After spending two weeks together with designers who have incredible AI workflows, I decided to get back into building and using AI to design and build products.

With just a few tweaks which I learned from my great friend Wyatt Feaster, I was able to build incredibly beautiful software. In this newsletter, I want to show you the outcome, how I got there, and, in the end, even how I think design is going to change in the future.

Let’s get started.

The Outcome

First of all, the product I built was a padel community website. B2C, mobile first.

Over the course of 3 days (so basically the weekend), I built out 90% of the app:

• Onboarding
• The public website
• Game signups for padel
• Login and signup pages
• The full email flow

It comes with beautiful animations, it’s responsive and follows most UX principles. No AI slop, no 3-column layouts, no ugly UI.

Here’s How to Get Pretty Software

All you need to get there is:

• Claude Code (Pro plan is enough)
• Inspiration websites (like Mobbin or FGLibs)

1. Write a design spec

I wrote this spec with Claude, before jumping into a Claude Code project. All I did here was:

1. Explain the core user flows
2. Told it to not design anything yet. Ask for context and references before designing anything

Then I downloaded the PDF and started a new Claude Code project. I used Claude Opus 5.5 with High effort, and I never ran out of credits during my weekend design sprint.

2. The secret sauce

Here’s what was the game changer for me in terms of output. This technique literally one-shotted screen by screen, and got the design 99% right on the first try.

Give Claude ONE reference screenshot.

That’s it. No design system, no long design.md file.

I went to Mobbin, screenshotted a calendar page I liked and said: “Let’s design the calendar booking experience, make it look like this.”

I’d rather spend 80% of my time finding a good reference than explaining what you can see on the screenshot. Claude sees the screenshot, recognizes the pattern perfectly and builds the feature.

But make sure you only add one reference, otherwise it tries to guess. Think of it like handing work to a real designer. If you give them 10 references to pick from, how would they know what you want it to look like?

So screen after screen, I shared a screenshot and asked Claude to build the feature, and it worked!

Designers Are More Powerful Than Ever

The most powerful builders in 2027 will be designers who ship. We have the craft, we know what good looks like, and now we can use AI to build the software.

I’m also just learning as I go, but with every project, I feel more confident that Grauberg won’t be a design studio for long, but a product studio, where we ship high-quality products.

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What do you think about the future of design? Feel free to let me know!

Yours, Nik