< Day 4 — Complete >
Personality & Polish
Deep feature specification day. Teams reverse-engineered features from reference apps, wrote detailed specs, and produced their most ambitious builds yet.
What Happened
The Feature Envy exercise was the morning's highlight — students found features in apps they love and reverse-engineered them into PRD specs. The afternoon builds showed the biggest qualitative jump of the week. Teams started thinking about reach features and what it would take to make their apps genuinely useful.
Key Moments
- Feature Envy exercise surfaced features students didn't know they wanted
- Students started thinking about what's 'under the hood' — databases, APIs, auth
- Biggest qualitative jump between daily builds so far
Student Highlights
“Writing a detailed feature spec for something I'd only vaguely imagined made the build dramatically better.”
— Derek
Learning Targets (as planned)
Knowledge
- Design systems as communication decisions
- Colors, typography, spacing as signals
- Mobile considerations and integration possibilities
Skills
- Finding and extracting design references (Mobbin, Dribbble, Refero)
- Using Claude to generate design system PRD sections from references
- Building apps that look intentional, not default
Mindset
- Same features, completely different personality
- Design choices say something before the user reads a word
Schedule (as planned)
| Time | Block | What Happens |
|---|---|---|
| 8:30 AM | Morning Exercise | “Design Hunt” posted in Slack |
| By 9:30 AM | Exercise Due | Post in #hds-general |
| 10:00–10:45 AM | Group Session | Pull up student design references. Quick visual examples: same app concept, three radically different design treatments. “Who is each of these for? How do you know?” Design systems as communication decisions. |
| 10:45–11:00 AM | Break | |
| 11:00 AM–12:00 PM | Build Task | Show yesterday’s feature-rich build with a Design Guidelines layer — watch what Lovable does differently. Plan teams’ design approach. |
| 12:00–1:00 PM | Lunch | |
| 1:00–3:00 PM | Build Time | Work with Claude to extract design systems from references as PRD sections. Add Design Guidelines layer to PRD → fresh Lovable build. |
| 3:00 PM | Deliverable | Post design-enriched PRD + new Lovable build in Slack. Push to GitHub. |
| 3:30–4:30 PM | Group Debrief | Compare builds. Same features, completely different personality. Demo Day prep preview for tomorrow. |
Up Next
Demo Day tomorrow — polish sprint and team presentations.