I like to work directly with AI.
AI made a mockup cost minutes, so the work moved from making ideas to choosing between them.
53 mockups · 4 days · live on a real Home Assistant
Homeboard is a dashboard for my house. Three decisions shaped it; every round behind them follows.
The house in these frames is a placeholder. The UI and the rounds are real.
I check the house from my phone as much as my desk. A put tiles next to the map, and on a phone the map lost. B keeps the house full-screen and pulls the controls up when I need them. Once that was settled, judging looks got easy.
What it changed: Every later round kept the plan full-screen, so looks were compared on one layout.
Another session handed me two pictures of a house: one you look into, one you look down on. I'd never have written 'both' in a spec. Seeing them side by side, I knew I wanted to find a room in 3D and check every room from above, in one model.
What it changed: 3D + Top became a requirement; the switch shipped in the next two mockups within 30 minutes.
After fifty mockups the agents had given me plenty of options and none of them was mine. The look came from a set of reference images. I asked for a prototype of that, and it ran on my real house the same day.
What it changed: The mockup became the product: Daylight drives my real Home Assistant, with demo mode as the default.
Aura is the tight loop: one concept image to a canonical look in about an hour.
Pattern
Options first: the agent lays out trade-offs and recommends; I pick.
Finalists are frozen. A change is a new mockup, so rounds stay comparable.
Done means the check was re-run, never a worker's say-so.