Twenty days ago I shipped CUBE, a tiny playground for isometric typography, and I built it with Claude Code. Most of the work was not writing code. This video walks through the paper notebook behind it, page by page.
AI made the building cheap. It did not make the judgement cheap. So when the machine handles the execution, what is actually left for you? I think three things: taste, judgement and care for details.
Taste is mostly about what you throw away, and being able to say why. I started with a Pinterest board, leaned towards Braun-style ‘less but better’ for the UI, and then said no to a vintage style I quite liked, because it did not fit a flat, modern 3D output.
Judgement shows up when your ideas start multiplying and you have to pull them back in. On paper, CUBE Type turned into four different product ideas before I converged back to one. From there I set the baseline (type something, change the style, export something usable), wrote three principles (effortless, playful, shareable) and tied them to metrics I can measure, like export rate and how long it takes people to start typing.
Care for details is the part people wave at and never explain, so I get specific. A person at a demo told me their brand blue was not my blue, so CUBE got a colour picker. I sketch examples by hand, then send a photo of the page to my AI agent to build. And the transition animations, hover effects and the light and dark mode switch are what make people want to play with it.
Doing things well used to be how you stood out. Now it is the baseline.
