How To Design In The Agent Era

Paper renders designs with HTML and CSS, which Haney says agents already understand. That lets people use the canvas to work directly with agents, while keeping code as a shared source of truth for design and development.

Paper combines tools for shaders, image generation, color extraction, and live-site editing. Haney and the host demonstrate generating layout variations, then improving them with simpler typography, fewer font sizes, lighter weights, and clearer contrast. Haney describes the tool as human-centered, with agents speeding up work while designers make the final choices.

Because Paper frames are code, users can copy them as React or Tailwind, or ask an agent to build a selection into a codebase. Haney says teams can use the same code for design and implementation instead of maintaining separate design-system copies. Paper also supports bringing live-site sections into the canvas for editing.

Reviewing three submitted sites, Haney and the host point out issues such as heavy type, too many font sizes, generic cards, and unclear value propositions. For a healthcare site, they say fit and finish affects trust; for a payments site, credibility matters especially. They recommend removing decorative elements that do not communicate useful information.

Haney expects agents to improve at visual details, but says design also involves human decisions about problems, requirements, and stakeholders. Paper uses coding agents internally, while its small team reviews code closely because the product needs precise, fast interactions. Haney also emphasizes talking with users daily and prioritizing the company’s current bottleneck.