Crafting UI in a AI-native Workflow

"This is obviously Raza and myself and there's a dwarf," Wondo began, standing beside his colleague Raza at a recent SQ Collective Coworking Friday. "And us, [we] love and care a lot about crafts."

For the next hour, Wondo and Raza of GovTech Singapore, currently deployed to the Ministry of Education (MOE), would act as builders forging new tools. Their talk was not a high-level manifesto, but a practical, demo-led session on how they are taking back control of their work as designers and craftsmen.

"We're gonna show more than tell," Wondo said, framing their central goal: to "give the control back to the quality of our craft." This talk gave a vocabulary to the frustration I hear from builders who feel their craft is eroded by the very AI tools sold as helpers.

They started by showing a few small tools, built to solve their own problems. There was a logo generator, which Wondo built with grids and mathematics "so that I can look smarter." Then came an org chart generator that was decidedly "more human," including details like a team member's soju bomb-making skills and pet peeves. An icon generator layered a hand-drawn skin over standard Lucid icons, instantly bringing them on-brand. Across these small tools, you can feel the touch of wonder that Wondo and Raza put into them. It is all in the details.

The most substantial demo was a project for their work in education: "My World." It was a "sense-making island" for secondary school students, designed to encourage honest self-reflection. Instead of sterile surveys, students interact with a companion, and their shared thoughts and feelings make the island grow. An interest in K-pop might cause flowers to bloom. The goal was to create a delightful space for students to know themselves better, away from the pressure of formal questionnaires.

These small projects demonstrated a mindset: if the right tool doesn't exist, build it. I had a related conversation last week about a designer whose business is being dismantled by the rise of automated tools. Wondo and Raza's work presents the alternative path, where deep expertise is channeled into building the very tools that define how a product is made. To scale this thinking, they needed a way to codify their design philosophy. This led to the "design harness," a system for teaching an AI what good design means and how to avoid producing generic "AI slop."

Raza offered a crisp definition of the problem.

Slop isn't just bad output. it's the result of indecision. "What slop is," he explained, "is like, you didn't decide what it should look like."

The harness, which they also call "Honest," is their solution. It's not a simple linter for aesthetics. It’s a sophisticated system with an orchestrator that routes tasks to specialized sub-agents for design criticism, motion, or patterns. At its core is a `control catalog`, a simple YAML file with three tiers of rules. "Non-negotiable" rules are deterministic and enforced by scripts. "Mandatory" rules must be followed unless an agent has a strong, justifiable reason. "Recommended" rules are left to the agent's judgment. This structure acknowledges that some design choices are absolute, while others depend on context. It provides a framework that, Raza estimates, can get them "roughly 70%" of the way to their intended design.

The final, most difficult 20% is where true craft lives. To address this, the team is building "Handmade." Raza presented it as a "very first version" that they have been working on for "about six months plus." It exists as an open-source npm package for direct manipulation, with a larger idea for a full Mac app.

Handmade enables a designer to work directly on the real codebase. The intended workflow involves a designer creating a new Git branch, opening the application in a visual canvas, and making changes that translate directly into code. It's not about editing a live production server, but about closing the gap between the design tool and the source of truth. "I want to design directly on top of the real app that my developer is building," Raza said.

This challenges the idea that designers and engineers must live in separate worlds. What if the collaboration layer they needed already existed? "It's basically Git, right? GitHub," Raza proposed. The idea resonated, with an audience member, Anh, noting he had tried building something similar for editing HTML slides. For Raza, this gets to the heart of the matter. "One thing that is quite clear to us is I think prompting is not the way," he stated, connecting the idea to the need for direct manipulation. Designers need to "grab the agent hand and use your own hand to direct the design."

Before a team can craft the final details, it has to decide on a direction. During the Q&A, Raza explained how they use Wayfinder, a tool that forces them to diverge and converge, like the double diamond model of design thinking. It helps them explore possibilities while recording decisions in GitHub issues, ensuring their path to the final product is clear.

Another audience member asked for advice for bootstrapped founders. How can someone without a design team or custom tools avoid creating a "weird techie looking app," especially for consumer products?

Raza’s answer was direct: it starts with taste. Before you can guide an agent, you have to know what you like. He compared it to designing a house. You wouldn't let a builder do whatever they want. "I just create a mood board of how my house should look like. Then I'm sure your agent will know how to generate a design MD based on this mood board."

For founders, the first step is to have a point of view. If you don't trust your own, he added, find a proxy: ask friends or family who have "good fashion sense." If you have an opinion, you can guide an agent to build something great. If you don't, you will get the generic default.

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SQ Collective hosts Coworking Fridays for founders, operators, and AI builders working through real product questions in Singapore.

Join an upcoming Coworking Friday: https://lu.ma/sqc-friday Explore SQ Collective: https://www.sq-collective.com

Michael