AI Won’t Design Your System. You Have To.

Abstract

Most developers I know have tried using AI to build UI. Most of them got inconsistent results, dropped it, and went back to doing things manually. I was one of them — until I figured out what I was doing wrong.

This talk is about rebuilding a personal site twice: first by treating AI as a code generator, then by treating it as a collaborator. The difference wasn’t the tool. It was the method.
I’ll walk through how I defined a design system before writing a single component — tokens, typography, visual rules — and how that gave AI the constraints it needed to produce coherent output. Then I’ll show the same workflow applied live: a new React component, built from scratch in front of you, using Claude Code with a structured context file that keeps every output on-brand and on-spec.

No magic prompts. No frameworks to install. Just a different way of thinking about what you hand to the AI before it starts generating.
If you’ve ever gotten inconsistent, unusable output from an AI coding tool, this talk explains why — and shows you what to do instead.