Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.

Start free trial →
CV Claire Vo Claire Vo Founder of ChatPRD, an AI tool for product managers, who writes and speaks about product management, AI agents and coding workflows.

“When people talk about taste, what you really need is design language and references in the world that you can point to. You need to know what liquid glass is, what minimalism is, what a gradient is. And when people ask me how you get good at this, I say: describe websites. Use your words to describe what makes brand A versus brand B special. The more you practice that, the better you can be at prompting agents to do a great job.”

How I AI · AI Builders · November 2026

“When people talk about taste, what you really need is design language and references in the world that you can point to. You need to know what liquid glass is, what minimalism is, what a gradient is. And when people ask me how you get good at this, I say: describe websites. Use your words to describe what makes brand A versus brand B special. The more you practice that, the better you can be at prompting agents to do a great job.” — Claire Vo, How I AI

Context

Imoh had just read out his long first prompt for the app, asking for a light, minimalist autumn look. Claire Vo pauses to argue that what made it work was design vocabulary, not knowledge of Swift.

Transcript

How I AI Around 14:27 into the episode
Claire Vo

Maybe that feels like autumn in Norway, right? It starts to get really dark.

William Imoh

So, yeah, I had to reframe it before that. I was like, first, this shouldn't be in dark mode. Not everything belongs in dark mode. It should be light mode. Use light, warm colors, explore gradients. And I'll use liquid glass as much as possible as well.

Claire Vo

So I want to pause really quickly because what I think is so interesting about what you just said in that prompt and our conversation so far is: look, you don't need to know Swift. Like, you just don't. It's none of your business. You don't need to know. You need to know that. Maybe that you should use Swift, although AI could figure that out. But what you do have that I feel like a lot of people haven't invested in their own skilling is design and product language. Like truly the ability to describe what you want with specificity. And when people talk about taste, do they talk about taste? All of like, what is taste? We need taste. And really what you need is design language and references in the world that you can point to. You need to know what liquid glass is. You need to know what minimalism is. You need to know what a gradient is. And I think the more rich your reference set is when it comes to design, the better. And then on the product side, the more you know how to articulate a user journey in a way that anybody can execute on, an engineer, human engineer, an AI engineer, the better that like workflow will be. And so, you know, when people ask me, like, how do you develop taste or how do you get good at…

William Imoh

Yeah, I agree. I look at, and as soon as I put this out there, I didn't intend to share it with anyone because I wanted to build this for myself to use just by myself. And then I put out a tweet that, hey, I made this thing. I think it's really cool. I'm not going to share it because I don't want…

Claire Vo

Can you show it to us real quick? We're going to put your Norwegian to the test.

William Imoh

Can you speak? English. Yeah, uh, please, please just speak English.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from How I AI