A designer’s agent-built fix for sideways card photos, the thumbnail choice that refused to pretend, and the gap between fixing something and finishing it.
Photos of insurance cards come into a mental health practice every way but upright. Clients take them on a kitchen counter, sideways or upside down, and until now a clinician who needed to read one had to download it, rotate it on their computer, and upload it again. One of the designers on our billing side fixed that this month, end to end, with an AI coding agent: a preview that opens from the thumbnail, with a rotate control. He walked me through it in our biweekly 1:1, and 3 of his decisions are worth sharing because they apply to any small fix.
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The thumbnail doesn’t pretend. The first version doesn’t save the rotation yet, so when you close the preview, the thumbnail goes back to the way it was uploaded. He did that on purpose, because he didn’t want anyone walking away believing the change had been saved. It would have been easy to rotate the thumbnail too and let it look finished. When saving ships, the thumbnail can dim, rotate, and refresh in its new orientation, so the change on screen matches the change underneath. It’s the same promise a loading state makes (I wrote about that in Issue 23): the UI should only say what the system has done.
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Rotate left, and only left. He borrowed the control from Apple Photos and Preview, which only offer rotate left, and he checked it against how people hold their phones when they take a picture. He also caught that on the last turn his animation spun 270 degrees to the right instead of 90 to the left, and he fixed it before anyone else noticed. Nobody would have filed a ticket for that, and it’s still the kind of detail that makes something feel cared for.
You fixed something that was not great and made it good. Great is when the whole job happens where the person already is.
- He pushed back on me, and he had a point. I asked whether the rotate control could live right in the panel next to the thumbnail, so there’s no extra tap to open the preview. His answer was that clicking the thumbnail is what people already do, so it meets them where they are, and the larger view helps anyone who has trouble reading a small image. Both things can be true, and the next version will probably carry a little of each.
Then I told him the thing I’d tell anyone shipping with agents right now. He fixed something that was not great, and he made it good. Getting to great is everything we talked about after: the whole job happening in the panel the clinician already has open, without turning that panel into Photoshop. That’s the level of control I think clinicians are yearning for across everything we build.
When a fix like this took a sprint, getting to good was worth celebrating on its own. When it takes an afternoon, good is closer to a first draft, and the next version is also a chance to learn how far the agent can go. Tell it how the images are stored and where they live, and let it look for the tools that already exist. He added the counterweight himself, and it’s the right one: once a feature can overwrite someone’s files, the scrutiny it deserves goes up, not down. So push further, and review harder as you do.