🖍️ Mots Outils
My daughter was learning French sight words in first grade. Existing tools were either dated or paywalled. So one Saturday, I built one — a few hours, with Claude as a coding partner. Her classmates use it too.
Role
Design Engineer
Products
Side Project · Education · AI-built
Dates
April 2026
A literacy tool for my daughter, shipped in a weekend.
From a need at home to a tool in the classroom.
Mots Outils started as a personal need: a small literacy tool to help my daughter practice the French "mots-outils" she was learning in CP. The existing options were either built for the 2010s or hidden behind subscriptions — neither felt right for the way she actually learns.
So I sat down on a Saturday, sketched the modules I wanted, and built the whole thing in a few hours with Claude as a coding partner. I drove the pedagogy, the structure, and the UX decisions; Claude handled the implementation. Two evenings from idea to working tool.
A small artifact that says something specific.
"A designer with the right judgment, paired with a capable AI coding partner, can ship a real, working product in a weekend. Not a prototype — a tool that gets used."
This isn't a flagship case study. But it's the workflow I'm building toward in everything I do now — and it's the reason I think the role of a designer is being redrawn faster than most teams realize.
Where it is now.
The tool is live and free. My daughter uses it weekly. Her classmates picked it up shortly after, and the teacher has integrated it into class routines.
A literacy tool for my daughter, shipped in a weekend.
My daughter was learning French sight words. Existing tools were either dated or paywalled. So one Saturday, I built one in a few hours — for her, and now for her whole class.
From a need at home to a tool in the classroom.
Mots Outils started as a personal need: a small literacy tool to help my daughter practice the French "mots-outils" she was learning in CP. The existing options were either built for the 2010s or hidden behind subscriptions — neither felt right for the way she actually learns.
So I sat down on a Saturday, sketched the modules I wanted, and built the whole thing in a few hours with Claude as a coding partner. I drove the pedagogy, the structure, and the UX decisions; Claude handled the implementation. Two evenings from idea to working tool.
A small artifact that says something specific.
"A designer with the right judgment, paired with a capable AI coding partner, can ship a real, working product in a weekend. Not a prototype — a tool that gets used."
This isn't a flagship case study. But it's the workflow I'm building toward in everything I do now — and it's the reason I think the role of a designer is being redrawn faster than most teams realize.
Where it is now.
The tool is live and free. My daughter uses it weekly. Her classmates picked it up shortly after, and the teacher has integrated it into class routines.