Dive Club 🤿 Kris Puckett - Becoming an AI-native designer
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Mar 19, 2026 Kris Puckett, a design leader at Stripe formerly at Dropbox and Mercury, who built the Epilogue reading app. He discusses building AI-native workflows, using Claude Cloud Code to prototype and create custom skills, teaching models niche expertise like metal shaders, and turning permissionless side projects into internal tools and career momentum.
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How Epilogue Was Built Without Traditional Coding
- Kris Puckett built a personal iOS reading app called Epilogue after teaching himself with Claude Code and Cloud Code instead of traditional coding courses.
- He created book libraries, synced quotes and notes, and iterated UI while Cloud Code walked him through APIs and app setup steps that he previously couldn't do.
Start By Asking LLMs To Do The Unknown
- Do use LLMs like Cloud Code as co-creators by starting with small, messy prompts and iterating instead of waiting for perfect specs.
- Kris gained momentum by asking Cloud Code to connect Google Books API, follow step-by-step instructions, and fix issues from screenshots.
Teaching Claude To Generate Metal Shaders
- Kris taught Claude about metal shaders by feeding it YouTube tutorials and the Book of Shaders, then made a shader system that extracts book cover colors and exposes tweakable parameters.
- He iterated in Claude, copied parameter values, previewed, and hard-coded presets into Epilogue.