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AI 2 min read

AI only did not work. Figma first did.

AI drafts the prototype. I own the flow.

My company asked for real prototypes on a phone. I taught my team to build them with AI. What worked was not what we tried first.

Nabhak "Yhai" S.Product Designer at OOZOU, Bangkok

Pictures were not enough

AI models got smarter. At work, a short prompt now ran until the job was done. It looked good, and it worked.

My company, OOZOU, supports AI and pays for the subscriptions. I love trying things.

Then we were asked: no static pictures. Show a real prototype, on a phone.

I taught it from zero

I was the one who started it. Then I taught my colleagues, from zero:

  • Claude Code in the terminal.
  • The installs to open the phone Simulator.
  • The Figma MCP, so the AI can read the Figma file.
  • Layers and files prepared so the AI can rebuild the design. (Why names matter: note 06.)

We finished one project that way. Then the next.

AI only? It did not work

The next project started with a Claude Code demo, and the plan was AI only.

It did not work.

An app has a lot of images. AI could not make them back then.

And our prompting was weak. It was our first time working this way.

Figma first

So: design in Figma first. Connect the MCP. The AI reads Figma, then builds.

Cropping images, trying layouts, making variants: all faster in Figma than waiting for an AI preview.

Figma first, then AI builds.

Figma first, then AI builds.

Then the code got messy

Coding the prototype took months.

Sometimes I wondered: why code this much? A clickable Figma prototype might have been enough.

The code was messy, too. Designers had no programming background, so it was built page by page, not from components.

So I organised it:

  • Template pages. One page, reused with many different data sets.
  • Data per page. Each page keeps its own data.
  • GitHub. I taught the team that too.
One template plus the data for each page: many pages, one structure.

I have worked this way ever since.

We hit many problems. We got through them.

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