Hey there 😁,

Today on the blog, Joss wrote about his summer experiment using AI to completely redesign his SaaS platform, Plus Tard. Spoiler: it's not as simple as asking ChatGPT to "make it pretty."

The Challenge With paying customers arriving and feedback rolling in, Plus Tard needed both a landing page refresh and an internal app redesign before the back-to-school social media rush. Instead of doing it the traditional way, Joss decided to push AI to its limits.

The Approach: Directive Coding The key? Being incredibly specific with instructions. Joss created a detailed brief covering everything from TailwindCSS integration to color schemes (keeping those blue/green gradients), SEO requirements, and UX priorities. Think of it as managing a junior developer who happens to work at the speed of light.

The Results ✅ What worked: 40-50% time savings, surprisingly coherent color schemes, and clean Tailwind-based code ❌ What didn't: JavaScript functionality (especially Stimulus and Symfony UX) got mangled, and SEO optimization was superficial at best

The Bottom Line AI accelerated the redesign process significantly, but it's not a replacement for developer expertise. You still need to review, refine, and rebuild certain parts. With a well-crafted prompt, though, the time savings are real.

Want to see the full before/after comparison and learn about the specific prompting strategies? Read Joss's full article here →

Also, if you're curious about the final result, check out Plus Tard - the redesigned version is now live.

See you next week 😁