by Emmett Shine and Alex Leiphart, Little Plains
Last week we sent a founder a zip file containing two folders: /human, /agent, & a readme.md. After a month of work, inside the agent folder, their entire **brand was encoded as instructions via YAML, JSON, Markdown, HTML, CSS, SVG files. Upon receipt, they dropped the packet into Cursor, typed a prompt, and had a near-complete landing page that day.
In the last few weeks the simple zip folder has become the deliverable **we've been asked to produce. Not a website, a software product, or a go-to-market campaign bible. Said another way, our input is where our value lies and what helps drives the outcome, not our outputs.
This is pretty new for us and in part pushed by what's possible through Claude Design. The accessible UI layer and the organized files Design produces have been a pretty big breakthrough at Little Plains.
We wanted to walk through what we've been experiencing over the past few weeks with a few of the earliest stage founders we've been working with this on.
We'll also talk about where we see human creativity and original thinking (the 'magic trick') being the most valuable, and why this is increasingly what we want to be paid for.
An example of what our ‘deliverables’ have been looking like over the past few weeks.
We're in the early stages of seeing first-hand that creative work itself is changing, and the value, timeline, and pricing model along with it.
A few days ago, Alex and I were at the office trying to explain this shift in how we’re working to a few friends in the industry who were visiting. To illustrate what we were grappling with, we drew a diagram on a whiteboard: a project's value on the vertical axis + project time on the horizontal.
A whiteboard sketch from last week showing how value is becoming more upfront and input based.
In traditional service engagements, value grows slow and steady as deliverables accumulate. You pay for the time, you receive the outputs, and the value builds across the engagement. Over the past few months, what we're finding looks more like a funnel laid on its side.
For early-stage engagements, we're finding the highest concentration of value sits at the very start: the 0-to-1 thrust of deep research, expert synthesis, and the bold judgment calls about how to position a company as a brand. Who it's for. What it says. How it sounds. Where it lives in the market. Those judgment calls are what separates a system that holds from one that doesn't. The funnel narrows sharply from here because once the thinking is done, the outputs runs on the thinking's logic.
Note: notice ‘magic_trick.md’ at the very end of the diagram. We'll come back to that.
For most of the history of (all?) agency work, the handoff was static. A design file, a PDF, a deck the client would reference, interpret …and gradually drift from as new work got built, new copy got written, and new vendors and teammates got hired.
In the past few decades of digital-based creative work, anyone who's encountered a Brand_Guidelines_FINAL_v3-FINAL-FINAL.pdf knows the pattern. The brand existed in the world after handoff in whatever shape the client's team could maintain.
However, what we and others on the front lines of agentic creative have been shipping recently is different in form and different in intent.