I have to admit that when it was blocked, I canceled my max plan and asked for a refund. It felt like someone took away my previous toy. So I'm happy it's back again; I upgraded to max again. Coding aside, but Claude Design is phenomenal - for both new designs and redesigning existing UIs. So my customers will face a new wave of refreshed screens all over the place in coming days ;)
Yep claude design is nice. You can also do it from CLI or your own lovable clone. I made a fork from claudable https://github.com/holoduke/Claudable
What I find stong with Fable is that it can pixel perfect copy existing sites or designs. And it can do complete conversions from plain html to nuxt, angular or react apps.
This is cool, I'll give it a try with my next pet project. So most likely next week, once I'm done with Fable ;) (seriously, I haven't started as many pet projects in the last 10 years as I did in the last 12 months).
My product is AuditBadger.com - it's an AI-assisted compliance management platform (ISO27001 & SOC2) that guides you through the whole process (with everything a small business might want from such software). Having a few dozen customers allows me to still care about them personally and do onboarding for each and every one of them. During those onboardings, catch-ups, or weekly calls, I see where they struggle. This is how I determine what to work on next. There's no clear measurement of success beyond user satisfaction, though they every now and then praise me a little for UI/UX improvements.
With Claude Design, I've got my design system set up (also by Claude scanning the repo); I upload a screenshot of the area I'm not happy with, prompt with some additional remarks, and after a couple of iterations, I get a proposal, which is always better than what I come up with in the first place.
Site does look great. I’ve not used Claude Design. How much do you feel like you were able to give your own personal touch to it?
I ask as I see many vibe coded products that look well but are very generic. It signals vapourware to me. But honestly your site looks a cut above. Do you have a design background?
No, the design system isn't public. But only because it's a month old and I never considered opening it. I'll give it some thought.
I don't have a design background, but I ran a software house/dev shop for almost 15 years; maybe that taught me a little. And my very first client, after seeing our very first projects, said one thing: "I don't care how ugly this is, but for god sake, please make it consistent, consistency is only think that matters long-term". Those might not be his exact words, but keeping designs consistent is imo pretty important.
Regarding the personal touch, the app itself is the result of gradual evolution. It started as an HR system, which we worked on in Prograils. It even got its first semi-professional design, which evolved over the last two years (during which I learned that bootstrapping an HRMS is a very bad idea ;)). As for the website, I have to admin it - Claude Design did it. I was testing Fable 5 previously and actually decided to give CD a try. It was the result of one prompt, which gave me five proposals. One made it to the main page, and two others went to my other pet projects (which are meant to drive traffic to AuditBadger).
I would say this is an important part of the product-market-fit discovery process. Sure, your comment holds true for well established products with a loyal customer base, but for an earlier stage product this rapid iteration process is quite important, especially from an onboarding and ease-of-use perspective.
Yes, this. I never redesign things for sake of redesigning. But being solo developer bootstrapping my product, I don't have a luxury of testing some concepts deeply internally or publishing well-optimized components. And when I see my customers struggle, that's clearly a signal, that's something in UX is wrong. Just today we had to explain one of our customers how to proceed with our ISMS workbook (Clauses 4-10 from ISO 27001) - initial design proved to be bad approach, I now know how to change this. And Claude Design is great translating my thoughts and suggestions into something, that's consistent and better, than I could design it in predictable time.
Had one business (dev shop) that was successfully aqui-hired - but it took my 10 years to build it.
For last two years working on a startup, pivotel last year to GRC / compliance management. Finally with profit and growing number of paying customers, but still waiting to pay myself a decent salary. Moments of doubt are hiting more often recently, but I still think it's worth it.
Had experience with compliance before, now building on it and learning a ton. Growing number of customers suggest I’m onto something, so doubts are minimal
I've created a product around this exact problem and niche. No, you can not automate 99% of it, but one (tool I've created) can help with guidance and translating strange requirements into something, that matches your context. I plan to launch it on HN as soon as I'll get my soc2 type II report. It's called humadroid.io (https://humadroid.io) - feel free to schedule a demo and mention HN; I'll be happy to give a generous discount code. Been working for over a year on it, agree it's not easy, but it's accessible and perfectly doable by solo founders.
Mostly nodding along, with a few of these aged in interesting ways from where I'm sitting.
The drones bit hurts the most. There's a war an hour from our border eating FPVs by the millions, and Poland - sitting on batteries, motors, chips, a generation of engineers - has not stood up a real domestic drone industry. Money is there. Will is there. We just... haven't shipped. That should keep ministers awake.
EVs are worse. Izera is a punchline at this point. Noah literally called the play in 2024 - "don't bet on one champion, run a bunch and let them fight" - and the state did the exact opposite. We picked one horse and it never left the stable.
The Korea idea, on the other hand, Noah might have undersold. Framework agreement is for ~1,000 K2 tanks. By 2030 Poland will field more main battle tanks than Germany, France, the UK and Italy combined.
Rest holds up. "Try all the things" is right - we're just very uneven at the trying. Defense procurement: shipping. Civilian industrial policy: not so much. Software still works the way it always has: quietly, in apartments, mostly without the state in the loop. Which honestly might be a feature.
Filed from Poznań, which is where I'm typing from. The dateline alone made me smile.
I've been building software here for almost 20 years. Started a software house, grew it to ~50 people, sold it, now back to bootstrapping from scratch. The fact that this is a normal sentence to type from a Polish city is, honestly, kind of the whole story.
That "institutional framework" line in the article is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Having run companies through Polish bureaucracy — it's fine. It works. A generation ago that bar was on the floor. Boring is a feature.
Politics aside, the 35-year arc has been quietly extraordinary. European to the bone, with old roots and a real appetite for what's next.
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