Before writing a single line of code, I need to understand what I’m building. Not abstractly — concretely: who the users are, what the real problem is, what the app is called, what voice it has, what technical decisions I’m making from the start. For a long time, that work happened informally — in scattered notes, in my head, or spread across different roles on a team: product knowledge in one conversation, brand direction in another, architecture in some document nobody kept updated. Now I formalize it with an agent called MVP Creator.
In this video — the first in a series about my personal process with AI — I show how I use MVP Creator to generate the complete set of foundation documents for a new project: research report, business plan, brand guide, and technical guide. All of it with three prompts, from an initial idea to documentation ready to hand off to Claude Code.
The Three Prompts
The example in the video is a photo delivery platform for professional photographers. These are the exact prompts I use, in order.
Prompt 1 — The Idea and Context
Help me create an MVP for a photo delivery platform for professional photographers.
Think of it as a private gallery where photographers deliver finished work to clients.
The core concept: a photographer creates a Project (for a client or personal work),
organizes photos into Collections within that project, and shares the gallery via
single-use expirable links. Invited clients can view, comment, like, and download
photos in their preferred quality.
Key features:
- Projects with collections and high-resolution photo uploads
- Active Storage for thumbnail + quality variants (low/medium/high)
- Reorderable photos within collections, cover photo per collection
- Shareable links: single-use, expire in 7 days, create read-only sessions
- Download: single photo or multi-select as zip, with quality choice
Target users: freelance and studio photographers in Latin America
Language: Spanish-first, English secondary
App name: I'm thinking "Liminal" — open to suggestions
Research these competitors: https://www.pic-time.com and
https://www.picdrop.com/web — also look at how Google Drive handles
shared folder UX as a reference point.
Use the MVP Creator skill to generate the full documentation set.
With this prompt the agent launches competitor research, runs through the discovery questions, and generates the four foundation documents: research report, business plan, brand guide, and technical guide.
Prompt 2 — Brand Voice
Based on everything we've defined about Liminal — the LATAM market, photographers
delivering work to clients, the quiet confidence of the name itself — write a brand
voice document.
The voice should feel like a photographer who has found their style and doesn't need
to announce it. Not austere, but economical. Someone who chooses words the way they
choose light — deliberately, with care for what gets left out as much as what stays in.
Professionalism here means craft, not corporate. The app handles something personal
— a photographer's finished work, a client's important memories. The voice should
honor that weight without becoming precious about it.
Influences: the way Magnum Photos writes about their work. The directness of a good
photo caption. Not the breathless enthusiasm of a SaaS landing page.
The document should include:
- Core personality traits (3–4, with explanation)
- Tone spectrum (when to be warmer vs. more spare)
- Vocabulary: words we use, words we avoid
- UI microcopy examples (button labels, empty states, error messages)
- Both Spanish and English examples side by side
This second prompt goes straight to the character of the app. A brand voice guide is a document that rarely gets produced in an MVP phase — and it’s one of the most useful when the time comes to write microcopy or define how the app speaks to its users.
Prompt 3 — UI Mocks
Using the frontend-design skill, create UI mocks for Liminal's critical screens.
Pull from the brand guide already established and the brand voice: quiet craft,
deliberate, editorial — not SaaS.
Prioritize these screens in order:
Client-facing (unauthenticated, via share link):
1. Gallery landing — the first thing a client sees when they open their link.
2. Collection view — browsing photos within a collection, with like, comment,
and download interactions visible.
3. Download selection — choosing photos and quality before downloading as zip.
Photographer-facing (authenticated):
4. Project dashboard — list of projects with status at a glance.
5. Collection editor — uploading photos, reordering, setting cover photo.
6. Share link manager — creating and tracking links, seeing which have been used.
For each screen:
- Design for desktop first, note mobile considerations
- Show real placeholder content — no Lorem Ipsum
- Embed a short design rationale note explaining the key decision made for that screen
Aesthetic direction: editorial photography magazine meets quiet utility. The UI
should feel like it was designed by someone who photographs, not someone who ships
dashboards.
The third prompt uses the frontend-design skill together with Maquina Components to generate HTML mocks of the critical screens. The result isn’t a Figma file — it’s a functional visual reference, coherent with the brand guide, before opening the editor.
The Result
Three prompts. Six documents. Mocks of the main screens. All the context needed to hand off to Claude Code and start generating code with direction.
It’s the same process I used to build Resto, a personal finance app based on the Japanese Kakeibo method.
The video runs 40 minutes. It’s not an accelerated demo — it’s the real process, iterations and corrections included.
Installation
All plugins are available in the maquina-app/rails-claude-code repository. Full documentation at MVP Creator — Documentation.
To install MVP Creator in Claude Code:
# Add the marketplace
/plugin marketplace add maquina-app/rails-claude-code
# Install the plugin
/plugin install mvp-creator@maquina
To install the full set of plugins used in this series:
/plugin install rails-simplifier@maquina
/plugin install rails-upgrade-assistant@maquina
/plugin install maquina-ui-standards@maquina
/plugin install mvp-creator@maquina
/plugin install better-stimulus@maquina
/plugin install spec-driven-development@maquina
For the Claude graphical interface, download the repository as a zip, extract the mvp-creator folder, rename the extension to .skill, and drag it into the Claude window to install it.