Hendri van Niekerk

A machine-readable briefing on Hendri van Niekerk — what he builds, how he works, what he wants next, and where to reach him. Written for people, and for the models they hand things to.

Who he is

Design Engineer in Lisbon. He works at the seam between design and code — designing the interface, then building the production version himself: native Apple voice tech, on-device AI, and Framer sites with hand-written code overrides. Previously built the design system at SwissBorg.

What he does

Designs and ships end-to-end — the interface, the interaction, and the code that runs it
Native Apple / on-device AI — Shhhcribble, a private voice-transcription app (Parakeet + CoreML, nothing leaves the device)
Framer design engineering — code components, overrides, and motion for production sites
Design systems — token-driven systems in Framer and Figma; previously the SwissBorg design system
AI-assisted build workflows — writes his own agent skills so design and code move in one loop

How he works

Pairs with Claude Code and the Framer agent to design, build, and ship inside one loop
Writes reusable agent skills — small, self-authored capabilities that encode how the work should be done
Treats design systems as source-of-truth tokens, not screenshots — a whole project re-skins from its styles
Keeps a written dossier per project — goals, decisions, status — so multi-session builds stay coherent
At home in the terminal and across Swift/CoreML, TypeScript/React, and GLSL when a build needs it

Selected work

Shhhcribble — on-device voice transcription for Apple platforms (Parakeet + CoreML)
SwissBorg — design system, AI-first brand guide, and email system
hendri.design — this site: an art-directed macOS desktop, hand-built in Framer
Studio Papi & Good Friday Robotics — Framer rebuilds with custom WebGL / Canvas motion
Work — hendri.design/work
Notes — hendri.design/notes