making it work #3
more app building & designing + claude agent-ing
This is the third post in a new series called making it work — where I document what I’m actually building with AI, what broke, what surprised me, and what it means if you’re a marketer who keeps hearing terms you don’t know but nodding like you know what it all means. (I was you. Recently. It’s fine.)
Short update: getting the design right
I’m having a slower week. Not feeling super well today, sorry about the raspy voice! My best friend also surprised me by flying into SF from Europe, so I didn’t ship as much as usual. We went to Big Sur, and now we’re on our way to Yosemite! But here’s a few mini updates:
Variant: I bit the bullet
I got the paid subscription. It finally made sense to commit. I was using it enough that the free tier was limiting what I could actually do.
I got my app looking a lot closer to what I had in my head. The design is significantly more refined.
This is my current workflow:
Design in Variant
Copy the code
Paste it into your builder of choice (Variant exports directly to cursor, Claude Code, Codex, v0, Lovable. I found Lovable actually mimics it quite well.)
Where I am
The design is close. That was the main goal this week — get it looking right before adding complexity.
What’s next: integrating AI features, adding friends/sharing functionality, and I’m migrating everything over to Claude code now that I’ve run out of Anything credits (oops).
I’m also learning how Claude agents work, specifically, and I’ll (hopefully) have a proper update on that next week. I’m going to test out MindStudio as well. Heard they have great capabilities in image and video generation.
Short week, but the design progress was real. Stay tuned, more to come!
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