Robert Ritacca

Designing and building AI-native products, systems, and experiences.

Principal Product Designer, based in Toronto, Canada

Gusto

Intuit

Meta

Augmenta.ai

Work

A Claude conversation where TurboTax returns a 2025 tax year checklist, with a drop zone for documents and the wage and investment forms already gathered.

TurboTax, embedded in ChatGPT and ClaudeLeading design for a Webby-winning tax experience that runs natively inside two AI platforms: from December MVP to full launch in one tax season.

Writing

A loose explosion of paint splatter in every colour that settles, on the right, into a neat grid of rounded swatches.

A DESIGN.md is not a design system What a shortcut at TurboTax taught me, and how it became Rift's theme importer.Early to mid 2026, my team at TurboTax built a TurboTax connector for Claude: an MCP app that runs inside Claude. At the time, Claude didn’t offer a design system for this. There was a Figma kit, guidelines and tokens, but no components or contracts to pull from. So every MCP app was custom

Design system

Rift DS, the AI-ready design system this site is built onEvery colour, radius, and motion value here resolves from one token layer, and the build fails when a rule breaks. It is a published package with a home of its own now, and this site is just another consumer of it.