AI coding is breaking the handoff model most government teams run on. User research, content design and interaction design will need to change shape, not just speed up.
Most teams I’ve worked in run a relay. Research finds the need. Interaction and content design shape the answer. The user story is refined until it’s “ready”, then developers pick it up. The relay made sense while building was the slowest leg. Designers and researchers had time to work ahead.
That’s changing. Luke Wroblewski is a designer with thirty years in software. He describes development teams at several of the companies he works with now running ahead of design. Designers go back and clean up features after they’ve been built. Government is on the same path. A cross-government trial gave AI coding assistants to more than 1,000 tech workers in 50 departments. The gains weren’t free. Only 15% of the AI-written code was used without edits. But the direction is set.
A government supplier, Hippo Digital, has written about building a government service with an AI agent. They reached a conclusion close to mine: the handover from design to development “starts to disappear because there’s less to hand over”. Their piece is about putting working versions of a service in front of users. It stops short of a full build. A full build would make the change even more challenging, with more people and more sign-off to keep in step.
My assumption is that if AI coding delivers the throughput people expect, pressure to build faster will follow. The legs before the build will take the strain.
What I found building with an AI coding agent
I don’t write code day to day. Recently I’ve been learning to build a small app with Claude Code, an AI coding agent.
The code arrived quickly. Deciding what it should do took longer.
The most valuable thing was structured documentation. It helped me and the coding agent agree on aspects of the app and work on questions. We stored questions and planned how they would be worked on. We worked on scope when deciding what would go into a prototype set of instructions.
Many times, the agent came back and reminded me of earlier decisions. We could look back at why a decision was made. Then we decided whether it still held, or whether we needed to plan how to test the assumption once it was built.
That record did the job the handoff used to do. It carried decisions and open questions from one step to the next. It stayed current because we both worked from it.
This is one person and one small app. I’m not claiming it scales as it is. It showed me what the agent needed from me.
Government doesn’t have a single version of the work
In government we don’t have this tidy single version of the work. Information is in Confluence. It’s in Word documents. It’s not always easy to find all the information you need, or to know which version is correct.
In the relay, people filled those gaps in conversation. A developer asked the content designer what a field label should say. A researcher mentioned a finding at stand-up.
A coding agent can’t do that. It builds from what it’s given, quickly and confidently. A Scrum.org article makes the same point about user stories. Agile teams rely on empathy and informal conversation to cover what a vague story leaves out. An agent has neither.
We’ve already seen what happens when AI works from stale fragments of government information. Content designers at the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade found an AI search summary telling people it cost £13 to incorporate a company online. The real fee, since February 2026, is £100. The wrong figure came from an old page nobody was maintaining. The department has since audited old pages like it and redirected 150 of them. That’s AI reading government. AI building for government will fail the same way if we hand it the wrong fragment.
What changing shape could look like
I’m a product manager, not a researcher or designer. What follows are suggestions for those disciplines to grapple with. The people who do this work are better placed to turn them into answers.
User research. A suggestion: findings and open questions go into the team’s record as they emerge, rather than waiting for a deck at the end of a round. Researchers test the real build every week. The question to grapple with: how do you protect discovery research, and research with people who have access needs, when neither can be rushed?
Content design. A suggestion: approved wording, patterns and guidance live where the coding agent can read them. Sign-off moves to patterns rather than every sentence. The UX Content Collective already advises content designers to gather their guidance and patterns in one place that AI tools can draw on. The question to grapple with: how does sign-off work when policy and legal owners sit outside the team?
Interaction design. A suggestion: design decisions and the design system sit in the same record the build works from. Designers refine the working build rather than working ahead of it. The question to grapple with: where does exploring alternatives happen when a working version exists before the design thinking has started?
Product still decides when a story is ready
It’s still the role of product to say that a story is ready. In a team of ten, with a policy owner and a supplier, product has to make that call much faster. Speed alone won’t get there. Building my app, I didn’t have to remember earlier decisions. The agent read the record every time and brought them back to me. A product manager in a busy government team can work the same way. They keep the record current and make the call on “ready” from it. The agent reads the record on every build and flags anything that conflicts with what was decided.
The objection: this is Big Design Up Front
Agile-minded readers will say I’m describing heavy documentation written before anything is built. They have a point. One engineer writing about coding agents noted that moving work such as testing and security earlier is starting to tip teams back towards Big Design Up Front.
The record I’m describing is a working list of decisions, open questions and scope. It changes as the work changes. Mine was revisited constantly, because the agent kept bringing old decisions back for review.
The test is whether it’s the one place you’d check to find out what’s true today. If people check somewhere else, it’s another document in the pile.
Some handoffs won’t go away because a team wants them to. Policy and legal sign-off on content sits outside most delivery teams. The record can make those handoffs visible and trackable. It can’t remove them.
What to try
Pick one live piece of work. Try to find its current scope, open questions and latest decisions. Count how many places you had to look.
Then ask your researchers, content designers and interaction designers what it would take to work from a single version of the work, instead of handing documents on.
The build is getting faster whether we plan for it or not. The work that tells it what to build deserves the same attention.
Personal views, not those of any client or department.