AI Tooling · Design Ops

Robby 5 v1

At Levelpath: a two-week, no-Figma demo that became the prototyping tool a whole design team used — and my first lesson in what AI tooling needs in order to hold.

Role: Designer, then sole builder
Timeline: 2 weeks, then ~2 months
Team: Two designers on the demo; the tool was mine
Result: 8 people prototyping in it almost daily

01 / 07 · Levelpath · April 2024 – April 2026

A design system, at a company that never stood still

I was hired to fix and own the design system at Levelpath, an enterprise procurement platform that grew from about 40 people to over 140 while I was there — shipping roughly 300 issues a quarter.

Keeping the rules intact at that pace was already my problem when my manager handed me a new constraint.

Levelpath Pipeline view with project spend data — Levelpath · the Pipeline

02 / 07 · Level Up · the AI era begins

My main tool was taken away

Level Up, a customer event, was on the calendar, and my manager added a rule: no Figma. Another designer and I had to build the prototype in code, with Claude Code, an AI coding tool. Every prototype we’d made before had started in Figma.

2 wks: start to presented
2: designers, same prototype
0: Figma files

03 / 07 · Level Up · the demo

Convincing, not functional

Three personas. A real chat box — you type, you hit send, a scripted answer comes back. It looked like a working product. It was on rails.

It presented well, and the company decided to invest further. That decision is what created Robby 5 v1.

It had to hold up on stage, not in production.

04 / 07 · v1 · turning the demo into a tool

Describe a screen, get a working first draft

The demo was fast enough that I couldn’t stop thinking about what it could be with the right setup around it. That weekend I started building a tool, and by Sunday it worked. I kept building it for two months alongside my regular design work.

v1 knew our components, colours, and layouts, so a designer or PM could describe a screen and get back a clickable prototype in our design language — not a static mockup.

What it honestly was: a prototype builder with almost no guardrails.

Guardrails in v1

Color— included
Tokens— included
Component rules— none
Product context— none
Enforcement— none

05 / 07 · v1 · how the team used it

Prototyping stopped needing a designer

Before, every prototype went through a designer, and ideas lost detail in the handoff. With v1, PMs started showing up to design reviews with prototypes that already matched our design language.

Designers copied each other’s working prototypes instead of redrawing them, and exploring five directions before picking one became normal.

Before and after workflow diagram: Figma handoff versus Robby 5 v1 prototyping

I was able to create general prototypes — mind you, very ugly — but it helped talk through the ideas with the design team.

Elena, PM

We’re now shipping real, functional code prototypes in hours instead of days.

Ryan, designer

06 / 07 · v1 · what it did

Days of back-and-forth became a single day

In one case I built several versions of a new component on real customer data in a single day — impossible in Figma, impractical to ask engineering for — and it went straight into a customer session.

8: people prototyping in it almost daily
~150%: more output, by a designer’s own estimate
1 day: to build a prototype on real customer data, ready for a customer session

Design stopped being a bottleneck and became a conversation.

07 / 07 · v1 · the rebuild’s premise

What v1 got wrong

The rules lived in six places

Notes, data files, styles, and logic buried in scripts. Adding one component meant updating three or four files, and every mistake was harder to find than the last.

It knew what things looked like, not what they meant

Our colours and components, but none of the product’s own language — record types, statuses, terminology, workflows.

A learning curve that kept people out

People who weren’t comfortable with AI tools had a hard time getting started. Lowering that barrier earlier would have brought more of the team in sooner.

Level Up and v1 added power, not rules. So I rebuilt it from scratch, on my own, around exactly the guardrails v1 never had.