Snacking—focusing on small, shippable tasks that make the product better but don’t necessarily help it grow—is addictive. Sometimes your main project is a slog. Why not take a break and fix something? You get that sense of accomplishment and suddenly your main project feels less daunting (the power of dopamine!).
My guilty snack is UI work. I started out my career as a mostly front-end engineer. I would obsess over pixel-perfect designs and building a strong FE style guide (this was before they were even called style guides). Chris Eppstein’s Compass was my bread and butter. I’ve since moved on to other roles and I am not doing much front-end work these days. So how do I satisfy my cravings?
I recently built a Figma-like tool called Radiant. Except, unlike Figma, Radiant is 100 percent agent-driven. It allows me to snack in a healthier way on UI work because it generates high-fidelity mockups based on prompts I provide. Also, instead of the traditional approach wherein someone gives the engineer a mockup that is either way out of scope or just technically infeasible, Radiant constrains itself to what our current code is capable of doing. Agents are great at scanning code and doing a deep dive on all the layers. So why not use that to our advantage when mocking up UI?
To prove this idea, I decided to tackle a rough part of our UI: the current user dropdown. I had Radiant look at the current implementation and, based on the issues I called out, redesign it in a mockup and present some options. (For context, the model I used was Claude Fable).
Here’s what we got:
What impressed me was that Radiant also managed to pull our current styles from our code to generate these mocks. This was exactly what I wanted because instead of hallucinating a UI, Radiant just took what we had and modified it and presented multiple options. Once I chose a design, the final chef’s kiss was having Radiant generate a prompt to hand off to another agent for the implementation. That agent was able to one shot implement it (I used Claude Fable for the implementation).
Radiant is still new in my toolbox, but being able to do UI work by asking for mockups and then quickly iterating on them is my new favorite way to snack.