Stefan Kovalik

Design Engineer · Creator of Perception-First Design™

I set the standard, engineer the context Claude builds from, and verify what comes back.

San Francisco, CA · (805) 708-9047 · admin@aurochs.agency

aurochs.agency · cognograph.app · github.com/skovalik · linkedin.com/in/kovalik

I'm a self-taught designer with a degree in psychology. Reading people never came automatically to me, so I learned it on purpose, one tell at a time at a nightclub door and then in improv, which filled in the social instinct I lacked and let me watch perception happen live. None of it was intuition, which is exactly why I could write it down. Fifteen years went into that, and it worked. A smart-home brand tripled its revenue. A vacuum-sealer company has kept me for a decade. The written version became Perception-First Design, a five-layer framework grounded in cognitive psychology and about a hundred citations, because everyone has an opinion about design and opinions aren't diagnosis. This past year I made the same move on Claude, which is really all context engineering is: take the judgment, make it explicit, and Claude starts producing expert work. It's all on this page. The method, the tools I built around it, the audit where I put a multiplier on my own output and then corrected it down. Education Labs is hiring people to do for everyone what I taught myself to do for one, and after a year of doing it alone, I would rather do it next to people who can push me.

Featured work

The methodology

Perception-First Design™

Open-source design methodology and LLM skill · github.com/skovalik/perception-first-design

A five-layer design methodology grounded in cognitive psychology (built on roughly 100 peer-reviewed sources), plus an LLM-backed skill that applies it: it codifies how a senior designer reasons so the judgment is repeatable, auditable, and runnable by someone who isn't me. Open-source (CC BY-SA 4.0 and MIT), trademark filed. This is my thesis in one artifact: take expert judgment and turn it into a system that makes people more capable.

Tools I direct and ship

Python, MCP servers and CLIs, mostly open-source · github.com/skovalik

Cognograph · cognograph.app · github.com/skovalik/cognograph · spatial AI workflow canvas; graph-based context assembly feeds connected nodes into prompts. Four USPTO provisional patents. Electron, React, Three.js. Solo build.
aurochs-qa-pipeline · github.com/skovalik/aurochs-qa-pipeline · multi-agent QA review (parallel lens reviewers that adversarially verify each finding).
conduct · github.com/skovalik/conduct · my operating-rules kit for Claude Code: the version-controlled corrective record described below, shipped as an installable plugin that verifies its own install.
aurochs-recall · github.com/skovalik/aurochs-recall · memory architecture for AI conversations: verbatim drawers, a BM25 index, and a knowledge graph. Local SQLite, no paraphrasing.
aurochs-voice · github.com/skovalik/aurochs-voice · voice model for AI-assisted writing: verbatim captures routed by recipient and register, with an audit pipeline that promotes recurring patterns into canon.
aurochs-platform · a multi-tenant platform and static-site generator that builds and hosts the client sites below.

Selected client work

Simply Smart Home · sshome.aurochs.agency · design rationale · my automation pipeline run on my own prior body of work: a concept rebuild and design system for the smart-frame line I led design for, given the original brand and product line as deep context. The discipline: "the site is the matte, the photo is the print." Pipeline demonstration on my own prior work.
Mehrwerk GmbH · mehrwerk.aurochs.agency · design rationale · paid consulting on information and messaging architecture for a non-English B2B domain (PFD applied), delivered with a public design-rationale page. Consulting engagement; implementation by a separate vendor on the architecture I defined.
Matthew Frederick · matt.aurochs.agency · design rationale · portfolio rebuild for an oil painter on a color-native system that samples every interface color from his paintings; first build in three hours, refined over a week; lifted the PFD perception score from 2.9 to 9.0-plus. Client dashboard, contract e-signing, and invoicing in place. In staging.
Nick Leoni Studios · nickleoni.com · portfolio for a fine-art portrait photographer, built in six hours on my platform with the client in the room, live on his own domain the same day, then refined. Live.
Vacuum Sealers Unlimited · vacuumsealersunlimited.com · production WooCommerce I design, build, and operate (10-year relationship): WordPress 7 and HPOS migration of 57,000-plus orders, Cloudflare edge at roughly 24 ms origin response, zero-downtime incident recovery. The platform powered fourfold revenue growth over ten years to over $5M annual. Live. A proposed front-end redesign is staged at vsu.aurochs.agency (design rationale).

Selected writing

The Multiplier. A 108-day audit of my own AI-augmented output, with method, math, and confounders disclosed; the honest read came in under the claim I started with. A case study in measuring a capability honestly instead of flattering it; the number it landed on is in the piece. aurochs.agency/writing/notes/multiplier
Make Me Think: Perception-First Design for the Post-Usability Era. Perception is upstream of cognition. A 12-chapter counterpoint to Krug's Don't Make Me Think. Free PDF and EPUB. aurochs.agency/writing/make-me-think
You Wouldn't Vibe Code a Car. A Perception-First Design analysis of why memes work and video doesn't: a meme costs a second and one cognitive channel, video costs all of them for a payoff you can't skim, and the "pivot to video" was a response to fabricated metrics, not audience behavior. The same lens turned on AI work: rendering was never the hard part, so value moves to specification and verification. aurochs.agency/writing/notes/you-wouldnt-vibe-code-a-car

Experience

Aurochs San Francisco · 2025 – Present

Founder and Design Engineer · aurochs.agency

Design and engineering for Cognograph and Perception-First Design: I architect and direct the build (brand, marketing site, product UI, runtime) and own the verification layer that decides when it is right.
Audited 108 days of my AI-augmented pipeline (about 7,000 sessions and 220,000 tool calls): built the measurement itself, disclosed every confounder, and reported the honest read, which came in under my own claim. Built the Python tooling, retrieval, and multi-agent QA the pipeline runs on.
Keep a running, version-controlled record of where the models fail me, fabricated verification, planning drift, instruction regression, and the written rule that catches each one next time. That corrective record is what makes the pipeline reliable.
Design, build, and operate production client systems: Cloudflare Pages and Workers, WordPress and WooCommerce, server hardening, and incident response for live commerce.

Simply Smart Home Dublin, CA · Oct 2019 – Mar 2025

Director of Digital Design (2022–2025) · Lead Product Designer (2019–2022)

Design and engineering lead across brand identity, packaging, retail materials, mobile app, e-commerce UI, and marketing: one continuous design system from marketing surface to product, working across engineering, operations, and leadership to ship it.
Built a 3D product-visualization library using virtual photography, replacing physical photo shoots for marketing, packaging, and retail. Designed and developed the e-commerce platform from scratch.
233% sales increase; revenue grew from $1.5M to $5M. DTC grew from under 2% to 15% of revenue. Retail at Costco, Walmart, Target, Amazon, Home Depot, and Lowe's; Disney licensing deal.

QTBIPOC Design Aug 2020 – Present

Technology Director and Brand Strategist · 501(c)(3) nonprofit · qtbipoc.design

Founding member and Technology Director: trained five junior designers across the early cohorts, co-host the Creative Chats series, and built the organization's first website.

Earlier 2010 – 2019

The iO Theater (website designer, two ownership transitions) · Tantum Technologies (co-founder, agency for 15-plus startup ventures backed by Barbara Corcoran)

Built and operated POS-integrated commerce platforms engineered for broadcast-driven traffic spikes (160,000 unique visitors within 10 minutes). SEO and ticketing work that grew online sales from 50% to 75% of volume.

Education

University of California, Santa Barbara 2011

B.A. Psychology · focus: cognitive psychology, perception, and decision-making. The root of Perception-First Design.

Technical skills

AI and orchestration: Claude Code (daily), Anthropic Agent SDK, MCP, plugin and skill authoring, multi-agent pipelines, prompt engineering, evals, context engineering.
Backend and data: Python, Node, API design, SQLite and FTS5, Postgres, retrieval and knowledge graphs, custom Python SSG (htpy, Pydantic, Starlette), analytics instrumentation.
Frontend: React, Zustand, React Flow, TypeScript, CSS (custom properties, container queries, OKLCH). Testing with Playwright. Accessibility: axe-core, Lighthouse, manual ARIA and screen-reader testing.
3D and real-time: Three.js, WebGL, GLSL shaders, Electron, post-processing pipelines.
Infrastructure: Cloudflare (Pages, Workers, R2, DNS), Supabase, Fly.io, GitHub Actions, WordPress and WooCommerce, server hardening and incident response.
Methodology: Perception-First Design™ (creator): a five-layer diagnostic framework grounded in cognitive psychology, applied to any surface.
Design: Brand identity, UI and UX, interaction design, design tokens and component libraries, motion, 3D product visualization. Adobe Creative Suite, Figma.
Languages: English; Spanish (conversational). United States citizen.