When and why prototyping is still needed when working with AI agents
My recent experience is that prototyping is needed when designing multi-step workflows with more than 20 screens. Let me recap what didn't work, and what did work. The context: Emm is a local first notes manager and issue tracker for agents and humans.
- ▪My recent experience is that prototyping is needed when designing multi-step workflows with more than 20 screens.
- ▪Let me recap what didn't work, and what did work.
- ▪The context: Emm is a local first notes manager and issue tracker for agents and humans.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Emm |
| Canonical URL | https://emmflow.com/blog/when-and-why-prototyping-is-still-needed-when-working-with-ai-agents |
| Publication time | Wed, 07 Oct 2026 23:27:47 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-07T23:43:14.294Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-07T23:43:14.294Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | CY8ze7VjaSVj · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
My recent experience is that prototyping is needed when designing multi-step workflows with more than 20 screens. Let me recap what didn't work, and what did work. The context: Emm is a local first notes manager and issue tracker for agents and humans. It's important to me that users can start building with local agents without ever connecting to the cloud. This creates complexity. A project exists prior to it being backed up in my cloud. Additionally, a user might have many projects. When they sync to Emm's server, they need a signed-in user. The user might want to change the signed in user. And, on top of all of this: as an young company, first time user experience is existentially important. First try: trust the agent to design a workflow This was a disaster.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Emm.
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