Last quarter I ran a design thinking sprint on an AI agent project discover why prompts are code now in my Claude Opus playbook. Three weeks in, the only thing I’d produced was a wall of Post-it notes, two empathy maps, and a definition statement nobody on the engineering team could repeat read the post that changed how I write about tech. The agent itself had not moved one line of code forward.
Then I threw out 80% of the framework and kept the 20% that actually shipped the project.
Design thinking, stripped of consultant-speak, is a debugging loop for the gap between “what we think the user needs” and “what the user actually needs.” Most of what gets taught in corporate workshops is theater. The 20% that matters is something engineers have been doing for decades under a different name. They called it “writing tests against user behavior” or “asking the customer before shipping.”
This post is the 20%.
