Building agents taught me more about product design than coding ever did

I’ve spent years writing code, but it wasn’t until I started building AI agents that I really started to understand product design at a deeper level. Curious to see if anyone experienced something similar.

When you build an agent, you're not just writing functions—you're designing a system that needs to reason, act, recover from failure, and deliver value to the end user, often without direct supervision. You start thinking about edge cases, decision-making paths, fallback logic, and how to design interfaces that help the agent and the user stay on track.

I’ve been using tools like Sim Studio lately, which sit in that sweet spot between code and low-code. It’s helped me focus less on boilerplate and more on how the agent interacts with real-world tools, how users will experience outcomes, and how to make systems that are actually resilient and usable.

Building agents forces you to think like a systems designer. You’re considering trust, transparency, autonomy levels, and failure modes—things I rarely thought about when writing isolated code. Curious if anyone else has had a similar experience. How do you guys think about building agents and shaping product design?