AI-Assisted Prototyping

"Regardless of your choice, cloud development environments all support building more complex applications than chatbots, with the ability to deploy to the cloud and easily share updated iterations over time."

"But what’s cooler is that you can use these tools to build functional prototypes from a Figma design, convert a rough hand-drawn sketch to a working app, translate a PRD document into an interactive prototype, or even build a usable internal tool for your team, with no coding ability."

"If you haven’t been paying close attention over the past six months, you may have missed the rise of tools like Cursor, Replit Agent, v0, Bolt, and other new cutting-edge AI tools that allow you to build working apps in minutes."

"One major drawback of Lovable is the lack of a code editor. To edit code, you have to ask the agent with prompting. This can make it difficult to debug issues directly in Lovable. I often find myself starting a new feature here but moving over to Cursor to resolve problems."

"But what’s cooler is that you can use these tools to build functional prototypes from a Figma design, convert a rough hand-drawn sketch to a working app, translate a PRD document into an interactive prototype, or even build a usable internal tool for your team, with no coding ability."

"I use Replit whenever I need a fully functional back end or I want to use Python code. I’ve used it to build an MP4-to-GIF converter and a Substack image resizer—both tools I use weekly."

"The Project uses those images as a reference, the entire context it has from its lifespan, and it generates a Lovable prompt I can copy straight in. Ten minutes later, we’re looking at a working prototype."

"A leading vibe-coding platform that takes a plain English description of what you want to create and builds a production-ready app. It includes a native database, user authentication, security scan, and hosting."

"Describe what you want, upload the raw data, and get back a compelling deck/doc/website. Creating decks and docs is one of the most time-consuming and annoying parts of most builders’ jobs."

"It’s designed instead to be the best tool in the world at prototyping your ideas using your existing products’ styles, getting feedback from customers, and then helping you build a real product in your regular development environment."

"Component libraries are the first big improvement you can bring to your team. They allow you to maintain branding and consistent styling without having to manually clean up each prototype to look like your product."

"Once you have your component library complete, pause! You’ll want to create a fork of the project and start to use your components in a new project. Your forked project will automatically reuse your components to assemble your design like Legos."

"Without handoff guidance or high-quality prototypes, AI prototyping is left to explorations and experiments, which are hard to operationalize and scale."

"Spending time to improve your components is worth it. Every prototype made using them has better visual quality, is less distracting to stakeholders, and allows conversations to focus on the specific elements that are being tested."

"In this case, we can use the Cursor agent to make calls to Figma’s MCP server to retrieve detailed styling information, and then transform that into components."

"Over the course of last week I built an AI-powered chatbot for Lenny that uses his entire newsletter archive to answer any question you have about product, growth, and startups. It’s built with GPT-3 and it took a couple hours to do, end to end."

"PMs can turn sketches, screenshots, and ideas into live interactive prototypes. Designers can refine the UX inline. Engineers review the code in their GitHub repos."

"As you’re reading through this list and wondering what to do, try opening up one of the AI tools (or a few at a time) and simply describe what you want in plain English, as if you were talking to a remote engineer. Then, iterate by describing what you want to change about what you see, as if you’re speaking with a remote engineer. You’ll be surprised by how far you’ll get."

"Your stories opened up my mind to what’s possible, and even inspired me to vibe code a few new tools for myself, including this sweet YouTube thumbnail preview tool, a tool to help me craft tweets for my podcast clips, and the beginnings of a tracker of the most mentioned books by podcast guests (data isn’t real yet)."

"Almost no examples are alike. Everyone is solving their own hyper-specific problem (e.g. group drafting app for your multi-sports fantasy league), or exploring a random idea they (or their kids) suggested (e.g. a cats and sushi browser-based video game). Welcome to the era of n-of-1 personalized software."

"Cursor, Claude Code, Replit, and Lovable were your favorite vibe-coding tools, followed by v0, Bolt, and ChatGPT. Honorable mentions to Gemini, n8n, Zapier Agent, Warp, and Windsurf."