The Claude Pod
Like many of you I’ve been experimenting with Claude and Claude Code. I was already considering a jump over to using Claude instead of ChatGPT but the drama with the US Government was the final little shove I needed to completely ditch ChatGPT. What does Claude do that Chat doesn’t? It codes. And it designs. And it does them well… My full time gig is as a Product Designer and these are tools that excite me, work that would have taken me 6 weeks I can do in a week to the same level of quality and more. But equally that scares me a little. This isn’t going to be a doom and gloom read (maybe that will be another day) but a short look into what I’ve been cooking up with Claude Code. Don’t we all struggle to pick what we’d like for dinner or is that just me?
I started a personal project to solve the problem of what we could make for dinner? Often we forget what’s in the fridge or don’t want to cook for more than 15 mins. Before you know it half an hour passes and no action has been taken. I decided to create something that will track what you have in your kitchen and then also recommend what you could make for dinner based on what’s in. This is where Claude Code comes in, I have some experience coding due to my tech background through my honours degree and plenty of design experience through my career. Combining these with Claude Code it took me two nights to have a viable MVP or at the very least a proof of concept. Meet What’s In?
There is a lot to be improved design wise and some features I still need to introduce but the point is it took me less than 6 hours I reckon to design, build and code something that works and solves the problem. Something I have found that has worked for me and saved a lot of time during prompts for Claude Code is instructing it to ask me clarifying questions. In a way I’m the Design Lead, the Tech Lead and the Product Owner. Giving Claude requirements and it’s the junior designer and developer asking me clarifying questions to ensure it executes the requirements correctly. An example here is when I explained I wanted a sticky button in the footer of the page for only Mobile and Tablet, I hadn’t included instructions on icons or labels but Claude asked me about this to Clarify as well as other sections within the image you can see. Going forward this is something I intend to do with all AI tools I use.
I’ve yet to experiment with the Figma integration between Claude and Figma. I’m especially excited to try this out as it is much much quicker to change the pixel size of an icon from 12px to 20px in Figma vs prompting Claude to do this. In my personal experimentation this is something I’ve yet to try due to the paywalls Figma puts up, however I will get to this. I am somewhat sceptical for some aspects of this team up, as for larger changes prompting Claude will be more efficient, even more so if you have a design system and component library. Which almost every business serious about design and building quality products does. Where Figma comes into play will be viewing journeys as a whole, collaboration and design thinking. The design doing will likely be in Claude Code.
With the speed everything is changing though who knows what product design will look like in a years time. I do try not to predict things as more often than not I’m incorrect in my predictions but it’s still fun to guess. My plan is each month to update you all with how my experimentation with AI tools goes here in a new paid tier for subscribers. Don’t worry 95% of content on this site will remain free but anything going forward that is AI related will sit within the subscriber bucket. So if you’re keen to follow along with my food website and more please consider subscribing!
