Forge: a per-designer AI tutor

How I got here

I run our design team's AI-builder program. The goal is easy to say and hard to do: every product designer able to read, change, and ship real code. Most of the team started with no coding background.

Live sessions got us moving, but they exposed a structural problem. One room, one pace. Some people were already building; others were still nervous about opening a terminal. I kept teaching to the middle, over-scoping, then watching half the room either coast or drown. And the whole thing ran through me: if I didn't prep and stand at the front, learning stopped. Miss a week and you were lost.

The people who actually broke through all did the same thing: they had a real task in front of them and taught themselves against it, at their own speed. I couldn't be that for a whole room at once. So the question became: what could?

How I thought about it

I didn't want another dump of course links or a group chat. Those don't meet a person where they are. What each designer needed was closer to a patient tutor sitting next to them, one that knew exactly where they were in the curriculum, what to hand them next, and could explain any dev concept in language a designer already owns.

Three requirements fell out of that:

• Per-person. It tracks your role, your pace, and the week you're actually on, not the room's average.
• Curriculum-aware. It holds the whole plan, so "what's next" is a real answer, not a guess.
• Speaks design. A designer doesn't need "a pull request" explained in engineering terms; they need "a PR is a design review for code." Every unfamiliar word gets translated into something from their world.

I also wanted it to remove me as the bottleneck, something a designer could open on a Tuesday morning without me in the room, and something that let anyone who missed a week prompt their way back in.

What I'm building

Forge is a custom Gem, the same build pattern we teach in the program: a system prompt holding the rules, over a knowledge base holding the content.

The knowledge base is the curriculum: every week, the resources for it, and what a designer can do by the end of each stage. That's the curriculum-awareness: Forge always knows the whole map, so it can place you on it.

The system prompt is where the pacing and the voice live. It tracks where each designer is and answers the everyday questions ("what should I do this week?", "I'm stuck on X", "I'm done, what's next?") with the right task, a time estimate, and a progress line so you can see how far you've come. And it runs one hard rule: no unexplained jargon. Behind it sits an analogy dictionary: dozens of dev terms each mapped to its design equivalent, so Git, deploys, auth and the rest arrive as things a designer already understands.

photo drops here

photo drops here

Where it stands

Honestly: built as a working v2, not yet rolled out. The Gem exists and does what's above.

Two things are still open. The curriculum underneath it just got re-scoped, from a long, branching plan down to one shared track to production, and Forge still carries the older, longer version, so it needs a rewrite to match. And it's deliberately been held back from the team until we reach the self-paced phase of the program, where a per-designer tutor is the thing that lets people move without me at the front.

So this is a real build with a real job still ahead of it: the mechanism meant to turn a facilitator-led program into one that scales past the facilitator. I'd rather show it honestly at that stage than dress it up as finished.