The AI Sandwich, Agent Primitives, and Designing with AI
Om avsnittet
Trevin Chow is has more than 25 years of experience in product and design, held product leadership roles at Axon, Sketchy, Nike, and Microsoft, and co-founded Chewsy. He is a core maintainer of Compound Engineering, a plugin for Claude Code, Codex, and other agent harnesses.
Dan and Trevin discuss how AI changes the work of building software, especially design and product judgment. Trevin describes starting with a value proposition before generating designs, using visual references to guide exploration, and keeping humans involved in critique. His “AI sandwich” puts human attention on defining the work and polishing the result while agents handle implementation.
Concrete examples include illo's character packs for consistent illustrations and Compound Engineering's reviews across model families. Trevin explains why newer models call for clearer goals and fewer prescribed steps, while extensive evaluations, changing model behavior, and outdated plugins make maintenance costly.
The conversation also covers the supervised Hermes Agent setup Trevin built for his daughter, including boundaries around companionship and homework help. It closes with Jev-powered prototypes and Energon, his open source service for sharing documents and files across agents without losing control of the underlying context.
Chapters
- (00:00) - Product optimism and the changing craft of software
- (09:53) - Design exploration with AI agents
- (14:24) - Start with the value proposition, then explore designs
- (21:21) - Agent primitives and the problem of sharing context
- (24:54) - Cross-model review and the AI sandwich
- (32:19) - illo and consistent character illustrations
- (40:08) - Writing skills for changing models
- (43:03) - Evaluations, model regressions, and maintenance costs
- (47:36) - Future skills and the plugin update problem
- (52:13) - A supervised Hermes Agent for a child
- (01:02:41) - Jev experiments in document analysis and book discovery
- (01:06:54) - Energon and context that travels between agents
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Links from the show
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- Compound Engineering
- illo
- Energon
- Hermes Agent
- Impeccable
- Jev
- Grok bot
- Muse
- Claude Code
- Codex
- Cursor
- Cloudflare Workers
- CleanShot X
- Figma
- Daniel Lemire
- simdjson
- design system
- risograph
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Guests
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Trevin Chow, Product Leader and Builder
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