Design mode was a two-day pass.

We shipped LADLE Design as a two-day pass in early August. The scope was deliberately narrow: make the design workflow feel like a design tool, not a chatbot with a preview panel.

Before this pass, hitting "New design" on LADLE just opened a chat with a different system prompt. Same UI as everything else. The reply, if the model decided to produce HTML, would land in an artifact panel you could open on the side. Technically it worked. In practice, "design" didn't feel like design — it felt like chat with a hidden output.

**What shipped in the split.**

The canvas surface at /design/[chatId] flips the ratio. The iframe preview takes 65% of the screen. The chat rail takes 35% and lives on the right. Every reply auto-updates the iframe. Below the preview: a strip of thumbnails for every previous version in the chat, one-click to revert. Above: device chips (desktop / tablet / phone) so you can see how the design looks at different widths without leaving the surface.

The "New design" CTA on /design/new opens the empty canvas with the composer focused. Type a brief, hit send, watch the design render live.

**What shipped in the inspector.**

The Select toggle in the canvas header injects an inspector script into the sandboxed iframe. Turn it on, click any element in the preview, and its CSS selector jumps into a chip above the composer. Type a change — "make this button bigger," "swap this copy" — and the request is scoped: the server augments the prompt with a SELECTION header, routes to Haiku for a sub-second edit, and returns a new version with everything else preserved.

Scoped edits go to Haiku because they don't need Sonnet's depth — they need surgical precision. Full designs still route to Sonnet. The user doesn't have to choose; the presence or absence of a selection is the signal.

**What shipped in Publish.**

A Publish button snapshots the current version to a public URL at /d/[slug]. Copy the URL, paste it anywhere, and the design renders fullscreen with a small "designed with ladle" credit in the corner. Auth-free for readers. The snapshot is immutable — editing the artifact after publishing doesn't change what the public URL shows.

**What didn't ship.**

Undo/branch pinning. Right now versions are linear — a new reply appends. Pinning a version as a branch base for iteration is on the list.

Inline diff pulse. When an element edit lands, the changed element should briefly glow to confirm what moved. Didn't get to it.

Kitchen budget line inside the canvas. Cost estimate per turn would help heavy users manage their cycle. Data is captured; UI is deferred.

**The point of the split.**

Before: LADLE Design looked like ChatGPT with a maybe-preview. After: it looks like v0 or Claude Artifacts — a working canvas with chat as the crew, not the star. That reframing is worth more than any specific feature we added around it. If you tried Design before this pass and bounced, try it again — it's a different product now.

Blog is the receipt. Design shipped 2026-08-05 to 2026-08-07 across two sessions. The changelog has the day-by-day.