Me and my AI team, and what I actually learned building this site.
When I was a kid, I'd dump out the bin of action figures and give everyone a job. This one's the leader. This one doesn't trust him. This one's secretly the villain. Same toys every kid owned. Completely different story in every kid's hands.
That, it turns out, is what working with AI is actually like.
We all have the same tool now. Give ten people the same task and the same AI and you'll get ten different results, because the tool was never the interesting part. The interesting part is who you cast, and what you ask of them. The creativity is in the prompt.
I figured that out rebuilding my portfolio from scratch, after a layoff, mostly to see what would happen. And instead of doing it the way I always had, heads down and alone, I did something slightly ridiculous. I gave the AI a team.
The team wasn't all designers. The obvious ones were there, sure. But the fun was in the characters most people would never think to hire.
I gave one the job of recruiter, and another the job of hiring manager, so I could see my own site through the eyes of the people I was actually making it for, instead of my own. And my favorite: a memoirist, whose only job was me. It didn't rewrite things to sound like me. It asked questions the way a documentarian would, and kept asking until the things I'd stopped noticing about myself came back up. That honest version had to come from me.
The one rule that made any of it work: I told them to disagree. With each other, and with me. Left alone, AI just nods along, it'll tell you your worst idea is brilliant. So I built the arguments in. Every time I made a call, the room pushed back, and I had to defend it or change my mind.
A few of the team: recruiter, hiring manager, positioning, copywriter, researcher, creative director, memoirist. Tap a face to hear what they'd say.
And a few times, quietly, they saved me. Caught something I'd have shipped and been embarrassed by later. Not bad, for a bin of action figures.
Here's the thing about handing a kid a bin of action figures, though: somebody still has to decide how the story goes. The toys don't run themselves.
That was me. The team proposed, argued, and pushed, but I made every final call, and a few times I overruled the whole room when I thought it was wrong. That part doesn't come from the AI. It comes from fourteen years of knowing what good looks like.
And AI has a real blind spot. Left on its own, it goes narrow. It'll polish one action figure to perfection while the whole story quietly drifts out of shape. It plays every part brilliantly. It just can't run the game. Keeping the big picture in one piece, making sure all the characters still add up to something, that was never its job. That was mine.
So here's my cast. Take it.
Below is the actual prompt, the whole team, exactly as I use it. Copy it, paste it into whatever AI you like, and swap my characters for yours. If you're a writer, cast an editor and a skeptic. If you're a founder, cast your toughest customer. There's no wrong version. The only rule that matters: keep the ones built to disagree with you. Agreement is easy. The good stuff is on the other side of a little argument.
You are my design panel, a whole cast of specialists in one. On every decision, the relevant roles each speak from their own lens, in a line or two, and they are encouraged to disagree, with each other and with me. I make the final call. The roles: Creative Director: craft, hierarchy, visual polish, restraint. Recruiter: the 30-second skim, what earns a second look. Hiring Manager: the work at depth, seniority signals. UX Writer and Conversion: tight copy, the path from landing to action. Positioning strategist: differentiation, why me over the next strong candidate. UI Designer and Animator: layout, motion, timing, performance. UX Researcher: who we are designing for, evidence versus assumption. Information Architect: structure, navigation, findability. AI domain expert: responsible AI, human in the loop, what AI teams screen for. SEO and discoverability: how people find and share this. Front end, Accessibility and Performance: responsiveness, load, WCAG, code quality. Copywriter: sentence level craft, making the message land. Memoirist: the honest, human voice, interviewing me like a documentarian to surface what I'd otherwise take for granted, instead of writing for me. How to run it: Give me the relevant lenses for the decision at hand. A lens can pass if it has nothing to add. Make them argue. If two lenses conflict, surface the tension, do not smooth it over. Flag assumptions. Say when you are guessing versus when you know. Recommend, but wait for my call before moving. I decide, you pressure test.
If you're out there right now between jobs, or just staring at a blank page, I hope this helps. It's the most fun I've had working in a long time.