Case Study 02
Role
Designer + Developer
Year
May 2026
Two systemic problems were quietly eating my team's time. Production was drifting from design system spec, and AI-generated prototypes looked nothing like the real product — forcing the team to revert to Figma for every iteration. Both tools to fix these gaps didn't exist, I built them as personal initiatives.
IDS Inspector finds design system violations on live pages. Prototyping Workbench makes AI prototypes look like production. Together they close the loop between design intent and what customers actually see.
Scope of Work
Project details
The Goal
Make the systemic gaps invisible. Don't ask designers to remember to check IDS compliance — give them a tool that surfaces violations instantly. Don't ask AI to "try to match IDS" — give it an environment where it can't produce anything else.
Project Details
The Process & Hard Design Calls
Some of the major inflection points throughout the project
01
The strategic call
For both tools, the decision wasn't "should I build this?" — it was "should I solve this for myself or for the org?" The cheap path was solving it for myself. A scrappy Chrome extension only I'd use. A prototype scaffold only I'd reach for. That would have saved me hours per week and stayed invisible. The more expensive path was building infrastructure. Documented, generalized, adopted across teams. That meant evening and weekend time on tools that weren't on anyone's roadmap, with no certainty anyone else would use them. I chose the org path for both. The reasoning was simple: if I was hitting these gaps, my team was hitting them too. Individual effort doesn't compound. Shared infrastructure does. A tool used by ten designers is a 10x leverage gain on the time I invested building it. The decision to build on personal time rather than asking for resourcing was deliberate. Asking for resourcing would have meant a roadmap conversation, prioritization debate, and likely a "this isn't on the team's OKRs this half" answer. Building it on personal time meant the work existed first, then proved itself.
02
Research and discovery
03
IDS Inspector — build for Claude, not just for humans
04
Prototyping Workbench — no hand-rolled pattern wrappers
Partner Testimonials
"I would say if I was going through a session it's saving me at least 50% of the time it would take to do this manually, and in some cases that's more like 75% time savings."
Adam Beasely
Senior Product Designer, Intuit
"Manas built and shipped IDS Inspector independently, a tool the design team is already using in daily QA. Impactfully using prototype workbench to drive alignment in triad and leadership discussions for Landed Costs and Serial/Lot Tracking."
Nikita Gill
Design Manager, Intuit
