---
title: Building disposable UI
description: "The AI builds the mockup and a control panel for it in the same file. Twenty minutes of sliders, export the settings as JSON, throw the mockup away."
date: 2026-09-01
tags: [ai, design, craft]
url: "https://mahdif.com/blog/building-disposable-ui/"
---

# Building disposable UI

The AI builds the mockup and a control panel for it in the same file. Twenty minutes of sliders, export the settings as JSON, throw the mockup away.

People ask how I tweak the details.

For years the answer was Chrome DevTools. Nudge a padding value in the inspector, get it right, then lose track of what I changed. Figma on the rare occasion I needed to think in shapes.

Now I ask for something else. The AI builds the mockup and a control panel for that mockup in the same file. Not a design. A machine that makes designs. The one behind this site's refresh carried 45 knobs: five colors, three font stacks, the spacing scale, corner radius, motion timing, and the copy itself.

Then I stop designing and start turning. Twenty minutes of sliders lands somewhere I could not have specified up front, because I could not have described it before I saw it.

The panel does not tell me which direction is right. It only helps once I am already in the right neighborhood. Taste picks the direction. The knobs make it exact.

When it is right I export the settings as JSON and throw the mockup away. Eleven labs, 73 mockups, every one built to be deleted.

The code is disposable. The decisions are what I keep.