Underhype has a six-step production cycle: Claude Design, Figma, Claude Code, localhost, pre-production, and production.

Since I was the only human on the project, my job wasn't really building — it was art-direction, handovers, and writing documentation clear enough for agents to follow.

Claude Design

Every idea starts in Claude Design. I keep it working strictly on a design-system level — only color tokens, only existing components, nothing invented from scratch. That's what keeps six months of "vibe-coded" features looking like one product instead of six different ones.

Figma + Claude Code

Once an idea has a shape, I refine it in Paper — it's still the best place for me to actually look at a screen and judge it. From there it goes back to Claude Design, and then to Claude Code, which builds it out on localhost.

To make that handover work, I lean on something I learned back at Yandex, on an enterprise-scale product: document the logic from both the user's side and the system's side. Most days it felt less like designing and more like a PM writing specs for an engineering team.

Pre-production

Anything behind the paywall gets tested here before it's real. It's also where I run usability tests — since it's a shareable link, I can hand it to actual people without exposing anything live.

Production

Once a feature holds up in pre-production, it ships. That closes the loop, and the next idea starts the cycle again at Claude Design.

Why it has to run like this

I follow the Basecamp principle fix time and budget, flex scope so instead of building everything at once, I release features one by one to hit deadlines.

With no one else on the team to absorb slippage, the cycle is what keeps that schedule from sliding.