Hidden Space is a workspace for creative people working with AI — projects, image and video generation, reusable elements and presets, and a dashboard that shows where your time actually went.

Two days before the challenge showed up I'd been messing with the rawest possible version of this idea — vibe-coding with ChatGPT late at night, no system behind it, mostly just checking whether the thing in my head could exist at all. I wasn't planning anything.

Then the Flowstep challenge landed on Contra, and the timing was almost annoying, because at that point I couldn't pretend I wasn't going to try.

So I thought, fine. Let's do this one properly.

Somewhere around the second prototype it stopped being a submission. I'd wanted this tool for about two years and never had the skill-stack to build it, and suddenly I was designing it instead of describing it to someone who'd never build it either.

Seven screens later it's live, running on production data. I used it for client work this week.

01 · What it is

Hidden Space is a workspace for creative people working with AI. Projects, image and video generation, reusable elements and presets, a gallery that remembers your settings, and a dashboard that shows where your time actually went.

The whole thing sits on one idea: the platform should stay out of the way of the work. The video walks through all of it, so I won't repeat that here. A few things from the process instead.

02 · The colour question got solved by looking

I've spent years of my career debating colour in the abstract and getting nowhere.

This time I rendered three whole directions — achromatic, violet, turquoise — as full workspace screens with the same composition, put them next to each other, and just looked. Achromatic came out stylish and completely impersonal, which I honestly didn't expect. Violet came alive.

Took minutes. I keep thinking about how much time I've wasted not working that way.

03 · Locking the system before the screens

That's what kept the build from drifting. All seven screens were designed in Flowstep against one design system, same tokens and same accent rule, screen after screen.

One accent colour in three tiers. Solid on the primary action. A faint wash on whatever's active. Flat neutral grey everywhere else.

That rule survived production without bending once, which surprised me more than it should have.

04 · I got something wrong, so I'll say it

All seven screens matched their references and I was ready to call the whole thing shipped. Then a small icon bug pushed me into an actual audit, and I found out that "this screen is rebuilt" and "this screen is migrated" were two different claims, and I'd been treating them as one.

Cost me time. Saved the foundation.

If you're moving fast with AI in the loop, verify the thing you're claiming instead of inferring it from your own changelog.

05 · Four tools, four jobs

Flowstep — the design surface. Editable screens I could keep reworking instead of redrawing.

Claude — product reasoning, and the decisions behind the design system.

Claude Code — the production rebuild.

Codex — a second pass over the implementation as it landed.

Underneath all of it the foundation got rebuilt too, from 1,464 lines of hand-written CSS to TypeScript, Tailwind and owned Base UI primitives running on Cloudflare.

06 · What I'd take from it

I didn't have to become an engineer for any of this. I had to know exactly what I wanted and stay disciplined about the system.

That's the part I'd want other freelancers here to hear. The tool you keep wishing existed is a lot closer than it was a year ago.

07 · What's next

7/7 shipped, and that's the foundation rather than the finish line.

Script agents that carry a script through to a storyboard. Audio in the same workspace. Shared styles and a community library that grows the more people use it.

Thank you

To Contra and the Flowstep team, genuinely. These challenges keep pushing the edge of what's possible, and this one pushed me well past mine.

Flowstep's groundwork is what made the difference — the design guide, screens I could keep reworking, MCP into Claude Code and Codex, iteration measured in minutes instead of rebuilds.

I came for a challenge and left with a foundation. Thank you for that.

Try it yourself

Don't take my word for any of it, go walk around inside it. The login below opens the working product on production data. And if something in there annoys you, tell me. That's how it gets better. 😎 Dropping more in the comments — screens, the bits that got cut, and a few things that went sideways on the way.

⚠️ Links

Presentation

Hidden Space — the working product. Sign in and explore: projects, gallery, presets, elements, dashboard. Generation and sharing are switched off on this demo account, everything else is open.

Username: Flowstep Password: Contra

Flowstep screens

Figma — behind the process