> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
It's midness. People don't find it good, it's just less effort to meh it.
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.
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?
It's cheap. That's all.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Don't underestimate stars given by claws without direct instruction from humans. Not bought or sold, but not real either.
Apparently so. Posted 12 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47831621
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.
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.
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?
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.