I had to spec out Cloud Telephony page by page for the dev team. My first instinct was to open Figma and start annotating screens. Instead I gave Claude the codebase and asked it to write markdown specs for each page. First two files came back accurate but useless — every button, every column, every colour dutifully listed. Screenshots in prose.
So I flipped the brief. I asked Claude to drop the CSS notes and audit each page as a designer would — flagging what should change, not just what exists. Every file since has a designer's note, 🆕 markers on improvements, and a before/after table at the bottom.
The output is now doing two jobs at once: it's the build spec for the dev, and it's my UX proposal for the cofounder. The 🆕 tags let him decide what's in scope without me having to write two documents. What I learned: getting Claude to describe code is low leverage. Getting it to audit code with me, while I make the design calls, is where the compounding starts. The markdown is the artefact. The audit is the actual work.