DesignAday

On June 1, GitHub (owned by Microsoft) switched its billing system from a flat subscription rate to a token-usage system. I’ve described here before how my $39-per-month subscription provided a certain number of premium requests. I was working well within that tier, and in the past two weeks, my agentic workflow has been really smooth.

I didn’t do any development work yesterday, as I was building my band’s website, but today I dove back in. It was early afternoon when Copilot informed me that I had used 50% of my credits. What would usually last me about 15 days, I had burned through in less than one. I was aware that they were changing their billing model, but that was a shock.

I spent the rest of the afternoon overhauling my workflow to make it more efficient. By the end of my work day, I was at 71%. If I were to continue at that rate, what was costing me $39 will instead cost around $609. That’s a 15x increase.

I fully admit, I was part of the problem. Their original use case was a developer using AI as a coding assistant for code completion, writing a function, fixing a bug, or generating a component. I’ve created an entire product development platform with a multi-agent development loop involving a Planner, Architect, Designer, Builder, Reviewer, Backlog Manager, Tester, and DevOps Manager. I built out an entire design system while at the same time building two entire applications from scratch. I’m probably the exact person they are targeting.

On the other hand, they have encouraged this type of use, and now they’re pulling the rug out from under us. I’ve spent weeks building my workflow with the intention of using it for my future livelihood. But now, all of a sudden, what I’ve built is no longer sustainable.

I’m not the only one feeling the pain, as evidenced by recent tech news.

I won’t be blogging the full week. My band has been invited to lead worship for the Western Pennsylvania United Methodist Church (WPAUMC) Annual Conference. It’s a big deal and really good exposure for us. To capitalize on the opportunity, I’ve finally taken the time to put up a basic website for Leap of Faith.

The first ultimate playlist I created was specifically made for a long family road trip. I gathered every song I had about driving, cars, and roads. There are a lot. And they’re really good songs. There’s something about traveling—the freedom of the road—that just lends itself to a catchy tune. The order is loosely based on sub-themes, but it’s not as structured as the last three playlists, so I’m going to dole this one out five songs at a time.

Join me on the drive, won’t you?

Cruise Control by Bruce Hornsby This is the perfect song to kick off the playlist. It’s such an upbeat, hopeful melody, you can easily forget the deeply meaningful lyrics inspired by a bicycle accident involving Bruce and his son. The song is made even better by Jerry Garcia’s lead guitar. This was the last studio recording Garcia made before his untimely death due to a heart attack..

Let’s Ride by MxPx If the first one wasn’t energetic enough for you, this one will get you moving. Punk rock isn’t usually my scene, but one of my bandmates turned me on to this bit of nostalgia. It’s the first song from their tenth studio album.

Joyride by Roxette And speaking of nostalgia, here’s Roxette’s fourth and final Billboard #1 hit. The title of the song was inspired by an interview in which Paul McCartney compared writing songs with John Lennon to “a long joyride,” but the first line of the song came from a note Gessle’s girlfriend (whom he later married) left on his piano: “Hello, you fool, I love you.”

Life In The Fast Lane by The Eagles Off their album Hotel California, this song started life as the opening guitar riff, which Joe Walsh played while the band was warming up in rehearsal. Don Henley heard it and was determined to make a song out of it. The title and and theme of the song came from Glenn Frey who was riding on the freeway with a drug dealer known as “The Count.” When Frey asked him to slow down, he responded, “What do you mean? It’s life in the fast lane!”

Cleo Abram of HUGE* Conversations just published a 45-minute interview with the designers of the first electric Ferrari: Flavio Manzoni and Jony Ive. The car has already stirred up a lot of debate. Personally, I really like the design, interior and exterior. Regardless of how you feel about the car, there is a lot to appreciate in the thought that went into it. I recommend spending some time at the feet of two design masters as they wax poetic about tangible UIs, tradition vs. innovation, and constraints as opportunities.

On Friday, I encountered a bug. Not in my code, mind you, but in the handshake between GitHub Copilot and Claude.

First of all, realize that Copilot is configured to use multiple LLMs.

The ones at the top of the list are the most recent models. The multipliers to the right are how much they each cost in relation to the baseline amount included in your subscription. Claude Opus is the most competent and the most expensive: 15x more expensive. GPT-4.1 is pretty basic and included for free in your plan, so you can use it as much as you want, even if you’ve used all of your credits for the month.

At the very top, you’ll see that “Auto” is selected at a 10% discount. When you set Copilot to auto, it chooses which model to use based on the type of request and its complexity. GitHub gives you a discount for using that option because it’s also best for the entire system. If everyone is burning Claude all the time, the system will be less efficient. It’s a win-win situation. You save money, and the workload going over the internet is balanced.

So, that bug I mentioned—every request that Copilot sent to Claude was failing. Worse, it was corrupting my session history, so there was no way to recover from the error. I’d just have to close the session and start a new one, losing recent context in the process. So, I worked with Copilot to troubleshoot the issue. We switched to different models, confirmed that it was an issue with Claude and likely to do with the Copilot update I had just run. Eventually, it gave me a command to run in Apple’s console after quitting out of VS Code, and that cleared things up.

After a relaxing weekend, I picked up Monday where I left off. I got a lot done on Tuesday and Wednesday, and one of the apps in particular was coming along swimmingly. Today was especially productive. Then, all of a sudden, a message popped up on my session, mid-run, saying that I had reached my premium request limit for the month.

How could that be? I had been tracking it, and I wasn’t going to have any problem staying within budget. I hadn’t checked it this week for that very reason. I checked my usage statistics.

Well, something obviously changed this week.

That screenshot of the model list up there is nice and big for you, but understand that the little Auto indicator there in the bottom bar of the window is tiny and surrounded by a lot of other UI cruft. Apparently, when I switched one of my sessions back to Auto, it didn’t take. It was stuck on Claude Opus. So, every request I made this week on that product was being directed to the most expensive model. No wonder that project was performing so well.

IxDA Pittsburgh just held its annual social gathering, UX Mex, in the cabana at Esquina Cantina. There were nine people in attendance. Five of us are unemployed. One attendee had just been laid off Thursday. Another has made it to the final interview round thirteen times, only to be second choice. Yet another informed us that the entire Google UX team in Pittsburgh had been let go—luckily, he already found work with the consulting firm he hired while there. Someone related a rumor that Duolingo won’t consider anyone with UX in their title, because “UX is perceived as unpopular right now.” There was a litany of local companies that used to have strong design teams and now have nobody. I felt bad for the CMU grad that showed up, listening to all of us complaining about the job market that he’s bet his masters degree on.

I believe good design is as important now as it has ever been. In fact, we’re reaching a point where implementation is no longer going to be the long pole in the tent. When you can build anything quicker than ever before (as can everyone else) knowing what you should build is of prime concern. That’s where design shines.

We’ll see how long it takes companies to realize that again. Until then, say a prayer for everyone that industry has cast aside.

After a couple months of adding rules, gates, checks, and reports to my agentic workflow, it was becoming sluggish, and I felt like it was acting dumber. I had a feeling I had reached a point of process complexity that was doing more harm than good. I explained to my DevOps agent the symptoms I was seeing and my hypothesis and it agreed with me. It basically told me that the agents had become more focused on meeting the process requirements than doing the work.

That happens to human teams, too. It’s one of the things that always bugged me about Agile, especially SAFe. Teams get so hung up on the particulars of scrums and the responsibilities of each of the roles, they forget that it’s supposed to be in service to the work.

So, I told my agent to run an analysis of the workflow and propose some simplifications that won’t lose the essence of the guardrails we had put in place. It did that in part by introducing a complexity rating given to each task. For simple tasks, it can skip a lot of the checks and reports. The more complex tasks require more rigor. It also cleaned up a lot of repetition and some conflicting instructions—cruft that had built up through iterations.

This is the final installment of my ultimate playlist, The Week. I have four songs about Sunday, but I’ll kick off with a transition song and finish with a couple weekend songs and the ultimate finale.

Brand New Day by Sting This song was the finale and namesake of Sting’s 1999 album. It ushered in the new millennium on a positive note in the face of a lot of apocalyptic nonsense. Stevie Wonder played harmonica on the recording. The song ends with a litany of sexual innuendos that Sting said with a laugh are “purely coincidental—the results of dirty minds.”

Put On Your Sunday Clothes by Jerry Herman From the Tony award winning 1964 musical Hello, Dolly!, this song finds the title character taking a group of young folk from Yonkers to New York on a matchmaking adventure. Arguably, the best version is from the 1969 film featuring Barbra Streisand and Michael Crawford.

Tell Me On A Sunday by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black This is the title song from a one-woman show originally performed by Marti Webb. It tells the story of an English girl who has emigrated to the United States where she has a series of romance. In this song, she explains how she wants to hear the news of an imminent breakup.

Sunday Afternoon by Paul Simon Yet another song from a musical, this one Paul Simon’s The Capeman, which was based on the life of Salvador Agrón, a convicted murderer. It’s not a very happy song, sung by a twice-divorced mother trying to raise her daughter.

Sunday Bloody Sunday by U2 This song conveys the band’s stance against violence, specifically referencing a famous incident in Northern Ireland. It was the first track off of their album War and was responsible for introducing the band in the U.S. by way of the video playing often on MTV.

Seven Days by Sting From his album Ten Summoner’s Tales, this quirky song (written in 5/4) has the singer procrastinating about challenging his lady’s other suitor. The chorus runs through the entire week, “but Sunday’d be too late.” Cleverly, the outro is the second verse and outro of the Police song Every Little Thing She Does is Magic, in which the singer is too afraid to ask a woman to marry him. So, it acts as the continuation of a story started two decades earlier.

Weekend Song by Billy Joel Joel’s third studio album, Streetlife Serenade, was a relatively short one with two instrumentals and no single releases. This song is simply about making a buck at the nine to five and then blowing it on a night out with your girl.

Working For The Weekend by Loverboy The quintessential Friday five o’clock whistle song.

Eight Days a Week by The Beatles What better song to wrap this playlist? Paul’s driver’s license had been suspended due to speeding, so he took a taxi to Lennon’s place. As they pulled up, Paul asked the driver if he had been busy. “Busy? I’ve been working eight days a week.” Paul ran into the house, told John that he had a title, and they wrote the song in the next hour.

I just had another uncanny experience with my agentic workflow. One of my project agents reported that all of the tasks in the current milestone were complete. I knew it was lying, because there was a raft of things I had specified for the milestone that weren’t implemented.

I don’t like having to repeat myself, so after providing it with the lengthy list of missing requirements, I asked it why there was such a large discrepancy between my spec and the implementation. It told me that the acceptance criteria it had written were too implementation-centric in places. Checks passed for code tests, but didn’t always include strict UI outcome assertions. Also, it admitted to “milestone-close bias”: once the list was marked complete, the workflow optimized for closure instead of gap re-audit.

So, I ran this past my agent that is in charge of the overall workflow (i.e., my DevOps lead), and it agreed with my suggestion that we need a new action for specification intake.

An action is a process that I can launch with a short command. There’s a bunch of documentation provided in one or more files that the agent will be directed to read and follow when I give the command. So, we can write out very specific instructions about how it is to handle a spec and know that it will, for the most part, follow those instructions every time.

My new /spec-intake action will convert my long specification into a locked requirement ledger with unique IDs for every requirement. Nothing can move to tasks until all requirements are represented in the ledger. We’ve also added a traceability chain so that every task must reference one or more requirement IDs, and every ID must be mapped to at least one task. At check-in, each completed task must report which IDs were satisfied and provide evidence. And, if anything is unmapped, unsatisfied, or missing evidence at Milestone Close (another action I defined previously), it’s treated as a hard fail.

This new structure also allowed us to put in place a couple new audits that should catch spec drift at the start of each task. Finally, we’ve strengthened the acceptance criteria format to be outcome-first, rather than implementation-first. How many times have I explained to teams that “code complete” can’t be considered the definition of done?

And here’s the power of agentic AI: I don’t know how to implement all of that, but all I had to do was explain to my agent what I need at a conceptual level and tell it to propose a solution. Once I reviewed the plan, all I had to say was…

Last week, Rosenfeld Media hosted one of their community chats, this one posing the question, “How will design be taught when the schools shut down?” California College of the Arts (CCA), which has a well-respected design program, announced that they’ll be shutting down next year—one of several schools to do so recently. Many more have been facing significant financial challenges with decreased enrollment, and the state of the design industry is seeing fewer graduates placed in jobs out of school. Then, of course, there is the impact of AI.

Of course, now that I’m unemployed, both BMW and Kia are finally bringing the EVs I’ve been waiting for to market this summer. The Kia EV3 has been available in Europe for over a year and is one of the region’s top-selling EVs. Their 2027 U.S. model was revealed at the New York International Auto Show last month. With an estimated 320 mile range and charging from 10–80% in 30 minutes, it’s a sweet little package that is expected to start under $40,000.

I just received email this week from BMW informing me that I can build and reserve my BMW iX3. I’ve been following the development of this one since they showed off the prototype a few years ago. At 383–434 miles, its range will rank in the top five models. Of course, it’s a lot more expensive than the Kia, starting at $61,500, and I actually like the styling of the Kia better. They toned the iX3 down quite a bit from the concept I fell in love with. The EV3 is also significantly smaller than the iX3, which is a selling point for me.