Context
Where it all started…..
I led the design for the Prompt Playground at Inya.ai, a platform that empowers businesses to build and deploy AI voice agents.
Think of Inya as a factory line for digital employees: you assemble them, give them a voice, and teach them how to handle customer calls.
The Brain - System Prompt
The most critical part of the Agent is its brain, the System Prompt. This is the set of instructions that tells the AI how to behave, what to say, and when to stop talking.
THE CHALLENGE
But here was the catch...
Builders were stuck in a "Context-Switching Loop," jumping between external tools like VS Code and ChatGPT just to iterate on a single prompt.
No way to test "edge cases" before deployment led to broken customer flows.
Constant context switching disrupted the "flow state" needed for complex prompt engineering.
High churn during the "Build" phase.
THE SOLUTION
A Native Development Environment (IDE). We moved the workflow inside the product and introduced a hybrid "Playground" that combines the structure of a code editor with the flexibility of a chat interface.
Nothing comes up without the Constrains
I knew we needed a native solution, but "just building a text box" wasn't going to cut it. I had to navigate some serious technical constraints that defined the boundaries of my design
01 Not all models are equal
Advanced reasoning required higher-tier models, so I had to design a UI that clearly indicated why a model gave a certain answer (Chain-of-Thought visibility)
02 The backend was messy
AI isn't perfect. We faced Error Handling Issues where backend inconsistencies required the UI to manage failures at a conversational level, not just a system level.
LLMs charge by the token. Unchecked testing would burn our budget, so we needed strict limits on conversation length.
pANEL STATES
I designed responsive panels that scale with user needs, ensuring space for complex prompt data while staying adaptable for future features like versioning, comparison, and evaluation.
THE IMPACT
GO BEHIND THE PIXEL
