The custom app
The software people open every day. It fits staff, customers, systems and data — the unique shape of the business.
UX design for AI brains
Design the app and the brain together.
The custom app fits the way you work. The company brain holds how you think, decide and deliver. One without the other is a chatbot, or software that never gets smarter.
The work
You are not designing a chat window.
You are designing four things that have to fit.
The jobs
A ticket, a proposal, a month-end, an onboarding. Each job has a start, a finish, and a record of what happened.
The knowledge
Skills, memory and DNA. What the brain is allowed to know, at which scope, and what must never leak between clients.
The human moments
Approve, assign, correct, roll back. If these are not designed, the brain guesses — or the team stops trusting it.
Principles
How to keep a brain usable.
These come from how Telos brains are organised — skills, tools, memory and budgets.
Organise, don’t accumulate
Structure is as important as content. When you add knowledge, decide what to split, what to remove, and where it belongs. A tidy brain answers. A pile of documents waits to be searched.
Show only what this job needs
Skills live in categories and load on demand. Do not pour the whole company into one screen or one prompt. Progressive disclosure is how a brain stays fast and cheap.
Tools are part of the interface
A tool’s name, parameters and error text are UX. Fix the tool definition before writing a longer skill that tries to explain a confusing one.
Design for the job that repeats
Workflows run again tomorrow. Take the lesson from a bad run, but do not rebuild the product around a single example.
Categories decide what belongs
The category description is the lens. If it is vague, knowledge lands in the wrong place — or is missed. Skills hold practices. Memory holds scoped facts. Do not mix them.
Give the model a budget
Turns, tokens and spend are design constraints, not afterthoughts. Raise a limit when the work needs it. Never because the model asked.
Vocabulary
Name the objects before you draw screens.
If these names are wrong, the interface will be wrong.
Clients and teams
The people or companies the brain must keep separate.
The job in progress
The unit of work: scoped, resumable, completable.
How we do this well
Skills — versioned practices the whole organisation can use.
What the AI can do
Tools the app exposes. Tight, sufficient, named in the user’s language.
The playbook
A workflow that loads the right context and starts the work.
What must stay true
Purpose, edge, voice, doctrine, customers — the DNA that shapes every answer.
Human control
Design the moments a person must decide.
A brain that cannot be seen, stopped or corrected will not be used for real work.
Always show status
People need to see that work is running, waiting, blocked or done — in time to act.
Use the business’s words
Tickets, clients, jobs. Not agents, payloads or sessions, unless that is how this company already talks.
Make approval obvious
The important actions wait in a place someone owns. Uncertainty should escalate, not guess.
Make undo possible
Learnings land with checkpoints. A person can review a change and roll it back.
Design the weekly review
Daily memory can be automatic. Strategy can be a meeting. The craft loop — turning what worked into a skill — needs a designed surface, or the brain drifts.
Information architecture
Categories are the lens.
Every document, lesson and brain-dump is read through your categories. A weak description means knowledge is misplaced, or never captured.
Aim for a small set of distinct dimensions — enough to cover the business, not so many that two buckets fight. Write what belongs, and what does not. Use the company’s words.
If two categories overlap, merge them. If one covers everything, split it.Start here
A sequence that keeps design cheap.
Get the job and the domain right first. Screens come last — that is when they are cheapest to change.
1Name the job
What is the user hiring this for? Write it without naming a feature.
2Fit the app
Map staff, customers, systems and data. The app wraps that shape.
3Write the DNA first
Purpose, edge, model, voice, doctrine, customers. Get this wrong and the brain learns the wrong company faster.
4Load only this job
Which skills, memory and tools does this run need? Leave the rest out.
5Design the review
Who approves, who is assigned, what gets graded, what becomes a skill.
Go deeper
Skills that inform this page.
Drop these into an LLM, or read them yourself.
BRA105
Brain Principles
Organise knowledge, disclose it progressively, and keep the model on a budget.
BRA102Company Brain Model
DNA first. Memory, craft and compass — knowledge up, alignment down.
BRA208Designing Skill Books
How to design categories so the AI can place knowledge correctly.
ProductWhat’s inside
Workflows, skills, memory, learning and the infrastructure to run it.
Telos Brain
Build it yourself.
Or talk to us.
A custom app plus company brain — designed around the way you work.