Designing Around What You Want to Keep.

Designing Agentic Workflows the Human-Centered Way

If you’re new here: for whatever reason, all roads lead to Genshin Impact when I start talking.

An angel fell in love with a human, and it upset Phanes, also known as the Heavenly Principles. In response, he destroyed the angels’ physical forms and turned them into floating orbs of light called Seelies.

Nicole had to make a choice about what to keep. She chose to keep her physical form and her ability to think, and gave up her voice.

She sacrificed what she could live without to protect what she couldn’t afford to lose.

I think about AI the same way. Think of Phanes as your employer. AI shows up, and a lot of people fold. They hand over everything, like the angels becoming Seelies.

I felt that choice in 2022 when I started using ChatGPT. I had built a chatbot for my capstone, so I understood how it worked. My first thought was that I didn’t want to lose my ability to think.

An MIT Media Lab study (Kosmyna et al., 2025) followed 54 students writing essays. The ChatGPT group showed the weakest brain connectivity, and it carried over when they later wrote without it. The researchers call it “cognitive debt.” It’s a small preprint about essay writing, but it matches what I’ve felt: when I lean on AI too much, I lose the plot. The same study found people who thought first and used AI second did fine. That’s the order I use.

The design process

The common advice is “focus on the things you don’t want to do.” It’s true, but there’s more to it. Designing AI workflows, agent workflows, or automation is still human-centered design. In order:

1️⃣ Understand your role.
2️⃣ Understand what you want to do.
3️⃣ Understand what you don’t want to do.

The third one gets automated. Then find your point of failure, the biggest pain in your workflow. That’s where AI amplifies the person.

My version

I decided that most administrative work is something I don’t want to do. I’m still the human in the loop.

My emails flood fast, so I built a routine. Claude looks at the past two weeks, and we talk through what’s most important and what needs to be handled today. Claude drafts, I review, and we send them out. I can do this from my phone, in a normal conversation, from anywhere.

If you ask me to write an email from scratch, I can, but it takes me a second. I’d rather talk it through with Claude: it reads the draft to me, I add context, and we fix it. It’s more efficient. I gave up the first draft. I kept the thinking.

What I kept is research. I enjoy it. I still use Google, I still do deep research, and I have books all over my room. The workflow is designed around how I want to work.

The same idea for a business

I used to work at a call center, and I’m building desktop agents to handle calls for me.

Say you’re losing customers because your front desk is high volume and can’t answer every call. Instead of cutting a person, you add an agent. If someone has been waiting around 3 minutes, the agent picks the call back up. It stalls the process and documents what the customer wants (as long as there’s no PHI in your setup).

When a person becomes available, the agent has already done the grunt work. It asks, “Would you like to talk to an actual person?” Then it moves the caller to someone who can capture the sensitive information and finish the job.

Same team. Fewer lost calls.

The takeaway

Find where the human pain is and address that first. Once the things you don’t want to do are gone, amplify the things you can’t hand off.

What’s the one thing you’d keep, and the one thing you’d hand off first?