My actual Claude Code workflow as a designer
How I design and ship production software with coding agents. The real setup, the taste file that keeps the output from looking generic, and where a person still matters.
Read the postSpeaking
I talk about designing and building products with AI, as a designer who still ships the code.
Talks
Build your own tools
Analytics I can talk to, a dashboard for my coding agents, an LED screen that shows my token usage. Building your own tools got cheap, and it changes how you think about product.
Read the postMy website's first reader isn't human
People now ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude instead of Google. How I rebuilt my site for AI agents, and how an event organizer found me through Gemini.
Read the postBuilding disposable UI
AI rarely gives you one answer. It gives you nine. Why I build a small page to judge the options, make the call, then throw the page away.
Read the postFrom a chat on my site to a product
I built a chat so my site could answer questions while I slept. Two months of evals later it became Sondo. What it takes to make AI answers right, and what each one costs.
Read the postDesigning a marketing site, on camera
Claude Code gave me 13 designs and I rejected all of them. Why the taste still has to come from a person, and how I handed my redesign back to agents to build.
Read the postMy joke website made $150
A joke site built in ten days, launched to two likes, then saved by a Product Hunt launch I forgot about. What a silly project teaches you about shipping.
Read the postDesigner, founder, acting CEO
First designer at Ronday, then acting CEO. Founder of DesignQA, then the one who shut it down. What designers bring to running a company, and what they get wrong.
Read the case studyFormats
Talks
20 to 45 minutes, demo optional
Panels
Panels and fireside chats
Workshops
Hands-on, for design teams
Podcasts
Audio, video or livestream
Based in the Bay Area, open to travel or remote talks.
For organizers
Ready for your event page.
Short bio
Mahdi Farra is a design leader and design engineer with 17 years of experience building products. He designed subscriptions at Meta, led design at Ava and Ronday, where he later served as acting CEO, and founded DesignQA, an AI devtool. He writes about designing and building with AI at mahdif.com.
Longer bio
Mahdi Farra is a design leader and design engineer with 17 years of experience building products. Most recently he was a Staff Product Designer at Meta, where he designed subscriptions for Facebook and Meta AI.
Before Meta he founded DesignQA, an AI tool that turned UI bugs into code fixes. He was Head of Design at Ava, which builds captioning for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. At Ronday he joined as the first designer, grew the design team to six, helped prepare the deck for the company's $7M seed round, and later stepped in as acting CEO.
He designs and ships production code, increasingly with AI, and builds his own tools in public, from Peeko, an analytics tool you can talk to, to Sondo, the AI that answers questions on his site. He writes and records videos about all of it at mahdif.com.
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