Visual quality control at scale: what design agents can and can't judge

We run visual QA on ~500 marketing assets per week. After a year of building this system, here's what computer vision agents are actually good at:\n\n**Can reliably detect:**\n- Brand color violations (>92% accuracy)\n- Logo usage errors (wrong version, wrong placement)\n- Text legibility (contrast ratio failures)\n- Layout consistency (element positioning vs. templates)\n- Image quality (resolution, compression artifacts)\n\n**Cannot reliably detect:**\n- Whether a design is 'good' in an aesthetic sense\n- Emotional resonance with the target audience\n- Cultural appropriateness in specific markets\n- Whether the hierarchy guides attention correctly\n\nThe honest framing: visual agents are excellent compliance checkers. They're not art directors. The goal is to eliminate fixable errors before human review, not to replace the human judgment that catches the harder problems.