Praxima Compass

New York has hundreds of galleries and the shows turn over constantly. A few existing tools let you find them, but none are intelligent or catered to your taste in art. These products end at discovery, without helping you engage more deeply with the work or learning what you actually like.

Praxima Compass recognizes that seeing art is both an introspective and a social experience, and lets you engage with it on your own terms. You can document your thoughts on the work that stood out to you, and scan artwork details so all those pictures that end up in your photos app are actually organized. You can create route-optimized walks and share them with clients or friends. You can follow friends and galleries to see their activity, and rate the shows you've been to, building a taste profile for the kind of art you want to see, and logging everywhere you've been in one place.

Every feature started as a rough wireframe in Figma to map out the UX architecture, core components, and interactions, then went straight to SwiftUI rather than a high-fidelity mock. The interactive parts — UX behavior, what happens on scroll, how it feels in the hand — don't show up in a static frame, so the sooner the design is running the sooner it's a real design.

The build ran on agentic workflows through Claude Code and Devin: describe the change, see it compiled, judge it on the simulator, refine. To keep that safe at product scale, I wrote the design system as a markdown file — brand, spacing, component patterns, the rules a screen has to obey. The agents read it before writing anything and updated it when a decision changed, so the product didn't quietly drift out of consistency.

Being both the designer and the engineer collapsed the process. We used GitHub for version control, which let me work across branches — feedback from the team went straight into the frontend while database and server-side updates moved in parallel — and merge them into one coherent system.

New accounts answer a few questions up front — the art you're drawn to, the mediums and movements you follow, and how deep your expertise runs. Those answers seed the taste profile, so recommendations are personal from the first session instead of after weeks of use, and the app can pitch what it tells you at the right level for someone new to contemporary art or someone who has been looking at it for twenty years.

The Home page is structured to aid in discovery with personalized recommendations.

Add the shows you want to see and Compass finds the best route between them, with travel times so you know what actually fits in an afternoon.

Praxima keeps up with you while you are out. Arrive at a gallery and it offers to check you in; pass near a show you saved and it can tell you. Rate what you saw while it is still fresh, and keep a running record of every show you have been to.

People already document shows, just badly — you photograph the wall text, photograph the work, and both disappear into a camera roll. The intent is there; the tooling isn't.