Designing Software Behavior in the Age of AI
A digital book for builders learning to shape the behavioral system behind the interface: what it notices, remembers, suggests, automates, explains, coordinates, withholds, recovers from, and hands back.
Interface
Copy, layout, buttons, forms, feedback, and the visible promise of the product.
What changed, and what stays true now?
What should the product remember or forget?
Who can act, see, approve, or override?
When should the system interrupt, wait, or hand back?
How certain is the system before it acts?
Which tools, people, and steps are coordinated?
What happens when the system is wrong?
What must be explained instead of hidden?
The book teaches you to design the behavioral system behind the interface.
This is for the builder who reads the system through the screen.
You can see the product decision inside a workflow before anyone names it.
You care about what the system should notice, remember, refuse, and recover from.
You care about the screen because it reveals what the system permits.
Six stages. Fourteen chapters. A path the reader earns one stage at a time.
The book is built as an emotional arc, not a flat list. Each stage earns the next. Land in the stage you’re standing in, or read from recognition through commitment.
The book becomes useful when its ideas become instruments.
The Product Beneath the Interface
The book's defining lens. Names the system layers that shape what the visible UI can honestly express.
Negotiated Software Loop
Describes the new contract between user and machine in probabilistic systems: intent, interpretation, suggestion, review, correction, adaptation.
Behavior Design Questions
A working list of questions to ask when designing behavior rather than interaction.
The Trust Stack
Names the structural materials of trust in intelligent systems, from expressive at the top to foundational at the bottom.
Workflow Authorship Canvas
A canvas for redesigning a workflow rather than wrapping it in better UI.
Authorship Practice
The six commitments that constitute the practice of product authorship over time: standards, point of view, taste, responsibility, consistency, reflection.
A complete reading path, with a private record of what changes as you move through it.
Read linearly when you want the full argument. Return through the Workbook for the reflections you have saved. Carry the Field Kit when the work moves outside the chapter.