# Designing With AI? Make a Jig

> In woodworking, a jig is a simple custom fixture that makes a tricky cut repeatable and safe. Jack Cheng borrows the metaphor for working with AI, arguing that the biggest gains often come not from a smarter model but from the little scaffolds you build around it, the templates, prompts and frameworks that turn a general tool into something reliable for your specific task. His argument reframes a common frustration. People treat AI as a magic box and judge it by raw capability, but Cheng suggests the leverage lives in the fixtures you construct, the reusable setups that shape how you and the model collaborate. Build the right jig once and every future job gets faster and more consistent. For designers especially, this shifts the job from making individual artifacts toward designing the systems and tools that make good work repeatable. It is a practical, hands-on take on a question everyone is circling: as the models keep improving, the durable skill may be less about prompting cleverly and more about engineering the small, boring scaffolding that makes AI dependable.

_Section: [Interesting AI Articles](https://www.wortins.com/articles) · Source: Every · Published Sunday, August 9, 2026_

## Wortins' read

In woodworking, a jig is a simple custom fixture that makes a tricky cut repeatable and safe. Jack Cheng borrows the metaphor for working with AI, arguing that the biggest gains often come not from a smarter model but from the little scaffolds you build around it, the templates, prompts and frameworks that turn a general tool into something reliable for your specific task. His argument reframes a common frustration. People treat AI as a magic box and judge it by raw capability, but Cheng suggests the leverage lives in the fixtures you construct, the reusable setups that shape how you and the model collaborate. Build the right jig once and every future job gets faster and more consistent. For designers especially, this shifts the job from making individual artifacts toward designing the systems and tools that make good work repeatable. It is a practical, hands-on take on a question everyone is circling: as the models keep improving, the durable skill may be less about prompting cleverly and more about engineering the small, boring scaffolding that makes AI dependable.

## Source

[Read the full story at Every](https://every.to/chain-of-thought/designing-with-ai-make-a-jig)

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