a balloon, even when deflated it has a visible shape, it never disappears completely. That’s the why. There’s no magic involved. Almost every “taste” decision has a logical reason if you look close enough. This applies to any other discipline really. Of course the more creative part of the job is still up to you, but the more you can package into a skill, the more leverage you can get out of your agents. Since we know how to articulate why something feels good, we can use that knowledge to guide the agents, just like you would guide a less experienced designer. In this case the scale trick and many others live under “Practical Tips” in my skill: ## Practical Tips | Scenario | Solution | | ------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------- | | Make buttons feel responsive | Add `transform: scale(0.97)` on `:active` | | Element appears from nowhere | Start from `scale(0.95)`, not `scale(0)` | | Shaky/jittery animations | Add `will-change: transform` | | Hover causes flicker | Animate child element, not parent | | Popover scales from wrong point | Set `transform-origin` to trigger location | | Sequential tooltips feel slow | Skip delay/animation after first tooltip | | Small buttons hard to tap | Use 44px minimum hit area (pseudo-element) | | Something still…