About

Why I built Duetpad.

I’m a designer. For a year I built things with AI builders — Lovable, Bolt, v0, Cursor — and got back work that was “close but wrong” about sixty percent of the time. The honest reason: my briefs were vibes. Personas, journeys, jobs-to-be-done lived in Notion docs the AI builders never saw.

I started writing structured briefs by hand. The output got measurably better. But the structured thinking lived in one place and the AI builders read another. I copy-pasted. I lost details. The thinking died on the way over.

So I built Duetpad. It’s a canvas with thirteen typed templates — the ones I reach for most are Problem Statement, Persona, Jobs to be Done, Customer Journey, and Acceptance Criteria. You answer six framing questions; you pair Claude Code; you let Claude Code do the reasoning while the canvas keeps an editable record of every artefact. When you’re ready to ship, you hand the resulting brief to your AI builder — the structure stays intact.

That’s the whole product. It’s small on purpose.

What it is

A canvas for the thinking part of design.
A way to bring Claude Code to the canvas without losing your work.
A brief shape Lovable, Bolt, v0, and Cursor can actually parse.
Built and run by one designer, for designers like me.

What it isn’t

The future of design.
A Figma replacement. Pixels live somewhere else.
A Notion replacement. General-purpose docs live somewhere else too.
An enterprise design tool. No team rooms, no SSO, no sales calls.

Under the hood

Duetpad runs on Next.js and Supabase. The canvas keeps every project’s artefacts in a single typed table; Claude Code reads and writes through a small toolset built on the pairing protocol. Duetpad holds the canvas; Claude Code does the AI work.

You don’t need to know any of that to use Duetpad, but I’d rather say it out loud than dress up the product with words like “intelligent”.

What’s deferred

A few things you might expect aren’t here yet, on purpose:

Billing. Duetpad is free to start — one project, with your own Claude paired for the AI. The paid plan that lifts the cap to unlimited projects is $19 a month; we’re wiring Stripe up now, and the card only comes in when you upgrade.
A custom domain. We’re live on a Vercel subdomain while soft launch runs. The custom domain is queued.
Team workspaces. Duetpad is a single-person tool today. Team rooms are a later question, not a hidden upgrade.

Part of the Emerged family

Duetpad shares its design language — tokens, type, the quiet near-white surface and teal accent — with the other Emerged tools I’m building. If something here looks familiar from one of the others, that’s the point.