second-brain

felix-lee

2 min read

Felix Lee

CEO of ADPList; designer-turned-builder who ships production apps entirely via Claude Code; practitioner perspective on AI-native design workflow.

Last updated: 2026-04-13

Overview

Felix Lee is the co-founder and CEO of ADPList, a global mentorship platform with 55,000+ monthly bookings. He started using Claude Code during the 2025 holidays and over 3.5 months built three production-grade apps — personal website, ADPList globe visualization, and a growth analyzer SaaS — without opening Figma once.

His background is industrial design before software. He brings a craft-first lens to AI-era building: concerned with intentionality, material quality, and the difference between “good enough” and genuinely refined.

Key Ideas

  • Skip Figma for new builds — went straight to Claude Code for all three products; Figma is a bottleneck in an agentic workflow
  • Claude Code wins on taste — produces significantly higher quality output than Cursor, Gemini AI Studio, Codex; “from a taste perspective, Claude Code just wins it all”
  • Figma’s future role — collaboration/comments layer and design system fidelity tool, not primary creation surface; “the use case of Figma really isn’t what it was a year ago”
  • Taste is very hard to codify — spent 2+ weeks (4 hrs/day) trying to replicate design taste in a skill file; concluded it’s possible but very hard; the problem is AI treats everything as high quality so slop detection rules don’t work
  • Designers aren’t freaked out enough — 90% of designers in ADPList’s ecosystem still in traditional Figma workflows; only 10–20% increase in Claude Code conversations over 6 months; Figma Make has more adoption but is less capable
  • Council of advisors skill pattern — creates design review skills with multiple reviewer personas (UX researcher, UI designer, visual polisher) to get structured feedback on designs
  • Industrial design lens — references Jony Ive’s Ferrari design as an example of intentionality level that software design rarely reaches; the irreversibility of physical manufacturing forces a level of care that digital doesn’t require

Connections

  • figma — Figma MCP workflows, code-to-Figma feature, Figma Make comparison
  • design-taste-craft — validates taste as hard to codify; practitioner evidence for the human filtering function
  • thin-harness-fat-skills — UX reviewer skill as concrete example; skill-as-council-of-advisors pattern
  • product-trio-agentic-era — designer who became a full builder; evidence for role blurring

Sources

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