Turn Claude Into a Design Genius: Jack Roberts' 3 Levels
Jack Roberts fixes Claude's AI-slop design in 3 levels: a 2,000+ design-system gallery, a critique-agent design loop for pixel-perfect HTML email, and a local design OS with style recipes.
Jack Roberts (who built and sold a tech startup with millions of customers, now building an AI startup) opens this 17-minute video with a diagnosis: Claude ships ugly, AI-slop design because it has never actually seen what great design looks like. His fix comes in three escalating levels.
Level 1 feeds Claude references: a gallery of 2,000+ professional design systems it can borrow from directly. He one-shots a titanium protein-shake website in Apple's design language, then runs a side-by-side teardown of his startup Glaido against Linear — down to letter-spacing and type-scale ladders — with an interactive slider that makes the design gap visible.
Level 2 is the design loop: Claude spins up critique agents that iterate on the output until an HTML email matches real-world benchmarks, then ships it through Zapier as the delivery layer — generation to inbox, end to end. Level 3 is a design operating system running locally: it generates images on demand via OpenAI, OpenRouter, and Higgsfield, indexes every image on your machine into a searchable library, and stores brand style recipes for generating consistent thumbnails whenever you need them.
For anyone using Claude or Claude Code to build websites, emails, or brand assets, the takeaway is a complete workflow you can copy: feed real design systems in, let critique agents iterate, and run a local asset system on top.
FAQ
Why does Claude's design output look like AI slop?
Jack Roberts' diagnosis: Claude has never actually seen what great design looks like, so it defaults to mediocrity. The fix is feeding it references — e.g. a gallery of 2,000+ professional design systems so it can borrow directly from design languages like Apple's or Linear's.
What are the three levels in the video?
Level 1: plug in a gallery of 2,000+ design systems so Claude borrows professional aesthetics. Level 2: the design loop — critique agents iterate until the HTML email hits benchmark, then Zapier delivers it. Level 3: a local design OS — on-demand image generation, a searchable index of every image on your machine, and saved brand style recipes.
How does the design loop work?
Claude spawns critique agents that score and iterate on its own output until the HTML email matches real benchmarks; Zapier then acts as the delivery layer and actually sends it to the inbox — a closed loop from design to delivery, not just generated code.
What does the local design operating system do?
Three things: generate images on demand via OpenAI, OpenRouter, and Higgsfield; index every image on your computer into an instantly searchable asset library; and save brand style recipes so you can generate consistent thumbnails and brand assets anytime.
Which tools does the video use?
Claude / Claude Code at the core; Zapier for email delivery; OpenAI, OpenRouter, and Higgsfield for image generation; Linear as the design benchmark; plus mentions of Google's AntiGravity and Nous Research's Hermes. Runtime is 17:54.