Working with agents
Prompting guide
Practical prompts for designers: inspect, generate, edit and review.
You talk to your AI client in plain language — no tool names or IDs needed. These prompts show what works well. Start each chat with the file open in Shippp: the client works on the file and the selection you have open.
Point at things with your selection
The simplest way to say what you mean is to select it in Shippp and say "this". The client reads your live selection; it never guesses one, and it never uses someone else's.
Prompt
Explain how this component is built: its variants, slots and which tokens it uses.Inspect and audit
Prompt
List every screen in this file and tell me which ones are marked ready for dev.Prompt
Audit the selected screen: find hard-coded colors, spacing and font sizes that should use tokens or text styles.Prompt
Compare the Mobile and Desktop versions of the Pricing section. What differs besides layout?Edit designs
Needs Read and write access. Be specific about what to use — your components and tokens — and where to put it.
Prompt
Create a new Desktop screen called "Team" using our Layout 5 footer and the blog text component for three short bios. Use only existing tokens.Prompt
Rename the layers in this component to meaningful names: Label, Icon, Container. Don't change anything else.Prompt
Replace every #737373 in the selected screen with the Grey-1 token.Ask for a plan first
Generate code
Prompt
Generate the React code for the selected component with the Chakra target and explain the props a developer will use.Prompt
Export our tokens as a Tailwind @theme file.Prompt
Generate the full Next.js project for this file into ./shippp-app and run it.Review your own work
Prompt
Render a preview of the Home screen and check it against our text styles and spacing scale.Prompt
List the saved versions of this file, then generate the design-system package from "Client review 2".Tips for good results
Name components, properties and layers well — the client reads the same names you see.
Mention tokens and text styles by name when you want them used.
Keep one goal per request. Chain requests rather than writing one huge prompt.
Ask the client to batch edits: one change set can hold up to 50 commands and is much faster than many small ones.
For repeating UI (cards, rows, pills) ask it to create a component once and place instances.
Previews cost more usage than reads — ask for a preview at checkpoints, not after every tweak.
If the client goes off track
- Ask it to revert its last change set — the rest of the file stays untouched.
- Restore a named version from Version History if you need to go further back.