Straight up, I enjoy working with AI. It’s made the industry more exciting, and it’s changed how I do pretty much everything, from spec’ing a component to remembering when the bins go out. I’ve also got some philosophies about how it should be used, responsibly, especially anywhere near a design system.
This page covers it: what I believe, what I’ve built, the setups I use daily, and the stuff I make for fun. And I’m lowkey loving being back in terminal.
How I think about it
Some important stuff…
1. Pair, don’t hand off.
Unless we’re talking super basic stuff… I prefer to not just give AI stuff and walk off. I pair with it. Yes, it does the grunt work and keeps an eye on the boring stuff, but I keep the judgement, the taste and the responsibility. If it ships, it’s mine to answer for.
2. Context first.
Anything that has to guess will eventually guess wrong (actually, that goes for people as much as agents). So the context goes in before the component exists, and it stays with that component for its whole life. Generally context is pretty important.
3. Systems are more important than ever.
A design system is where a team’s judgement gets bottled up and reused everywhere. Get it wrong there and you’re wrong in every product at once. So “human in the loop” isn’t enough for me. For systems especially, I want a human all the way through.
Custom AI tooling
Something I find really exciting right now is that nobody has to work the same way anymore. I don’t think we’ll ever settle back on one industry-standard stack. People get to find the workflows and tools that actually fit how they work, and make them their own.
A big part of that is building your own tools when the right one doesn’t exist yet. This is so freaking cool. Here are a few I made earlier.
Token visualiser
When I started on Resin’s token architecture, I knew it was going to get complicated: multi-brand, multi-theme and customisable at runtime. While I was working through some of the trickier relationships in my head, I wanted a quick, easy way to actually see them. Plus it was fun to start experimenting with AI-assisted coding.
Icon component creator
Building icon components that hold multiple styles across multiple brands is a whole thing. I wanted anyone to be able to add a new icon to the system without it turning into a time sink. So I built a Figma plugin that takes raw icons, maps them to the brand variables and puts the component together in the way that works for the system. With an optional API key it’ll help write the usage descriptions too.
CRD editor
Every Resin component has a CRD: one living doc that says what the component is for and how it should behave, from the first request until long after it ships. I built the CRD editor over the Christmas holidays, as a first go at letting PMs, devs and other designers contribute CRDs to the system. It’s since been retired in favour of Claude skills.
Percy Lite
Percy’s little brother. He lives in a pretend terminal on this portfolio, in his soul he’s a grumpy squirrel who’ll tell you about my work. Pick from his options or type a question, and he’ll follow you around the site in a small bar at the bottom. There’s even a meter showing how much of my context you’ve explored. Weird. Everything he knows is also on a plain text page, for anyone who’d rather read than chat. Try the Konami code.
How I work
Control Tower
My whole week runs from one long Claude Code session I call the Control Tower. It spins up side sessions, and each one does one small, controlled job. When a side session wraps up, it reports back, including anything a skill got wrong or missed (for a continual improvement feedback loop).
It also runs my actual working week: tickets, backlog, to-dos, where I’m up to on everything, and all my brain dumps and half-formed notes. So every morning I can sit down and ask it where I’m up to, what I did last week, what I should do next, or what I can squeeze into the 15 minutes before lunch.
Design system workflow kit
The workflow I designed for contributing components to a design system. It’s pair-working, built on skills, and it takes a component from first conception to ready-for-dev with a human involved through every step. It’s made my own work a lot more efficient, and it opens the door to a hybrid model where PMs, designers, engineers and agents contribute side by side.
I’ve open-sourced the whole kit, CRD template included, so you can install it, bend it to fit your team and have a play.
Percy, second brain plus
Percy is my second brain, and also my grumpy squirrel personal assistant. He lives in a few Notion databases that can be fed from anywhere. He keeps track of projects, to-dos, bookmarks, my reading list, people I’ve met, half-ideas for talks, and the opening times of places I always forget. He syncs with my calendar, checks my email, sets my reminders, summarises Slack, rounds up industry news and wakes me up with my plan for the day. I have big plans for Percy.
Tool stack
Tool
What I use it for
Claude
Thinking partner. Specs, planning, and pulling together all the project knowledge and context before anything gets built.
Claude Code
Basically everything else. Control Tower, building my own tools, and doing the actual work in Figma, Notion, GitHub and the rest through MCP.
Terminal
Home.
VS Code
Keeping an eye on what Claude Code’s up to, and poking at the code myself.
Figma + MCP
Letting Claude Code read and build in Figma, so I’m not clicking through it all by hand, doing actual (gasp) design work.
GitHub
Where, you know, stuff lives in the repo.
Jitter
Motion fun times.
Notion
Percy’s home. My whole second brain lives in here. Note sharing. Writing talks. All the things.
Wispr Flow
Talking instead of typing is so much quicker these days.
Simple is better
Things have moved really fast over the last few years.. and I’ve tried a whole bunch of tools along the way. Ultimately I’ve landed back on the stack above every time.
Kind
Tools
Chat assistants
ChatGPT, Grok, Copilot
Prototyping
Lovable, Bolt, Replit, v0, Magic Patterns, Claude Design, Figma Make, Uizard, Google Stitch
Coding and workflow
Cursor, Supabase, Superhuman, Framer
Notes and research
Granola, ChatPRD, NotebookLM, Google AI Pro
Visuals
Midjourney, Sora, Adobe Firefly, Canva, Gamma
