I built a native prototyping tool. It hit 2,600 weekly downloads.

One command, a live, native prototype in under 60 seconds, then you design it by prompting. Here’s the story and a full walkthrough.

It started with a real problem at work.

We had a major product change coming. Key UX flows moving, new UI, brand changes. The kind of thing you cannot judge from a Figma canvas. I needed to feel it. Real gestures, real scroll, the way it actually behaves in your hand.

Figma surfing wasn’t going to tell me that. Figma Make is good, and I use it, but it renders the web and I needed to feel native. Xcode would get me there and lose every designer on my team on the way. I’d been dabbling with Expo on personal apps, so I knew native was reachable. It just wasn’t reachable for a designer who didn’t want to live in an engineering setup.

So I asked a simple question. What if I strip Expo down to the basics, point Claude Code at the folder from a terminal, and just let it run?

A couple of hours later, it worked

After an afternoon poking at Expo with Claude, I had it.

One command opens the iOS Simulator with a welcome screen, ready to prototype. Under 60 seconds and you have a live, real, native prototype running in front of you. As far as I can tell, it’s the first tool that does this.

npm create proto@latest myapp

Then the fun part. You open a new terminal, open Claude Code in the project and start prompting. The screens come to life as you type, thanks to Expo’s hot reload. No canvas. No IDE. You describe what you want and it appears in the Simulator.

cd myapp
claude

Then connect the Figma MCP to Claude and you can build your actual designs straight into the prototype. That’s the moment it clicked for me. Within hours, the product we’d designed was running as a live native prototype I could hold and feel.

I sent it to a few friends to see if it would break

That was the real test. Hand it to other designers and watch what happens.

They got hooked. They started sending me videos of their own prototypes running. That’s when I knew it wasn’t just solving my problem.

npmjs now shows around 2,600 weekly downloads. Turns out a lot of folks needed this more than I thought.

Where it sits next to the tools you already use

Every tool here is good at its job. The point is that one specific combination didn’t exist yet: designer-friendly, genuinely native, prompt-only, no IDE, no canvas.

A few comparisons:

Figma Make is designer-friendly and needs no IDE. It renders a webview, so native feel isn’t its job.

ProtoPie is great for rich interaction design, but it isn’t native and isn’t prompt-driven.

Origami Studio can get genuinely native, but it’s a steep canvas-and-patch tool, not a prompt one.

Expo and SwiftUI are as native as it gets. Both are built for engineers, not designers.

Prototo is the one that’s all five at once. That’s the gap it fills, and it’s the only reason it exists.

What’s honest about where it is today

The core works now. One command, the Simulator opening itself, prompting through Claude Code, Figma MCP, hot reload. That’s live today.

It’s a prototyping tool, not a production one. It generates prototypes you test, share, and hand off. Though the handoff is cleaner than usual, since the project itself reads like a spec.

And it’s native only by design. That’s a deliberate constraint, not an oversight.

Try it this week

If you’ve got a flow you can’t judge from the canvas, the kind you need to feel, give it 60 seconds.

npm create proto@latest myapp

Then cd myapp, run claude, and ask for a screen. Watch it come to life.

Learn more at prototo.app, read the docs at docs.prototo.app, and the full demo is on YouTube above.

If you build something with it, send me the video. I’m collecting them now.

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Sherizan is Chief of Design at Botim, MENA’s fastest-growing super app. Previously Global Design Leader at TikTok and Senior Principal Designer at Grab, where he led the GrabPay redesign. He writes the Design AI Stack newsletter and builds in public.