I have directed film sets for years. Last night I directed a website the same way, and I never wrote a prompt. On a set you do not operate the camera. You watch the frame and call what it needs. Slower. Dirtier. Again. The crew has the hands. You have the eye. I ran a build the exact same way. A live page open on screen, an agent holding the hands, and me reacting out loud to what moved in front of me. One change. Watch it land. Call the next. DIRECT THE SCREEN, DON'T PROMPT THE MODEL. A prompt is a memo. You write the whole brief, fire it off, and hope what comes back is what you felt. Directing inverts it. You give one small note against a live render, you see it land the instant it changes, and the screen hands you the next note. What came out of it: a wall of twelve CRT monitors, each playing a showreel at a different second, scanlines and flicker and a teal glow. "Make the cursor knock the screens." Now a mouse sweep tears the signal, splits the colour, sometimes cuts a screen to black static, then it recovers on its own. "Dirtier." A pink and teal spark cracks at the pointer. A custom glitch typeface on the headline. None of it was written down up front. It emerged, note by note. This is not magic. Nothing builds itself. An agent built each change, I reviewed every frame, and I called every move. The taste was mine. The hands were not. The loop, if you want to run it: 1. Stand it up live and look. "Warmer" needs something to be warmer than. 2. One move per round, so your reaction maps to one cause, not five. 3. Make every value a named dial. Steer by feel, not by editing code. 4. The agent proves its own edit compiled before it says done. You stay free to just watch. 5. When a look locks, save it. The final dial values are your design system. The skill that runs this loop is open source. Take it: https://github.com/Pushing-Squares/art-direct Here is the part that stuck. You cannot write a feel down. A brief is a guess at an aesthetic you have not seen yet. The eye only knows once the live thing is moving in front of it. So stop trying to specify the feel. Build a loop fast enough to react inside.

It's starting to all make sense! I'm getting more comfortable with Claude in VS Code, and things are finally beginning to click. At the same time, I've realized I don't know a damn thing about CMD/terminal prompting yet. 😂 The more I learn, the further backwards I seem to go. But I'm starting to understand what Clief means about learning from the past—everything feels a lot more connected now. It's been quite the journey. Hope everyone's doing well! ❤️