Agents say it looks fine. I can see it doesn't.
A coding agent’s own check on its UI work doesn’t replace one second of me looking at the screen. It runs the screenshot loop, it verifies, and the thing is still wrong in ways a test would never catch. So I stopped asking it to verify. I look, write down what I see as a numbered list, and send that.
The drawer needed a drawing
The example is the page for my Mies design skill. There’s a picture in a wooden frame. Click it and a drawer opens to the right of the picture, with the content inside. The frame gets a slow, subtle glare every so often, just enough to hint that you can hover it, and a warm tooltip follows the mouse with a little lag.
The agent was busy verifying everything it built. I was looking at the white fringe the background removal left on the Mies image, and I wanted it darker so it wouldn’t show. I told it early on: “stop verifying im verifiying myself its fine”.
The drawer still didn’t work. The agent hadn’t understood the shape: the image is the top of a drawer, and the inner part is where the content lives. It only landed when I drew it in ASCII. Then came the first four fixes. Image and frame the same width as Mies so the drawer gets more room, glare less often, smaller tooltip, tooltip stays until you leave the image.
Four items, all visual
The next round was bad. Four items, and every one of them is something you only see by looking:
- A thin line between the frame and the drawer on hover.
- The arrow should be small, exactly centered both ways, and barely visible, same color as the border.
- When the drawer is open the arrow sits on the right, like a drawer insert handle.
- A hover effect showing up from nowhere after closing.
No test fails on a thin line or an arrow that’s a pixel off. I sent the whole list to a fresh-context agent to fix.
Safari on my iPhone showed nothing
The drawer broke at small browser widths, with a weird small line underneath. The video was fine, and hovering still started the Mies animation. The agent said it had checked narrow phone sizes. I didn’t believe it. I asked it to just give me the link so I could open it on my iPhone and check irl.
In mobile Safari I couldn’t see Mies at all. Just the background video. Desktop was fine. The first round of fixes didn’t change that, and neither did the second. A few follow-ups later it was showing on my phone and I was asking for more room inside the drawer. I don’t know what the cause was.
So I keep sending lists
The agent can read the code. It can’t see a thin line, an arrow that sits wrong or a page that’s missing on a phone. Those I find by looking, so I write them down as a numbered list: where it is, what’s wrong.