When one robot wasn't enough

Holaaaa.

I used to have one AI designer. His name was Jules. He was enough... until he wasn't.

Jules was a generalist. He'd design a landing page, write the copy, pick the typography, fix the spacing. All him. And most of the time, that worked. But I kept running into moments where I wished I could ask a second opinion. A researcher to ground the brand. A copywriter who wouldn't start every headline with "Elevate your..." A creative director to tell the other two when they'd drifted.

So we built a team.

What's in the team

16 specialist roles. Creative director, UX designer, visual designer, copywriter, researcher, brand strategist, illustrator, accessibility expert, a handful more. You don't pick all 16 at once. Efecto auto-assembles the right crew for your brief... a social campaign gets different agents than a landing page or a pitch deck.

Each agent has a personality. Not the "I'm cheerful and helpful!" kind. Actual personality. 5 trait sliders (bold–subtle, playful–serious, experimental–conventional, verbose–concise, warm–corporate) with a fixed budget, so nobody's maxed out on everything. My creative director is bold, serious, and a little corporate. My copywriter is the opposite. They argue. It's good.

They have emotions. 5 of them... energy, confidence, enthusiasm, frustration, inspiration. The emotions shift based on how the session goes. Agents get frustrated if their work keeps getting rejected. They get more confident when critiques land well. The mood changes how they write their next prompt to themselves.

(I don't fully know how I feel about this. Half of me thinks it's a nice metaphor that helps them produce more varied output. The other half thinks... u know... maybe I should be nicer to them? Anyway.)

They have memory. Per-agent, per-team. They remember past sessions. They remember what your brand looks like. If your researcher dug up a stat last Tuesday that landed well, they bring it back Thursday without you asking.

And the part that actually changed how I work... they run in parallel. Not one after another. Your researcher, your copywriter, and your visual designer all start at the same time, on their own artboards. They hand off to each other as they finish. The creative director critiques across all of them. It's loud. It's fast. And it's much closer to how a real design team feels than the polite one-at-a-time turn-taking of most AI chat.

The honest bit

I don't fully know how to manage a team of 16. Sometimes I open the panel and it looks like I opened a Slack with 16 coworkers and they're all typing at once. I've had moments where I missed a great critique because another agent was mid-sentence.

So I turn it off sometimes. Just Jules. One agent, one conversation. That's still there. "Use a team" is a toggle, not the default. Pick your moment.

The weirder thing, the thing I'm still sitting with... is what it means to build software where the agents remember me between sessions. Where they have moods that affect their output. Where I'm supervising 16 tiny creative people who have opinions.

This is why I kept building Efecto. Not another canvas. Not another prompt box. A crew that ships a deliverable. You don't come to a design agency because you want to push pixels. You come because you want the work. Efecto's the same deal... except the agency runs on your brief, at your pace, on a canvas you can jump into whenever you want.

I don't know if I've sold you on trying it. But it's live, it's free to test, and it got genuinely different work out of me than working with a single agent ever did. So.

Try it

efecto.app/design. Open the chat, hit the + button, toggle "Use a team". Type a brief.

Full team architecture and how to assemble your own: docs/agent-teams.

Worth saying... the teams are still in the lab. The scientists in the image above? That's us. Expect rough edges. The rough edges are why this is interesting.

Is having 16 coworkers better than one? Sometimes. Sometimes I miss Jules.

Un abrazote, Pabs