How Notion designers ship live prototypes in minutes | Brian Lovin (Product designer)

The way I think about designing B2B SaaS is you want your designs to encounter reality as early as possible. I've always been into prototyping, and then all of a sudden, these AI coding tools come along, and now I can prototype faster. I can prototype in production.

So explain to us what this prototype playground is.

It's just a Next.js app. All of our prototypes are in one place. Seeing what other people are working on is really fun and interesting, and oftentimes, you spot cool ideas, and you're like: "Ooh, I want to try that." The code is all in one place. It's just in one repo, and so I can just yoink cool ideas from other people's prototypes and incorporate them into mine.

Every time somebody is, like, a little anti-AI-assisted coding, I'm like: "Do you know that I used to have to walk uphill both ways for my CSS?" It was not fun [chuckles] to do this.

I mean, even just sitting here watching this, I still just find this magical.

[upbeat music] Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have a designer-centric episode with Brian Lovin, designer at Notion AI, who's gonna show us how he set up a prototype playground for the entire Notion design team to vibe code using Claude Code any prototype they need. This is a great one for someone looking to either shift their design organization into a code-first prototyping mode or learn some advanced techniques with Claude Code. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch: these tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your copilot needs to see your entire code base. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs, and for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch, it's a massive lift. That's where WorkOS comes in. WorkOS gives you drop-in APIs for enterprise features so your app can become enterprise-ready and scale upmarket faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor are already using WorkOS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at workos.com. Start building today. Brian, welcome to How I AI. What I am so excited about in terms of our conversation today is you're gonna show us about how one of the best-designed products out there, Notion, is being designed by people like you using these new AI tools like Claude Code. So why did you make this shift to how you were doing design, what it meant to prototype, design, and build things, especially for a product and in a company who values design so highly?