My Paper × Contra design challenge entry: a fictional product taken from AI slop to a polished, shipped UI in about 20 hours of canvas-to-code iteration.
Visit Cosmic Companions Compare before and after
The story
For the Paper and Contra design challenge, I decided to polish a small web artifact I vibe coded in early 2026. This is a fake alien adoption service I built with Claude as a way to test out Google’s new Web MCP. I gave the AI no instructions about the visual design because I just needed something functional. It served my purposes at the time, but it looked like AI slop, so I decided to make it better.
I pointed Claude Code at my code files and Paper Design, then asked it to build me a visual of the design system as it existed in code. This was so helpful because it gave me a good visual sense of the existing styling that I wouldn’t have gotten just by looking at the code or the live site.
Then I duplicated the artboard and started editing. The canvas is so essential for this part of a designer’s workflow: feeling out colors, fonts, layout, and seeing the path that you’re not taking right next to the one you are. Once I had a marginal improvement, I had Claude build it in code so I could see it live. This was the magical part, because I could instantly see how the interactions and responsive behavior felt without having to spend hours prototyping it.
I kept going in this same cycle: copy the live code into Paper via Paper’s Snapshot extension, iterate and edit in the canvas, have Claude implement changes in code, feel it out and debug in the browser, then go back to the canvas to iterate when it was necessary. Around and around we go: Paper, Claude, browser, and back again. This workflow is truly a dream: getting instant feedback on interactions and behavior in code, while still having the flexibility of the canvas when a broader exploration is needed. No translation, no busy handoff files, no manual prototyping — just fast iteration and meticulous control of what I’m building.
The final result after about 20 hours of work is a polished and unique alien adoption service. Go check it out on my GitHub Pages site, and get yourself a cosmic companion!