Welcome to Unknown Arts — I’m Patrick, your field guide to tech’s creative frontier. Join thousands of builders around the world navigating what’s next.
Hello friend,
I’ve been heads down over the past month building an open-source starter kit for my AI design sandbox. It’s finally coming together, and I’m excited to share it with you.
After my conversation with Michael Riddering on Dive Club, a number of people asked whether I’d be willing to open-source something like what I’d built for my team at Sublime. I wanted to, but felt strapped for time. So I focused on writing, which is, of course, what I do here.
I published Build a Design OS with the intention of continuing a detailed series to help you build your own. I started the next draft covering the setup, the lessons I’d learned, and what I’d do differently if I were starting from scratch. But by the time I’d worked through all that, it was something like 10,000 words and honestly pretty boring because so much of it was just setup instructions 😅.
At that point, I realized that even with all that detail, a codebase people could actually use would be more helpful. So I gave my instructions to an agent to see if it could get a first version started, and lo and behold, it worked! It wasn’t a “one-shot”, but it set up enough that I had a good foundation to start building on.
Since then, I’ve put basically every waking, non-work hour into transforming this starter kit into something I’d be proud to put my name on. Hell, I even became one of those guys you read about online who prompts his agent from his phone at the gym!
Now I’m getting ready to share that starter kit in beta. This version benefits from everything I learned building the first one. It’s already substantially better than the version I shared on Dive Club, so I’m excited to bring this foundation back to my own team, too.
Like the internal Design Studio at Sublime, it brings prototypes, design systems, and product context into one shared environment, so your design work can compound over time. The code is open source so you can run it, understand it, and change it to fit how you work.
My hope is that for a lot of people, the starter kit will provide a foundation that just works, without going through the hundreds of hours of trial and error I put in over the last ten months. At a minimum, you’ll have a real codebase your agent can inspect, pull apart, and reconstruct to make your own version.
This Thursday, October 15, I’m sharing a first look in a free live session: Build Your Own AI Design Sandbox.
My fellow designer and writer Xinran Ma from Design with AI will be hosting the session. I’ll talk through the background from building the internal tool at Sublime, then demo the open-source Design Studio and share it with attendees so you can give it a try. We’ll also have time for questions.
People who come to the session will be the first to get access!
But if you can’t make it Thursday, no big deal. I’ll share it more broadly soon (likely next week).
It’s a beta, so I’ll be learning how it works for people outside my own team and using that to guide my efforts. I’ll also be putting together video walkthroughs and articles to help you get the most out of it. I think it will be a lot more useful to ground my writing in a tool you can actually experience firsthand.
So if you’re a designer or product manager exploring AI, personally or with a team, I’d love to see you at the session!
Thursday, October 15, 2026 · 10 a.m. Pacific / 1 p.m. Eastern
45 minutes, including Q&A. Free to join, with a recording available afterward.
Until next time,
Patrick
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