The inevitable outcome here is that designed materials become so generic and infinitely produceable that they become worthless background noise. We are well on the way to that path.
For almost all materials the only value of getting a seriously produced work of design (i.e., the "make me a magazine-style pitch deck for our seed round" this design engine mentions) is a signaling function that some combination of effort and capital went into its production. Yes, the 1 in a 10,000 work of design adds some actual value. But usually it's just a filtering mechanism. The purpose of making a powerpoint deck before a meeting is rarely the value of a deck. Rather it is signaling that someone spent some time actually organizing their thoughts instead of bloviating spontaneously.
All of this is lost with AI led design. Producing designed artifacts are free and instant. Yeah you will impress the old folks for a year or so who haven't caught onto the joke. Eventually this just becomes pointless table stakes. Just the same way desktop publishing was in the 90s. You impressed the old folks for a bit until it all became background noise table stakes.
I’m glad people will have to evaluate the substance of the deck rather than using a cheap heuristic like how visually appealing the presentation is.
I understand there tends to be a correlation between visual appeal and effort, and correlation between effort and merit, but correlation is notoriously flawed. Flawed models can be useful, but only if one qualifies their use sufficiently. I don’t think most people who used are using the aesthetics heuristic you mention to gauge merit are using it rigorously to sharpen their thinking, they’re using it as a shortcut to prevent themselves from needing to think.
An equally plausible scenario to that of which you mention is that technical people can make presentations that are similarly visually appealing as the non-technical people, and that their opinions will be valued more than before. Maybe this will happen, maybe this won’t happen, but I am certain that we do not know yet.
> The purpose of making a powerpoint deck before a meeting is rarely the value of a deck. Rather it is signaling that someone spent some time actually organizing their thoughts instead of bloviating spontaneously.
> All of this is lost with AI led design. Producing designed artifacts are free and instant. Yeah you will impress the old folks for a year or so who haven't caught onto the joke.
I was at an AI/LLM themed hackathon recently. At the end the winning teams presented what they’d done.
The slides were all AI generated, which was fair given the theme and the short time they had at the end to prepare to say something (~10 minutes given to prepare after winners were announced, and before that all teams were spending all the three or so hours we had fully focused on the tasks rather than wasting time making presentations about what had been done).
Still felt a bit weird to see someone speak with slides that were as surprising to themselves as it was to the audience. Like I said, no shade on them in this case given the theme of the hackathon. But it does make me wonder how the future will be at many jobs where “velocity”/“productivity” is so much in the focus that unreviewed LLM generated slides becomes the norm. Hopefully not.
Obviously if you make the slides yourself then you'd know the content well.
The way of using these tools is not to one-shot your slide deck (unless you have plenty time to learn the content) but give it a base product you've already worked on and ask it to make it pretty, interesting, etc. and perhaps make small changes to the content which you'd review and learn.
You can probably use a knife as a fork but it wouldn't be the best way of using the knife.
> The way of using these tools is not to one-shot your slide deck
This line of thinking IMO is hopelessly naive. Yes, the responsible way to use AI and perhaps the way _you_ use it is to do some formatting/cleaning up/enhancement of slides that you primarily authored yourself. The reality is that _most_ people are using and will use AI as a way to breeze through as much work as possible either out of laziness or pressure and their "reviews" will primarily consist of "LGTM." Which is going to lead to an explosion of "did you even read this?" or "did you even test this?"-style disasters.
I beg people to send me their prompts rather than the stochastic text expanded drivel they send me as memos/plans/etc... Massive waste of my time responding to ghosts - actually taking 10 pages seriously that often the "author" has barely read. I'd much rather get some unstructured bullet points if those are actually a person's ideas.
I love AI. Used well it's a massive enhancer to make things. But yeah whats the value of a presentation that the presenter is also seeing for the first time. Not just zero. Since it wasted everyone's time and bandwidth the value is negative.
This is true if you that assume the only purpose of design is aesthetic differentiation. There actually is a lot of science in how you scan information in a design, how it's presented, the visual hierarchy, grouping and things that actually have utility in and off itself.
> The inevitable outcome here is that designed materials become so generic and infinitely produceable that they become worthless background noise.
Hopefully. The process has taken way too long. Compare to something similar like PowerPoint animations. Fun the first time you see them, and then annoying after that.
The best possible side effect of the cost of producing content dropping to zero would be more effort spent honing a message into its most concentrated form.
> That's not "AI tries to design something". That's an AI that has been trained, by the prompt stack, to behave like a senior designer with a working filesystem, a deterministic palette library, and a checklist culture
What, you don't want your senior designer to have a working filesystem and checklist culture? No deterministic palettes?
This insufferable period of AI will eventually come to an end. We just have to power through as people get fed by it. Mindless writeups, social media posts, emails, cold calls.. they all bear common trait of no to low effort and it shows. It's as vapid and empty as the impulse that thought it would be a good idea. Some of us consciously go by the rule that if you haven't bothered to write, we're not going to bother to read.. rest will grow into the same mindset. Spam farms pretending to be sales optimizations, linkedin lunatics with "valuable messages", low effort slackers larping to be engineers.. it's all going to go away and true value will prevail. Right now, it's not too much different than nigerian prince letters, industrialized.
curious how much of the output quality is the design systems and skill files doing real work vs claude just being very good at HTML. the prompt stack matters, but it's hard to know how much.
I'm curious what flows folks find most productive here? We are a heavy vibe coding team, with heavy review. That has smoothed out for our backend work, but frontend feels much earlier.
We have AI driving a usual mix of storybook, pencil, figma, playwright, tailwind/react, per-pr staging servers, etc, and a few skill files on using these. PRs include autogenerated storybook and intool screenshots, and links to staging servers.
Except... Everyone works quite differently in how they flow through this. Likewise, it's unclear how valuable each pieces still is, and when. Our developers are doing more ownership now, which is shifting this too.
Are folks switching to Claude Design? Some super skills imports? Etc..
To be fair I find the approach from claude design incredibly wasteful of tokens, and time-consuming since it needs to build a full website. Their website is also clearly vibe-coded and not homogeneous in style with the rest.
ChatGPT image 2 is much better at protoyping uis, cheaper and faster. I haven't tried the figma plugin but I suspect it's also more efficient.
It depends on what you’re doing. If you’re working on a product like Slack, for example, the right question will often be not what UI your feature needs but what feature your UX idea needs.
Readme reads like a sales deck. Got to "six load-bearing ideas" and closed the tab. If your tool was actually good you'd just show what it does.
Also 14k stars in a week is doing a lot of work here. Nobody finds a repo that fast organically.
Once stars started becoming a marketable metric, it's pretty much inevitable that they would be purchasable. Same as any other bot review market I suppose
How does a human designer even compete? I just looked at all the demos and they look beautiful.
I hand designed my site https://www.nair.sh/ and it feels like it doesn't even compare.
Sure, there's some judgment as to what design is appropriate in a given situation, but it just feels like so much harder for a human's design to feel valuable now.
That is precisely my point. The non-expert won't know what is missing and will be impressed, and there might be a price to pay. How would you like to trust your data to my vibe coded database, safety to my vibe coded mechanical designs, and health to my vibed up diagnosis?
Maybe I misunderstood. I agree that not all buyers may appreciate the difference, and experts should educate them. Sometimes the price of their ignorance will educate them too.
I feel the designs they present are actually quite bad. Like... they are an anti-ad for this product. Just random fonts, bold, italics, underlines. Bad contrast, skinny small fonts.
Your site is actually really nice except the red color burns into my retina, so that's the only thing I would change about it (change your --primary to something more like #7c2c3e)
Originality. The same as with art. Art and design are more than just a mean to satisfy a need. They are an opportunity to explore, to question. When Georges Seurat developed pointillism, he wasn't trying to compete with the people who could imitate Raphael. He created his own direction.
> The creating part still remains because it's intrinsic but the sharing part feels discouraging now.
Why? Is a chair that you made with your own hands not as valuable to you because somebody else got one from Ikea? Would you not show it to your friends for this reason?
I can't draw. I'm learning to draw. I really don't give a flying toss if AI can generate pencil drawings of my loved ones. They'll know I made the effort myself.
The inevitable outcome here is that designed materials become so generic and infinitely produceable that they become worthless background noise. We are well on the way to that path.
For almost all materials the only value of getting a seriously produced work of design (i.e., the "make me a magazine-style pitch deck for our seed round" this design engine mentions) is a signaling function that some combination of effort and capital went into its production. Yes, the 1 in a 10,000 work of design adds some actual value. But usually it's just a filtering mechanism. The purpose of making a powerpoint deck before a meeting is rarely the value of a deck. Rather it is signaling that someone spent some time actually organizing their thoughts instead of bloviating spontaneously.
All of this is lost with AI led design. Producing designed artifacts are free and instant. Yeah you will impress the old folks for a year or so who haven't caught onto the joke. Eventually this just becomes pointless table stakes. Just the same way desktop publishing was in the 90s. You impressed the old folks for a bit until it all became background noise table stakes.
I’m glad people will have to evaluate the substance of the deck rather than using a cheap heuristic like how visually appealing the presentation is.
I understand there tends to be a correlation between visual appeal and effort, and correlation between effort and merit, but correlation is notoriously flawed. Flawed models can be useful, but only if one qualifies their use sufficiently. I don’t think most people who used are using the aesthetics heuristic you mention to gauge merit are using it rigorously to sharpen their thinking, they’re using it as a shortcut to prevent themselves from needing to think.
An equally plausible scenario to that of which you mention is that technical people can make presentations that are similarly visually appealing as the non-technical people, and that their opinions will be valued more than before. Maybe this will happen, maybe this won’t happen, but I am certain that we do not know yet.
I really love this take. AI both increases and decimates the ability of people to BS you with fancy graphics and text.
Human communication moves ever closer to its final form: bullet pointed lists of lower case text and emoji
> The purpose of making a powerpoint deck before a meeting is rarely the value of a deck. Rather it is signaling that someone spent some time actually organizing their thoughts instead of bloviating spontaneously.
> All of this is lost with AI led design. Producing designed artifacts are free and instant. Yeah you will impress the old folks for a year or so who haven't caught onto the joke.
I was at an AI/LLM themed hackathon recently. At the end the winning teams presented what they’d done.
The slides were all AI generated, which was fair given the theme and the short time they had at the end to prepare to say something (~10 minutes given to prepare after winners were announced, and before that all teams were spending all the three or so hours we had fully focused on the tasks rather than wasting time making presentations about what had been done).
Still felt a bit weird to see someone speak with slides that were as surprising to themselves as it was to the audience. Like I said, no shade on them in this case given the theme of the hackathon. But it does make me wonder how the future will be at many jobs where “velocity”/“productivity” is so much in the focus that unreviewed LLM generated slides becomes the norm. Hopefully not.
Obviously if you make the slides yourself then you'd know the content well.
The way of using these tools is not to one-shot your slide deck (unless you have plenty time to learn the content) but give it a base product you've already worked on and ask it to make it pretty, interesting, etc. and perhaps make small changes to the content which you'd review and learn.
You can probably use a knife as a fork but it wouldn't be the best way of using the knife.
> The way of using these tools is not to one-shot your slide deck
This line of thinking IMO is hopelessly naive. Yes, the responsible way to use AI and perhaps the way _you_ use it is to do some formatting/cleaning up/enhancement of slides that you primarily authored yourself. The reality is that _most_ people are using and will use AI as a way to breeze through as much work as possible either out of laziness or pressure and their "reviews" will primarily consist of "LGTM." Which is going to lead to an explosion of "did you even read this?" or "did you even test this?"-style disasters.
I beg people to send me their prompts rather than the stochastic text expanded drivel they send me as memos/plans/etc... Massive waste of my time responding to ghosts - actually taking 10 pages seriously that often the "author" has barely read. I'd much rather get some unstructured bullet points if those are actually a person's ideas.
I love AI. Used well it's a massive enhancer to make things. But yeah whats the value of a presentation that the presenter is also seeing for the first time. Not just zero. Since it wasted everyone's time and bandwidth the value is negative.
This is true if you that assume the only purpose of design is aesthetic differentiation. There actually is a lot of science in how you scan information in a design, how it's presented, the visual hierarchy, grouping and things that actually have utility in and off itself.
> The inevitable outcome here is that designed materials become so generic and infinitely produceable that they become worthless background noise.
Hopefully. The process has taken way too long. Compare to something similar like PowerPoint animations. Fun the first time you see them, and then annoying after that.
The best possible side effect of the cost of producing content dropping to zero would be more effort spent honing a message into its most concentrated form.
I don't disagree, but I'm not sure I see the point you're trying to make.
Maybe ask your LLM to explain it?
Ah, I see, you weren't making a point, fair enough.
It's cheap. That's all.
The README is unnerving. Do people really see the Claude-salesman style of writing as something normal?
On the other hand, I should be thanking Anthropic for making it so easy to spot, they might have done this intentionally.
> That's not "AI tries to design something". That's an AI that has been trained, by the prompt stack, to behave like a senior designer with a working filesystem, a deterministic palette library, and a checklist culture
What, you don't want your senior designer to have a working filesystem and checklist culture? No deterministic palettes?
> OD stands on four open-source shoulders:
That's impressive, although I'd hesitate to call that "standing", it's more a crawl I'd say.
Yep I agree. I was looking for a getting started like for example here for openspec: https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec/blob/main/docs/gettin... but couldn't find anything like that
This insufferable period of AI will eventually come to an end. We just have to power through as people get fed by it. Mindless writeups, social media posts, emails, cold calls.. they all bear common trait of no to low effort and it shows. It's as vapid and empty as the impulse that thought it would be a good idea. Some of us consciously go by the rule that if you haven't bothered to write, we're not going to bother to read.. rest will grow into the same mindset. Spam farms pretending to be sales optimizations, linkedin lunatics with "valuable messages", low effort slackers larping to be engineers.. it's all going to go away and true value will prevail. Right now, it's not too much different than nigerian prince letters, industrialized.
I found the At a glance section especially funny. Just a ton of buzzwords compressed together. One of the most dense tables I've ever seen on GitHub.
Agreed, I could just about bear it until I hit the “ Six load-bearing ideas” section. Very off-putting.
>Do people really see the Claude-salesman style of writing as something normal?
In certain circles, yeah. It's bad powerpoint writing by ambitious but dull mid-level managers, memeified. There's a lot of it out there.
If you were to distill that kind of copy into an AI model and then reproduce it with just a touch of uncanny valley, yup. 100% that's what it is.
It's midness. People don't find it good, it's just less effort to meh it.
It's bad, not mid. And it's insulting to the reader.
curious how much of the output quality is the design systems and skill files doing real work vs claude just being very good at HTML. the prompt stack matters, but it's hard to know how much.
I'm curious what flows folks find most productive here? We are a heavy vibe coding team, with heavy review. That has smoothed out for our backend work, but frontend feels much earlier.
We have AI driving a usual mix of storybook, pencil, figma, playwright, tailwind/react, per-pr staging servers, etc, and a few skill files on using these. PRs include autogenerated storybook and intool screenshots, and links to staging servers.
Except... Everyone works quite differently in how they flow through this. Likewise, it's unclear how valuable each pieces still is, and when. Our developers are doing more ownership now, which is shifting this too.
Are folks switching to Claude Design? Some super skills imports? Etc..
To be fair I find the approach from claude design incredibly wasteful of tokens, and time-consuming since it needs to build a full website. Their website is also clearly vibe-coded and not homogeneous in style with the rest.
ChatGPT image 2 is much better at protoyping uis, cheaper and faster. I haven't tried the figma plugin but I suspect it's also more efficient.
Do people design UIs first?
I just basically define what I need in a UI in plain text
when the prototype is built.
I extract the repeating units, then add design to it.
If you're product first, you design the UX, which includes the UI.
If you're tech first, you do what you do.
It depends on what you’re doing. If you’re working on a product like Slack, for example, the right question will often be not what UI your feature needs but what feature your UX idea needs.
Readme reads like a sales deck. Got to "six load-bearing ideas" and closed the tab. If your tool was actually good you'd just show what it does. Also 14k stars in a week is doing a lot of work here. Nobody finds a repo that fast organically.
Repo's been up for a week and already it has 14k stars.
Oh look, they are gaining stars at a rate of pretty much exactly 1400 per day: https://www.star-history.com/?repos=nexu-io%2Fopen-design&ty...
Yeah, nothing shady here at all.
Wow, rounded exactly to the hundreds? Or is that an artifact of star-history's data-collection?
Do people really buy stars for github? Would explain some of these crazy growths
Don't underestimate stars given by claws without direct instruction from humans. Not bought or sold, but not real either.
Once stars started becoming a marketable metric, it's pretty much inevitable that they would be purchasable. Same as any other bot review market I suppose
Apparently so. Posted 12 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47831621
Makes me wonder if there is a secret HN upvote economy too.
Edit: yep, quick search turned up a site to buy upvotes. All these vibe coded slop projects getting to the front page make sense now
I don't think I've ever wanted a README to fuck off more than this one, impressive.
I really appreciate open source community for moving this fast
How does a human designer even compete? I just looked at all the demos and they look beautiful.
I hand designed my site https://www.nair.sh/ and it feels like it doesn't even compare.
Sure, there's some judgment as to what design is appropriate in a given situation, but it just feels like so much harder for a human's design to feel valuable now.
We are soon going to converge on all websites looking exactly the same, we’re almost there really
It’s just the same sterile template used for everything, yeah it looks good first time you See it. But the 100th? It starts to look like noise
Are you a designer? Everything AI does looks impressive if you are not familiar with it.
You're right in that our expertise can see how this was not generated with the same kind of thoughtfulness that we might apply.
But you're wrong in implying (if you are) that it's not valuable to be impressive to a non-expert.
Or isn't it? You are one step away from deploying superficially impressive things, without understanding what is lacking.
Yes, lacking for the expert.
To the non-expert, probably acceptable, even impressive.
That is precisely my point. The non-expert won't know what is missing and will be impressed, and there might be a price to pay. How would you like to trust your data to my vibe coded database, safety to my vibe coded mechanical designs, and health to my vibed up diagnosis?
What I'd said: it just feels like so much harder for a human's design to feel valuable now
I'm talking about competition; being valuable within a market; being seen as useful by others.
Maybe my focus on competition wasn't well communicated but you're making a precise but irrelevant point about personal integrity.
Maybe I misunderstood. I agree that not all buyers may appreciate the difference, and experts should educate them. Sometimes the price of their ignorance will educate them too.
I feel the designs they present are actually quite bad. Like... they are an anti-ad for this product. Just random fonts, bold, italics, underlines. Bad contrast, skinny small fonts.
Your site is actually really nice except the red color burns into my retina, so that's the only thing I would change about it (change your --primary to something more like #7c2c3e)
How do human artists compete with AI-gen images?
Yes, we're building a dystopia where AIs do the work humans enjoy, and humans get to hold on to drudgery.
But a small percentage of people get rich, so we're all in.
Your point? It's an analogical problem.
I love writing but even there I have to work doubly hard to make sure I'm doing something valuable.
My point is that the space within which human creators can distinguish themselves is diminishing rapidly.
Originality. The same as with art. Art and design are more than just a mean to satisfy a need. They are an opportunity to explore, to question. When Georges Seurat developed pointillism, he wasn't trying to compete with the people who could imitate Raphael. He created his own direction.
Yes but you're talking about groundbreaking work.
There's so much joy to be found in regular human creating and sharing.
The creating part still remains because it's intrinsic but the sharing part feels discouraging now.
Regular, non-groundbreaking creative work seems ... less worthy of sharing?
> The creating part still remains because it's intrinsic but the sharing part feels discouraging now.
Why? Is a chair that you made with your own hands not as valuable to you because somebody else got one from Ikea? Would you not show it to your friends for this reason?
Why would you pick an example that does not have AI as a competitor?
If people could generate an infinite variety of chairs in a few seconds, than yes, my sharing would be discouraged.
I can't draw. I'm learning to draw. I really don't give a flying toss if AI can generate pencil drawings of my loved ones. They'll know I made the effort myself.
Why would you use an example that limits sharing to loved ones?
Your point is thin.
Are you really that desperate for approval from the anonymous masses?