Eight ways to open an article, and the one that keeps winning
A typed hero system with eight arrangements, and what eighteen real choices revealed about which composition actually survives contact with a screenshot.
Posts by Alejandro Haydar
The design doc was wrong about its own colours
A colophon that reads its own tokens instead of describing them — because the prose version had been describing a palette the code abandoned.
I wired Figma to the code. Then we left Figma.
Code is the source of truth and the canvas is a synced view. Figma Connect proved it. Then the canvas stopped being worth the maintenance.
Fifteen prompts, five criteria: what a typed registry actually changed
I couldn't run this on the registry I built at work. So I rebuilt the pattern on a component set I still have, ran 90 generations, and scored them.
Snowplow: one contract that people and coding agents build from
I embedded with Snowplow's teams, audited three drifting surfaces, and deployed one contract people and coding agents build from. They now run it without me.
One Wrapper Class Instead of Twelve Prose Modifiers
Swapped Tailwind Typography for shadcn/typeset across every long-form surface — twelve prose modifiers on four routes became one wrapper class.
Turning a passive article into an interactive reader
A design-engineering upgrade that adds text-to-speech, sentence highlights, progress, speed control, and reactions to long reads.
A closed world agents can't hallucinate out of
The typed registry that stopped our coding agents inventing components — and the parallel package I killed in order to ship it.
From Dead Hamburger to Floating Dock
Progressive portfolio enhancements building in real time
Building a portfolio design system with Subframe and Claude Code
How I integrated a production design system into my live portfolio as a solo design engineer — without breaking the typography I already loved.
Customer Value Agent — deploying an AI agent on the data customers already had
I led design on an AI agent at Thought Industries, got into the codebase, rebuilt it on data customers already had, and shipped to four paying beta customers.
Swirl Networks — the in-store platform that got acquired by Best Buy
Hired into marketing, I ended up leading product design — and shipped the in-store media platform Swirl was acquired by Best Buy for.
