Iterative UI/UX polishing workflow for web applications. The exact prompt and methodology for achieving Stripe-level visual polish through multiple passes.
When to Use: This is for when your site/app already works and looks decent and you want to improve it. There's a different approach when it looks bad and needs a complete overhaul.
Key Insight: Something about asking for agreement from the model ("don't you agree?") somehow motivates it to polish things up better. Also, instructing it to separately think through desktop vs mobile leads to much better outcomes.
This prompt is used so frequently it's worth putting on a Stream Deck button:
I still think there are strong opportunities to enhance the UI/UX look and feel and to make everything work better and be more intuitive, user-friendly, visually appealing, polished, slick, and world class in terms of following UI/UX best practices like those used by Stripe, don't you agree? And I want you to carefully consider desktop UI/UX and mobile UI/UX separately while doing this and hyper-optimize for both separately to play to the specifics of each modality. I'm looking for true world-class visual appeal, polish, slickness, etc. that makes people gasp at how stunning and perfect it is in every way. Use ultrathink.
The phrase "don't you agree?" engages the model's reasoning about whether improvements are possible, rather than just executing instructions.
"carefully consider desktop UI/UX and mobile UI/UX separately...
hyper-optimize for both separately to play to the specifics of each modality"
This prevents the model from making compromises that work "okay" on both but great on neither.
References:
These anchors push the model toward higher quality than generic "make it better" instructions.
Extended thinking allows the model to:
| Model | Effectiveness |
|---|---|
| Claude Code + Opus 4.5 | Excellent |
| Codex + GPT 5.2 (High/Extra-High reasoning) | Excellent |
| Gemini CLI | Good |
This prompt works with:
# First pass
[Run the UI/UX polish prompt]
# Review changes
[Agent makes improvements]
# Second pass
[Run the same prompt again]
# Repeat 10+ times until changes become minimal
You can have more than one agent working on UI/UX polish simultaneously:
For complete overhauls, use a different approach focused on establishing a design system and component library first.
After each iteration, you might notice:
These small changes compound. An app after 10 passes looks dramatically better than after 1 pass.
For systematic UI/UX work, create beads:
br create "Polish homepage UI/UX for desktop" -t enhancement -p 2
br create "Polish homepage UI/UX for mobile" -t enhancement -p 2
br create "Polish dashboard UI/UX for desktop" -t enhancement -p 2
br create "Polish dashboard UI/UX for mobile" -t enhancement -p 2
This lets agents work on UI/UX polish as part of the normal bead workflow.
I still think there are strong opportunities to enhance the UI/UX look and feel and to make everything work better and be more intuitive, user-friendly, visually appealing, polished, slick, and world class in terms of following UI/UX best practices like those used by Stripe, don't you agree? And I want you to carefully consider desktop UI/UX and mobile UI/UX separately while doing this and hyper-optimize for both separately to play to the specifics of each modality. I'm looking for true world-class visual appeal, polish, slickness, etc. that makes people gasp at how stunning and perfect it is in every way. Use ultrathink.
Great, now I want you to super carefully scrutinize every aspect of the application workflow and implementation and look for things that just seem sub-optimal or even wrong/mistaken to you, things that could very obviously be improved from a user-friendliness and intuitiveness standpoint, places where our UI/UX could be improved and polished to be slicker, more visually appealing, and more premium feeling and just ultra high quality, like Stripe-level apps.