Thread AI
Founding Product Designer
- AI
- Agentic
- Workflow
- Builder
- Orchestration
- Enterprise
- 3May 2023 to Aug 2026
- 18supported as sole designer
- 2shipped through both
- 1the first one hired
Problem
Agent systems are non-deterministic, so the work they do is hard to see and harder to trust. As the first designer, the job was to make that behavior legible to the operators running it, not just to the engineers who built it.
Approach
- Designed the primitives, the canvas interaction model, and the mental models that make non-deterministic agent systems legible, inspectable, and trustworthy to operators.
- Shipped production front-end code, owning components in the codebase and opening PRs directly rather than handing off specs, which removes a translation layer between design intent and what users get.
- Built and maintained the design system and token architecture as a single source of truth spanning Figma and code, and designed the brand from scratch across product, marketing site, commercial assets, and documentation.
Outcome
Took Lemma, Thread AI's platform, from zero to product: its surfaces, the underlying design system, and the company's visual identity, as the only designer through 18 engineers and two funding rounds.
The canvas
Worker Builder is where an operator composes an agent workflow and watches it run. The interaction model came first: a graph readable at a glance, the library on one side, configuration on the other, and test runs streaming underneath, so a change and its consequence stay on the same screen.
Making a run legible
Agent systems are non-deterministic, so trust has to be designed rather than assumed. Configuration sits beside the node it belongs to instead of behind a modal, and every run leaves an inspectable trace. The wireframe underneath is how much structure that legibility actually costs.
The primitives
Under the canvas sits a small vocabulary: call, switch, parallel, handoff, wait, loop. Each primitive carries its own inline controls, so whatever you want to do to a node is on the node. Get that vocabulary right and complex orchestration composes out of parts an operator already understands.
The system underneath
Every surface above draws on one library, maintained as a single source of truth spanning Figma and code. I owned those components in the codebase and opened PRs directly rather than handing off specs, which takes out the translation layer between design intent and what users actually get.
Brand, out of the same tokens
Tokens are where the design system and the brand meet. One palette, defined once and themed across light and dark, then carried out of the product into the marketing site, commercial assets, and documentation.
The exploration behind it
The prototypes these surfaces came out of are still drivable: the node canvas, the function registry, worker states, the API editor, and the rest of the run. They are exploration rather than shipped product.
Thread AI Playground
The design exploration behind the AI workflow builder — the node canvas, function registry, worker states, and more.
Available for select product design work.
If the problem in one of these looks like yours, I would like to hear about it.