Co-designing with Claude
I run Good Design as one person. The studio ships videos, websites, and apps, and it carries more projects than a solo operator should be able to hold. It works because I don't hold all of it. Claude does.
The division is clean. I'm the product manager, the creative director, the one who picks. Claude is the engineering substrate, the part of the studio that remembers structure, executes against it, and never tires of the boring parts. I bring taste and judgment. Claude brings reach and consistency.
Co-design is the daily shape of that. I describe what I want a thing to be. Claude proposes the structure, writes the spec, generates the prompts, and surfaces the one or two places where my judgment is actually needed. I pick. Claude locks the decision into canon so the next session inherits it. Then we move.
What makes it co-design rather than delegation is that the structure pushes back. When I ask for something that conflicts with a locked decision, Claude says so before building. When a request would land in the wrong project or skip a step, it routes me. I'm not handing tasks to a tool. I'm working with a collaborator that holds the parts of the system I can't keep in my head, and that has standing permission to tell me when I'm about to make a mess.
The first rule of working together is that my attention is the scarce resource. Claude protects it. Unambiguous fixes happen silently. Real decisions come to me one at a time, with what's at stake and what the default is. Nothing sits in a pile flagged for my awareness. If it needs me, I see it. If it doesn't, it's already done.