Think first. Then prompt.
AI makes building easy. Building the right thing still takes design thinking.
Hi! My name is Michael, and this is my working notebook on designing+building with AI. I share writing, tools, and tutorials for people shipping with Claude Code.
Recent writing
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How to Get Your Site Cited by AI: A GEO field guide
AEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) require different signals than traditional SEO. Here's what I actually did to get pairwithclaude.com visible to AI systems and what the limits of that work are.
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How to Research a Company's UX in 30 Minutes Before Your Next Interview
A repeatable workflow for pulling real UX sentiment about any company's product, turning it into talking points, and walking into the interview as a peer instead of a candidate. Worked example with a real company. Includes a downloadable Claude skill.
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Claude Design has the incumbents scrambling
Anthropic shipped Claude Design a month after Google's Stitch 2.0. Everyone's watching Figma. The tools that should actually be nervous are Lovable, Bolt, and everything in that lane.
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Think first, prompt later
Generative coding with AI makes building easy. Building the right thing still takes design thinking. Here's why that matters more, not less, in the age of AI.
Tools I use
- Claude CodeTerminal-first AI pair programmer. My primary building environment.
- ExpoExpo is a full-stack React Native framework with cloud services for building, deploying, and updating mobile apps across iOS, Android, and web from a single codebase. It's the only native framework recommended by Meta and gives you 100+ production-ready libraries, over-the-air updates, and build automation without touching native code.
- KlaritaA design brief and specification builder that walks you through discovery, problem and solution exploration to generate a build-ready spec, step by step.
- UX Sentiment ResearchA reusable Claude skill that pulls real UX sentiment about any company's product, identifies friction patterns, and produces interview-ready talking points and questions. Designed for product and design interview prep. Also works for competitive analysis and product critique writing.
- Vibe Security SkillAn agent skill that audits AI-generated code for common security vulnerabilities that coding assistants tend to introduce, like hardcoded secrets, missing row-level security, client-submitted prices, and tokens in localStorage. Built for Claude Code and other Agent Skills-compatible tools, it loads only the checks relevant to your stack (Supabase, Stripe, React Native, etc.) so you're not wasting context on irrelevant rules.