Notes on building AI-powered SaaS platforms. Systems design, typed contracts, agent orchestration, and the unglamorous craft of shipping software that survives contact with real users.
Most AI design tools end the moment the picture looks good. I built OpenPlanr's design phase on the opposite stance: a design is only valuable if it survives to production. So design is the first governed phase of a pipeline, and its real output is a machine-readable contract the planner, the build, and QA are all held to.
Most AI design is one shot and converges on the same safe look. I built a loop instead: taste-aware concepts, a spend gate, parallel variants on a live board you pin-comment, and a $0 path that needs no image API at all.
After years of building websites, SaaS platforms, automation systems, and AI-powered products, I decided to create a space to share what I learn while building.
Without a project design system, an AI agent quietly falls back to a generic look. So I gave OpenPlanr a system it cannot skip: a hard gate before any design runs, and a linter that fails the build on sub-AA contrast.
A coding agent does an hour of great work, the session ends, and the context is gone. OpenPlanr fixes that by turning a feature spec into a durable plan the agent re-reads every session, from codebase analysis to shipped tasks.