# Dan Birman

> Dan Birman designs how people work with AI agents: what they're allowed to do, when they ask, and how they earn more room. He is Head of Design at Caplight, a private markets data and trading platform, and previously led design for tipping at Uber, AI legal research at Ruli, Vida Health's care platform, and the Backbone One controller. He trained as an industrial designer at RISD and prototypes in code.

Every page has its own URL, listed below.

## Agent Trust Patterns
Interface patterns for AI agents that act on people's behalf. Each has a working demo, the evidence behind it, and the closest prior work.
- [Consent by example](https://dbirman.com/consent): test a natural-language mandate with near-boundary cases instead of asking people to review a policy.
- [Interrupt on drift, not on danger](https://dbirman.com/drift): use the approved plan as the baseline and interrupt only when the agent departs from it.
- [Questions with a shelf life](https://dbirman.com/shelf): ask early, show the assumed default, expire questions by progress, and fork on late answers.
- [Whose idea was this?](https://dbirman.com/whose): before irreversible actions, flag reasoning that came from untrusted content and bind approval to exact terms.
- [Show the track record](https://dbirman.com/record): show how often "done" was verified done for this kind of task before delegating.
- [The other side of the agent](https://dbirman.com/other): design for the recipient of an agent's email, booking, or purchase.

## Agent Trust Reviews
Monthly reviews of agent products people can use today, scored against the six patterns.
- [ChatGPT Work, against the six patterns](https://dbirman.com/review-chatgpt-work) (October 2026)

## Writing
- [Progressive reduction, ten years later](https://dbirman.com/reduction)
- [How I design with AI](https://dbirman.com/writing)

## Work
- [Ruli: getting lawyers past the blank prompt](https://dbirman.com/ruli) (full case study)
- [Uber: tipping without guilt](https://dbirman.com/uber)
- [Vida Health: building a design team](https://dbirman.com/vida)
- [Backbone: hardware and software, designed together](https://dbirman.com/backbone)

## For agents
- [How this site's assistant works](https://dbirman.com/assistant): what the Ask box can and can't do, and why.
- Markdown version of every page: https://dbirman.com/index.md and https://dbirman.com/md/<page>.md
- Full site text in one file: https://dbirman.com/llms-full.txt
- MCP server (read-only, Streamable HTTP): https://dbirman.com/mcp. Tools: list_pages, get_page, search_site, contact_info.

## Contact
- [About, talks, and bio](https://dbirman.com/about)
- Email: hi@dbirman.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danbirman/
- GitHub: https://github.com/danbirman