We're two product designers at Fern and we recently rebuilt the buildwithfern.com site in five weeks with no developer help. The three things worth mentioning here from the blog:
Figma has become a very expensive virtual whiteboard. It’s still in our loop, but only as a starting point for ideation and moodboarding. Then we quickly move to claude.ai/design for iteration and Claude Code to build. The code is the source of truth, not the Figma file.
The common understanding is that AI does 80% of the work and humans finish the last 20%. We found it’s more like 25/50/25: humans set taste up front, AI carries the middle, humans polish the end.
The biggest prompting mistake we made was describing the implementation instead of the output. When we tried to build our footer animation by specifying vector widths, curve endpoints, and line lengths, we got brittle, lifeless results. When we switched to “svg blades of grass swaying in the wind” it nailed it in the first few passes.
We open-sourced two templates from the build: the hero product animation and the full marketing repo (skills, campaigns, voice file). Links in our full blog here: https://buildwithfern.com/post/building-fern-site
