Product design question
Design an agentic flow (Cascade) that keeps developers firmly in control.
- Windsurf
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Product design for agentic assistance that preserves developer control, a specific and named design constraint.
How to approach it
- Clarify the constraint: Cascade (Windsurf's agentic flow) should let the AI take multi-step actions across a codebase while the developer remains the final decision-maker.
- Design a plan-preview step: before executing a multi-file change, Cascade shows the intended plan and affected files for developer approval.
- Add granular control: developers can approve, edit, or reject individual steps within a larger plan, not just accept or reject the whole thing.
- Add a live diff view during execution so the developer can watch changes happen incrementally rather than receiving one large, unreviewable diff.
- Add an easy interrupt and rollback control so the developer can stop Cascade mid-task if it starts going in the wrong direction.
- Define success as developer approval rate without major edits, and interrupt rate as a guardrail signaling when autonomy needs tightening.
What a strong answer includes
- Designs concrete control points (plan preview, step-level approval, interrupt) rather than a single accept/reject gate at the end.
- Uses a live, incremental diff view, which matches how experienced developers actually want to review changes.
- Treats interrupt rate as a meaningful guardrail metric, not just a rarely used escape hatch.
- Balances autonomy and control explicitly, which is the named tension in the question.
- Ties the design back to Windsurf's differentiation from more autonomous tools like Devin.
Common mistakes
- Designing Cascade as a fully autonomous flow with only an end-of-task review, which contradicts the 'firmly in control' requirement.
- Not providing a way to interrupt or partially approve a multi-step plan.
Likely follow-up questions
- How granular should step-level approval be without becoming tedious?
- What would you do if a developer consistently rejects Cascade's plans?
- How would you measure whether developers feel in control?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop