Meng To - How to build your ideas with AI

One of the most impressive things I’ve seen a designer make all year is Meng To’s Dreamcut.

It’s the perfect example of what it looks like to transition from traditional designer to builder 💪 So if you’re interested in becoming a designer who ships then this is the episode for you.

Meng gives a highly practical breakdown of what it looks like to go from 0 to 50,000+ lines of code as a designer. And Meng is the perfect person to onboard you into tools like Claude and Cursor because he’s spent 10+ years teaching designers how to code through Design+Code. So in this episode we go deep into:

• Meng’s tech stack and go-to AI tools
• How to fine-tune visual details in code
• The secret to an effective first 10 prompts
• How to find the perfect first project to build
• How much code you need to know to build with AI
• What parts were easier/harder than Meng expected
• Why Meng considers Claude the newest design tool
• a lot more…

• Meng uses Claude + Cursor to build his ideas
• Meng’s original .svg pattern product that he build to get started
• Meng’s new Dream Cut editor
• Meng previously used Screen Studio (which is awesome), CapCut, and Eleven Labs for videos
• AI typically uses TailwindCSS (Meng also mentioned the Shadcn component library)
• Meng also mentioned V0 and Bolt as alternatives to Claude
• Scratch is visual programming for kids