One of the most impressive things I’ve seen a designer make all year is Meng To’s Dreamcut.

It’s the perfect example of what it looks like to transition from traditional designer to builder 💪 So if you’re interested in becoming a designer who ships then this is the episode for you.

Meng gives a highly practical breakdown of what it looks like to go from 0 to 50,000+ lines of code as a designer. And Meng is the perfect person to onboard you into tools like Claude and Cursor because he’s spent 10+ years teaching designers how to code through Design+Code. So in this episode we go deep into:

Meng’s tech stack and go-to AI tools
How to fine-tune visual details in code
The secret to an effective first 10 prompts
How to find the perfect first project to build
How much code you need to know to build with AI
What parts were easier/harder than Meng expected
Why Meng considers Claude the newest design tool
a lot more…

Meng uses Claude + Cursor to build his ideas
Meng’s original .svg pattern product that he build to get started
Meng’s new Dream Cut editor
Meng previously used Screen Studio (which is awesome), CapCut, and Eleven Labs for videos
AI typically uses TailwindCSS (Meng also mentioned the Shadcn component library)
Meng also mentioned V0 and Bolt as alternatives to Claude
Scratch is visual programming for kids

Silke Helfrich

The AI-powered Podcast Player