How I Work
I've spent 5+ years designing and building products: discovery, flows, prototypes, user testing. Much to my excitement the line between design and engineering began to disappear recently.
My main tool these days is Claude Code. The thing that makes it work is a context system I've built over months. CLAUDE.md defines the rules: code style, engineering preferences, git conventions, and a strict build process from spec to test-driven development. A design system file governs tokens, component patterns, and visual constraints so the agent produces consistent UI without manual policing. Custom skills encode best practices for scaffolding, plan reviews, and verification. They compress hours of context-setting into seconds and improve every time I refine them. Every decision, plan, and architecture choice gets written to a project doc so the next session picks up exactly where the last one left off. The repo is the source of truth.
Build process
I write the product brief, user flows, and technical constraints as a structured markdown doc. The spec becomes PROJECT_PLAN.md, the agent's source of truth for the whole build. No Figma yet. Clarity here saves time everywhere downstream.
The agent picks the stack based on the spec, generates the project structure, installs dependencies, and documents everything in ARCHITECTURE.md. I design the key screens in parallel. Design and code start at the same time, not sequentially.
Each feature gets written as a failing test first, then the agent implements until the test passes. I describe what I want in natural language, review what the agent produces, correct course, and ship iterations in minutes. If the plan diverges from reality, we stop and fix the plan before continuing.
The agent runs its own code review, checking for missed edge cases, stale docs, and failing tests. Final design tweaks happen in code. Vercel deployment.
Why this matters
Designers who can build make different decisions. When you know the cost of a design choice in engineering terms, you stop proposing things that look great in Figma but fall apart in production. Figma still has a role, but it's an early-stage whiteboarding tool for flows and layout, not a pixel-perfect handoff step. Most design decisions happen in code now because the feedback loop is faster there.
The agentic layer compresses this further. I spend my time on the decisions that actually shape the product: what to build, how it should behave, what to cut. The feedback loop between design intent and working software is measured in minutes, not days.