automation hub

Block released goose to the open source community in early 2025. While we supported and continued to evolve it, Applied AI and Designed turned to the rest of the company with the directive to reimagine work.

People were already running agents but they were doing it in a chat box. The rest of the work lived in tools, accounts, and things already in motion. Chat still opened on a blank prompt. Supervising a conversation is not the same as delegating work that is already underway.

I made a self-initiated prototype of that: a hub you arrived to with work already in progress, reviewed what needed attention, and steered.

As part of that prototype, I created Substrate to help people picture a company running on AI automations. Through the visualization, you could look under the hood and see how people, projects, automations, and tasks connected.

I made the prototype to propose a direction, with no expectation that we would ship it as shown. Jack greenlit the project with a launch date three months out. More designers joined, we sorted out resourcing, and started a weekly loop: align, build, show, fold in feedback.

With a team in place, we explored how people would organize and supervise work in the hub. One direction was a grid of tiles: people could arrange their own view, pin what mattered, and expand a tile to work inside it.

I collaborated with the designers on the interactions and built a prototype to explore how the grid would feel in use. We were concerned about whether people would know what they could move or resize, and whether the surface would become overwhelming as it filled up.

I started with a wrapped, virtualized grid so the canvas could feel large while only drawing what was on screen. Then I worked on drag momentum, deceleration, a little give on release, and resize that snapped without going rigid.

The open canvas was fun to push around, but harder to orient within. Reviewing ongoing work meant knowing where to look and what needed attention. The freedom to keep moving around the canvas made that harder.

For launch, we kept the tiles and pinned views but bounded the surface. People could still arrange their work without having to navigate an infinite canvas.

I spent the last stretch of the launch window working between design and engineering to keep the direction clear, and deciding which in-progress and blocked work to bring into each weekly demo.

We launched the hub in September 2025. People could arrive to work already in progress and review what needed attention. One early user described using it to summarize their to-dos across different platforms, a small example of bringing scattered work into one place.