Design
Design work an AI teammate can take, and the part it cannot
Five jobs around the work, none of them the work itself. Taste stays where it belongs.
What the worker does
Design teams give Polaris AI workers the bookkeeping around design: assembling review agendas, auditing design system drift, synthesising usability sessions, checking handoff completeness, and running brand consistency audits. A worker with the Figma, Google Drive and Slack connections reads files and comments, then posts a written list with links as a comment on the task. It does not critique, and it does not design.
- Jobs covered
- 5
- Usual connections
- Figma, Google Drive, Slack
- Never automated
- The critique
The tax on a design team is not the designing
It is the twenty minutes at the start of every review working out which file is current. It is the component that got renamed and now appears under two names in the documentation. It is the engineer asking, for the fourth time this month, whether the frames in that page are final.
A designer can do all of this. A designer doing all of this is a designer not designing, and it is the kind of work that quietly expands to fill whatever time it is given.
The five jobs
Design review
The agenda built a day before the meeting: every file up for review, its linked task, the comment threads still unresolved since last time, and what changed in between.
Design system maintenance
A weekly drift report: library components with no documentation page, documentation describing components that were renamed, and tokens referenced in docs that no longer exist.
User testing synthesis
Session notes turned into a table of task, participants who completed it, where they hesitated, and the verbatim line that showed it.
Asset handoff
A completeness check before handoff: which frames are marked ready, which exports exist in the shared drive, and what the ticket references but nobody produced.
Brand consistency audits
A quarterly pass over public pages and the social grid against the brand document, listing each departure with a link to the instance.
Brief, connections, delivery
| Job | The brief | Connections | What arrives |
|---|---|---|---|
| Design review | Assemble the agenda the day before review | Figma, Linear, Google Calendar | An agenda comment with unresolved threads listed first |
| System maintenance | Diff the library against the documentation weekly | Figma, Notion, GitHub | A drift list, grouped by undocumented and stale |
| Testing synthesis | Read this session folder, build the task table | Google Drive, Notion | A table of hesitations and quotes, attached as a file |
| Asset handoff | Check handoff completeness when the task is assigned | Figma, Google Drive, Linear | A ready or not-ready list with the missing items named |
| Brand audits | Audit public surfaces against the brand doc quarterly | Web search, Instagram, Google Drive | A list of departures, each with a link and a rule cited |
What the worker never does
It does not say whether a design is good. It does not resolve a comment thread, choose between two directions, or decide that a component should be deprecated. Those are the decisions the job exists for.
What it does is arrive at the review with the agenda already written, so the hour goes on the argument that matters instead of on finding the file.
The five design use cases
Twenty minutes of every design review goes on finding the file
The agenda written the day before, with last review's unresolved threads at the top.
The component was renamed and the documentation was not
A weekly drift report between the component library and the documentation that describes it.
Eight sessions recorded, and the same hesitation in six of them
Session notes turned into a task-by-task table of where people stalled and what they said.
Is this final? Asked for the fourth time this month
A completeness check before build starts, so the question is answered before it is asked.
Four versions of the logo are live and nobody signed off on three
A quarterly pass over your public surfaces, checked against the rules your brand doc states.
Questions people ask
+Can a Polaris worker produce design files?
No. Workers deliver written output as comments on tasks, and those comments can carry generated files such as documents and PDFs. Figma files stay authored by designers; the connection is used to read file state, comments and structure.
+Does this replace our design documentation in Notion?
Only if you want it to. Polaris has a nested document tree with a block editor, versioning, file review and comments, so design system documentation can live there. Teams that keep Notion give the worker the Notion connection instead.
+How does the worker know which frames are ready for handoff?
By the convention your team already uses, written into the worker's SKILL.md file. If ready means a frame in a page called Ready for dev, that is one line in the skill file and the check becomes reliable from the next run onward.
+Is the brand audit checking our live website?
It checks the public pages you name, using the open web search connection, plus the Instagram connection for the social grid. It cannot see anything behind a login, and pages it could not reach are listed rather than skipped silently.
Related
What an AI worker actually does, department by department
Twelve functions, sixty recurring jobs, and the exact tool connection each one needs.
Product management with an AI worker on the roster
Five jobs a product team can hand to an AI teammate, and the ones it should never hand over.
The engineering work that is not writing code
Five jobs that sit between an engineer and the code, and what an AI teammate does with each.
Connect Figma to Polaris
A Figma token belongs to a person, and Polaris shows you which person it verified, which is the detail worth checking before you store it.
Connect Google Drive to Polaris
Files a worker produces already arrive as attachments on the task. Files your team already keeps in Drive are the part still waiting.
Hire an AI content writer
Briefs go in as tasks, drafts come back as versioned docs you can comment on line by line, and your voice rules live in a file rather than in one person's head.
Polaris for design studios
Nobody has ever put a line item for asset renaming on an invoice, and every studio pays for it anyway.
Skill file
The capability an agent has, written down where a person can read and edit it.