Lab
Lab / AI tool

ClarifAI

A conversational AI tool that interviews you about a rough product idea and turns the conversation into a structured brief, tracking what’s covered and what’s still open as you talk.

Type
AI tool · web app
Role
Designed & built
Status
Live
ClarifAI end to end: a one-line idea becomes a structured brief, gaps and all.
01

Why I built it

The blank page is the slowest part of any product doc. The fastest way past it isn’t a template, it’s a good interview, the kind a sharp PM or researcher runs. That’s exactly the sort of structured, judgment-heavy conversation an AI can hold, as long as a person stays in the loop to steer and edit.

It also scratches a bigger itch. I design agentic AI workflows for a living, so I want to build them too. ClarifAI let me work through the same questions I face in product design, how to make AI output trustworthy, editable and genuinely useful instead of a black box, with my own hands on the keyboard.

Building it taught me more about designing good AI tools than any amount of speccing would have.

02

What it does

You start with a rough idea, a sentence is enough. ClarifAI interviews you about it one focused question at a time, plays your answers back, and turns the conversation into a structured brief: problem, target user, solution, success metrics, constraints and scope. You leave with a real draft and a clear list of what’s still unanswered.

  • Conversational, not a form. It asks one sharp question at a time and reflects your answer back, so you think the idea through instead of filling fields.
  • Coverage you can see. Six topics fill in live as you talk, so you always know what’s covered and what’s left.
  • A brief, and its gaps. The output is a structured brief that also names the open questions, instead of papering over them.
  • Export where you work. Take it out as a one-pager, PRD, backlog or Figma brief.
The interview
ClarifAI interview: the assistant reflects the idea back, then asks a structured multiple-choice question about the core pain the tool solves⤢ Click to zoom
The interview: one focused question at a time, your answer reflected back before it moves on.
03

How it works

The start screen
ClarifAI welcome screen with the prompt “What do you want to create today?” over an idea input⤢ Click to zoom
Where it starts: a rough idea in a sentence, and the interview takes it from there. Click to zoom in.

ClarifAI runs a real interview, not a questionnaire. You pick the interviewer’s style up front, a skeptical PM, a curious researcher, a structured interviewer or a contradiction detector, and it asks one question at a time in that voice, reflecting each answer back before it moves on. Behind the chat, six topics fill in as they’re covered, so progress is always visible.

Live coverage
ClarifAI coverage panel showing 2 of 6 topics covered, with problem and target user checked and solution, success metric, constraints and scope still open⤢ Click to zoom
Six topics, problem, target user, solution, success metric, constraints and scope, fill in live as the interview covers them.

Under the hood the conversation is progressively summarised, so each turn stays small and cheap, and the model returns structured state rather than just text: what’s covered, the data collected so far, and a flag for when there’s enough to generate. The API key stays server-side, never in the browser. When enough is covered it assembles the brief, and it surfaces the gaps instead of hiding them.

The brief
ClarifAI generated brief with target user, proposed solution, success metrics and constraints, plus a highlighted “gaps remaining” list of open questions⤢ Click to zoom
The generated brief, with a “gaps remaining” section that names what’s still unresolved instead of hiding it.
04

Tech stack

Built and shipped solo, fast with AI assistance and refined by hand. The interview and brief generation run server-side on the Anthropic API, with progressive summarisation keeping each turn cheap.

Next.js 16 React 19 TypeScript Tailwind Anthropic SDK Tiptap react-pdf GitHub Vercel