Five Live Prototypes Turn Visual Taste Into a Decision Tree
Maps joelclaw’s planning and review workflows to an explicit human-in-the-loop branch for resolving visual uncertainty before implementation.
Visual taste is hard to specify in words. Will Ness turns it into something an agent can traverse: five radically different interfaces in one live mocked app, a picker to flip between them, and another round after every verdict.
The grilling-frontend-prototyping skill builds on Matt Pocock’s grilling and prototype skills. Instead of asking Claude Code to guess taste from a paragraph, it asks a human to choose among concrete alternatives. Each round walks down the visual decision tree: overall direction, component groups, then individual components. The interface becomes the question.
The sharper pattern is the planning hook. Ness wired the skill into Wayfinder, so novel frontend work creates a decision ticket that invokes this prototype loop. The workflow remembers when visual judgment needs a human instead of hoping an implementation agent notices. For joelclaw, that maps cleanly to planning plus pi-notes review surfaces: route uncertain interface work into an explicit human-in-the-loop branch before implementation.
Key Ideas
- Build five radically different variants for each design question instead of polishing the first plausible answer.
- Put every variant in one live mocked app with a draggable picker, keyboard switching, and state toggles so comparison stays fast.
- Use each human verdict to descend one level through the visual decision tree, from the whole screen to component groups to individual components.
- Treat the prototype as the question and the human’s selection as the answer; prose becomes supporting feedback rather than the main design medium.
- Encode the
grilling-frontend-prototypingskill into Wayfinder so planning automatically routes novel frontend work through human judgment.