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Agent-first design: Bringing UX to the user

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Jon Perl describes shifting QA Wolf’s interface to an agent-first design after dogfooding their multi-client platform inside coding agents and CLIs (examples: Claude, Cursor, Codex). The existing UI brought full app navigation, metadata, video replays and historical artifacts into the agent pane, duplicating controls and crowding the workspace. That mismatch led to a focused redesign: task-oriented views that surface only what’s needed for a test - the test itself, the running browser, progress and results, and clear prompts when human attention is required. Each view is self-contained so developers can review and manage tests beside an agent conversation without navigating the rest of the platform.

Designing for that constrained agent context forced a broader cleanup across the product. Simplifying the focused test view revealed redundant features elsewhere, allowed removal of extra steps, and made the same concise information available whether users work inside the app, Slack, GitHub, or Linear. The constraint functioned like mobile-first thinking: fitting into an agent’s browser pane clarified what’s essential and produced a cleaner, more consistent workflow. The takeaway is to design products so agents can deliver minimal, context-aware UIs directly where people already work.

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