Determined Agency Design.
A practice for letting AI-generated material live alongside user-guiding content — without one cannibalizing the other.
Most product teams treat AI-generated content as a feature you turn on. Suggested replies. Auto-summarization. Smart compose. The interface gets a sparkle icon and a button that says “Generate.”
That works for one kind of product. It quietly fails for another. Specifically: it fails for any product where the user’s own deliberate input is the thing that gives the product its legitimacy.
Determined Agency Design is a small framework for navigating that tension. It has three rules:
- Be explicit about authorship. AI-generated content needs a visible, persistent marker. Not a sparkle. Not a tooltip. A label that survives copy-paste, screenshot, and sharing.
- Default to user-guided, escalate to AI-generated. The first state should be the user’s own content. AI assistance is a deliberate, opt-in second state — not a preselected default that the user can opt out of.
- Maintain the through-line of intent. Even when AI generates the words, the user must remain the author of the decision. Generated drafts are a starting point, not a substitute for the work of choosing.
[Full essay coming. Email dscholz249@gmail.com if you’d like to discuss the framework before then.]