Layers
AI skills for deep product design
Details
- External ID
- 48015321
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Layers
- Website domain
- jamiemill.com
- Launched
- May 4, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.3053311793214863
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Some years ago I wrote a mildly popular article called 'The Elements of Product Design' which broke down modern product design into 7 distinct layers. It was influenced heavily by Jesse James Garret's Elements of UX, hence the name similarity.The framework seems to help remind designers and their teams that there's more to design than just the visuals: structure and flow, concept modelling, product strategy, domain understanding, user needs.What's lacking from the article are concrete steps how you might apply the thinking, which was always a bit hard because it's so situational. But with AI, I felt suspected I could give it examples and guidance about each layer and use the LLM's creativity to fill in the blanks.The result is a set of skills, one per layer, plus an 'Orient' skill to help kick things off.The idea is to use it as a coach, a sparring partner, or if you're delegating design to AI, to tell it to use the skills to ground the design in the necessary deeper work.It works quote well in Claude Code, asking it to write to Markdown files, which I view in VS Code with the 'Markdown Preview Mermaid Support' extension.I tried asking with Figma MCP asking it to diagram in FigJam but the labels overlapped and it wasn't readable. ;( That would be a good next step so you can take over and edit the diagrams more easily, if anyone has some ideas.
Enrichment
- Theme
- 3D modeling and visual design tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Agent / copilot
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- ai skills for product design
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes Layers is a collection of structured markdown prompts and CLI skills for LLMs (Claude Code, Cursor) based on product design frameworks, requiring only prompt engineering and standard package distribution.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 184 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #149 of 185 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 187 days after the earliest competitor.
- Figr · hn · 2026-01-22 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- skills · github · 2026-09-27 · 108 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- BrainGrid · hn · 2026-02-10 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- product-design-three-views · github · 2026-09-16 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- product-film-skill · github · 2026-09-26 · 374 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- blender-game-skills · github · 2026-09-24 · 93 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- logo-design-skill · github · 2026-09-26 · 1017 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- dataviz-skills · github · 2026-09-24 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.40
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a agent / copilot tool for Agriculture yet.