Teaching AI to remember how our team designs

What if one designer's good decision made every designer better?

We were a handful of product designers with more government modules than time. Everyone was already using AI, and everyone was using it differently. I wanted it to make the whole team faster without every designer drifting into their own style.

Problem: our AI forgot everything, every single brief.

Each new brief started from zero. The AI didn't know our design system, the ministry's rules or what we decided last week, so every designer re-explained it in their own words and got back their own version of the answer.

Opportunity: our edge isn't a better model. It's a shared memory.

Every team has access to the same AI models. What only we have is our own history: the decisions, the patterns that already passed review, the rules each ministry cares about. If the AI could keep that, and keep it for everyone, it would get better every time anyone used it.

Introducing the INA Digital Design Agent: one design partner, one shared brain.

Any designer opens it and types ina digital agent. It takes a brief all the way to flows, hi-fi screens in Figma built from genuine IDDS components, and a handoff for developers. And it remembers everything for the next person.

We looked hard at how our team actually works

Before building, I mapped where AI was helping and where it was quietly hurting: how each designer prompted, where decisions got lost between sessions, which patterns kept being redrawn. Then I wrote the findings into the agent itself, as specs, conventions and a pattern index.

Inside the shared brain

The first version only worked for me.

The brain was strong, but its opening assumed you were me, resuming a project I already knew. A teammate walking up cold got no greeting, no sense of what the agent held and no obvious way to start. So I designed a proper front door.

One brain, two layers, and skills on top

The org layer holds what every squad shares: the IDDS design language, the project registry and the pattern index. Each project keeps its own context, memory, findings, decisions and open questions. Craft lives in skills anyone can call by name, and when someone sharpens a skill, everyone gets the better version.

A brain that reads everything is too slow to be useful.

As the brain grew, just saying hello got expensive. Reading it to greet someone cost about 24,000 tokens every session. So we had to ask:

Now it's how the team designs, every day.