Sean Patrick Coon, Viability Designer

I work within ecosystems of possibility, moving between human goals, the price they demand, and the solutions that might fulfill them. Design is how I whittle my way toward viability. When the solution includes an agent, the design is in its judgment: the context it works from, the tools it can reach, what it leaves to a person, and the evals that show it chose well.

Principles

1. 01 / AGENTS

   Design the conditions, not the prompt.

   A prompt is the smallest part of an agent’s judgment. The rest comes from what surrounds it, so I read what the agent actually did, trace where a decision went wrong, and fix the conditions behind it. Each failure becomes a new eval.

2. 02 / PERSPECTIVE

   A solution has to hold up at every altitude.

   I move between human needs, market forces, business realities, and interaction details. What makes sense from one vantage point can fall apart from another, revealing assumptions worth questioning.

3. 03 / INQUIRY

   A problem space has no fixed boundaries.

   I explore what’s known, what’s assumed, and what hasn’t yet been considered. The work often changes shape as relationships emerge and new possibilities come into view.

4. 04 / PURPOSE

   Complexity belongs to the system.

   People have things to get done. I build tools that help them work quickly and well at a fair cost, without forcing them to shoulder complexity the system should handle.

5. 05 / SYSTEMS THINKING

   Every solution rearranges the problem.

   I look beyond what a change fixes to understand what it sets in motion. The tradeoffs become the solution, and the consequences inform what comes next.

6. 06 / TECHNOLOGY

   The material changes; the discipline doesn’t.

   I start with human goals, context, and scenarios to understand what a product needs to do. That interaction design work is just as essential when shaping how agents behave.