I'm doing a master's in AI and I was still avoiding AI tools. I thought it made me a worse engineer. I was wrong — but not completely.
I'm doing a master's in AI. And for a long time, I refused to use AI in my actual work. My thinking was simple — if I rely on it too much, I stop being a real engineer. I stop thinking. So I stayed away.
Meanwhile, I had a list of ideas I kept promising myself I'd build someday. That list just kept growing. No time, always something else going on.
Then I started noticing everyone around me was actually shipping things. Fast. And I'm still hand-writing every component. At some point I just had to try it.
Google Stitch
I tried Google Stitch first. Honestly I expected it to be bad — most AI UI tools feel generic. But the output surprised me. Some screens came out great on the first prompt. Others needed a few rounds of tweaking, but even that was fast. The quality was better than I expected.
The real useful part is the export. Stitch gives you the HTML and a design.md — a proper design system document with colors, typography, spacing, and component rules all written out. That's what makes the handoff to Claude Code so smooth.
Claude Code
I installed Claude Code about a week ago. I gave it the design.md from Stitch and described what I wanted to build. It read the design system, set up the project structure, configured Tailwind from the design tokens, and scaffolded the components — all following the rules in the spec.
The UI came together quickly. Where it needed more work was the functionality — you still need to describe the behavior clearly and guide it along. But the architecture decisions, the file structure, the boilerplate? That part just happened.
“The design.md from Stitch acts like a shared contract. Stitch writes it, Claude Code reads it. You just decide what gets built.”
Was I wrong to avoid it?
Partly. I think the risk of over-relying on AI is real — especially for people who skip the thinking entirely. But if you already know what good code and good architecture looks like, these tools just let you move faster. Your experience still matters. You just spend it on different things.
Those ideas I had sitting around for years? I'm actually building them now. That part feels good.