Guess what, Reader? I had a breakthrough this week with a system I'm building.

One of those moments where things finally clicked into place. I think I even shouted "YES!" out loud. 😂

Let me tell you about it.

I think I mentioned in a previous issue that the Kit Growth org has been working with the team at Casper Studios to create AI-powered internal systems and level-up our systems-building skillsets. (and if I didn't, well, now you know)

As part of their engagement with us they identified a few workflows they'd build for us, and then also hosted training and office hours to help us as we built our own workflows.

One of the systems they worked on for us was a Brand Studio Request Agent. Basically a way for Kit team members to submit a brand request via a chat interface that'd ask the right follow-up questions, with some tools available for self-servicing where possible.

While the agent itself needs more work to fully solve our workflow challenges and get to a point where it's delivering a fully fleshed out brief for net-new projects, what they were able to build for us was a system for automatic image generation.

Now the image itself is not AI generated, but it uses a template we designed and adds the necessary information into the right spots via dynamic fields. And this is what the process looks like:

There's still some kinks to work out here, because it definitely didn't need to know my name to generate this image. but WOW how easy is that?

We used to create these manually by duplicating a frame in Figma when a new request came in from the People Ops team. It was simple enough – just a couple of clicks and copy and pasting the right details in – but all of that time adds up. And not just the time of creating the image, but the time for the People Ops team to fill out our request form, the time to triage that request and assign it to the right person...

With this workflow, the People Ops team can have an image ready in seconds! 😱

Of course, I wanted to expand this to offer more self-service via other templates so I set about learning from the workflow the Casper team had created for us (that's how I learn best; by reverse-engineering something someone else has built and applying it to a real-world need of my own).

Here's what I learned:

• It uses a combination of Relay and Creatomate for the functionality, and Claude for the interface the user interacts with.
• You can create tools (workflows) in Relay that connect to Claude via an MCP, which is basically a way to extend the functionality of Claude.
• Creatomate isn't as comprehensive a design tool as Figma, nor is it as nice to use, but I could do everything I needed to to replicate a template in Figma inside the tool
• Creatomate can do video too! (so obvs I'm gonna work on a way to automatically generate video versions of the assets next)
• The only AI involvement is at the start and end: the workflow gets the inputs from Claude and Claude delivers the URL back to the user. The actual image generation is just API calls and JSON magic! So there's a way to run this workflow completely without AI, and I'm going to try that next (a form in Notion where you click to generate the image)
• It's harder than I thought to do anything with an image uploaded to Claude as an input (another reason for wanting to try a Notion form instead).

I know my way around HTML and CSS, but anything else code-related is not my forté. So when I did my first run of the image workflow and IT WORKED (mostly) I couldn't believe it. I was so proud of myself.

And I realised how much I'd been missing that feeling recently.

I'd missed how it feels to tackle a problem by learning something new. The feeling of working through challenges and troubleshooting. Of your mind expanding as you learn new things about what's possible. And that sweet, sweet feeling of success when you get the desired result. It's so empowering.

While I'm not ready yet to share this workflow in any more detail, my hope is that by sharing this experience it inspires you to tackle a challenge or learn a new tool or put yourself in 'building' mode this week. I know it's hard to carve out time for (trust me, I had this on my to do list for months before I got to it), but it's so worth it for the creative energy boost.

Next week at Kit we have a "CreateAI Friday" where I'll get to focus on improving and building on top of these systems the whole day, so expect to see a more comprehensive overview in a few weeks time.

Hope your week is going well.

Talk soon,

​

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