Jake Knapp

Today we’re launching Design Canvas for AI agents. AI can build a feature, but every "design tweak" turns into another prompt. We built a drag & drop editor for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex to explore and iterate on your UI, so you get the best design by default. No endless prompting. Ship better designs in code with Subframe.

🚨 Back by popular demand: Character Foundations, our one-day masterclass for founders! Applications are now open for our next event on March 26 in SF. Come spend the day with @jakek, @eliblee, and me! Learn our unique approach to product design, meet other founders, and participate in real conversations about building startups today. Last year, we launched Character Foundations on a simple premise: in the age of AI, product, design, and marketing matter more than ever. Today, that's 10x true. For many teams working in AI, coding and shipping are no longer a significant bottleneck. They can build and launch faster than they ever imagined. But so can every other team. As a result, what matters most today is: 1. Product — Am I building something that meaningfully solves an important problem for customers? 2. Marketing — Can I cut through the noise and stand out in a market where everybody is building and shipping fast? But there's something else important going on in AI... The capability of software has expanded dramatically. Today you can do things with software that you simply could not five years ago: discover drugs, design chemicals, invent materials, analyze research, automate filings, close deals, etc etc. For teams building here — what we call "frontiers of the software-addressable economy" — there is an even greater set of challenges, because there is simply no playbook for how to build a software company like this. - How do you sell software products to a company that doesn't buy software? - How do you build trust in your product, when it's doing a job that's done by experienced human experts? - How do you go full-stack and sell outcomes, not just software? To be clear: We don't have easy answers for these questions. Nobody does. We don't believe in playbooks and cheatsheets that tell founders WHAT to do. Instead — Character Foundations is all about HOW to answer these questions. We've used our Design Sprint and Foundation Sprint to help 300+ teams navigate the intense unknowns of building new products and businesses today. We're on the court with founders every day, using these methods to give our portfolio companies at @CharacterVC the greatest possible chance of success. We want to share the Design Sprint and Foundation Sprint with more founders. So, for the first time ever, we created an opportunity for founders to sprint with us without raising money from Character. Character Foundations is free and equity-free: There are no fees to attend, and we take 0% of your company. You just need to apply. We love doing this work with founders. And Character Foundations has become one of the truly peak moments of our work together at Character. You can read more and apply at character.vc/foundations — and if you have questions, please reply and I'll drop in to answer it. Thanks!!

Our team’s work outperformed: OpenAI’s GPT-OSS model by +49.32 pts Gemini 2.5 Flash-lite model by +6.12 pts Claude 4.5 Sonnet by +6.49 pts We’ve all seen the news headlines of large consulting reports that hallucinated. They lead to lawsuits, fired employees, and bad PR. Our policy engine dramatically improves accuracy and our results speak for themselves: - 3.3× accuracy gains on TruthfulQA - +49 pts truthfulness - 96.5% hallucination prevention on HaluEval A question we get often is “How can you control models you don’t own?” Answer: You don’t fine-tune the model. You govern the reasoning path.

the future is extremely promising, but it has some advanced dangers. ​so let's def/acc -- accelerate the defenses to big risks, so we get the good future. hackathon nov 22 at @vivariumsf. sponsored by @BlueDotImpact (others to be announced soon). luma.com/def-acc-hack-s…

So good

If you can make it to this event, I can vouch for the fact that @luke_drago_ will make it fascinating

Hey not to make this all about me but I wrote a new book, it's like a sequel to Sprint, it's available here theclickbook.com okay thanks!

@Sara_J0nes_ @jazer Yes, it's doable! Just allow extra time for you sprint days because you'll have to "reboot" a bit when you don't work consecutive days.

🚨 (1/8) Today, we’re officially launching Hypernatural 1.0: the fastest, weirdest AI video generator for storytellers! You can read more about it in our blog post or watch the video below. To answer the question: yes, this video was made in Hypernatural. hypernatural.substack.com/p/storytellers…

Founders: The next session of Character Labs kicks off in person in August. Run sprints together with me and @jazer. Eat. Sleep. Sprint. Repeat. Applications open now.

Founders please check this out thank you

We should have to use a hyper connected dopamine machine for every little task. ✨So I put the most useful features of my phone into a fun little package to prototype a digital sidekick!✨ It’s making me comfortable thinking of reducing my phone time a LOT. Details in thread:

🚨 Big announcement – after two years of beta, @SubframeApp is now open to everyone! Subframe is the best way to build UI, fast. It's a design tool that lets you visually build UI using real components, then export it as React / Tailwind code 👇

Had a great time on @lennysan's podcast, check it out!

Applications are now open—so if you’re starting something new and ambitious, I hope you’ll apply today. character.vc/labs

And, starting now, Character Labs is a twice-yearly program. In my opinion, it is not only the best way to accelerate toward product-market fit, but an incredibly rewarding way to spend 30 days with your team.

In 2009, at Google, I ran the first Design Sprint. During a 5-day session in Stockholm, we went from sketch to working prototype of the video call software that would become Google Meet.