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.
It’s even worse when you cant push back with “did you even read this”, because the politics haven’t evolved to constrain the slop.
We are getting pre-solutioned massive epics, dozens of files, from senior leaders (non-ICs); when shit goes sideways, what do you do? Our jobs are already at risk just in general, and we have new KPIs around generative AI (as do those senior leaders). I’m not sticking my neck out get chopped off.
Just last week I had to make some shit up in my uplevel status report to shift blame away from an AVP. Technically it’s my fault, for not digging into the 30 files (and tanking my own metrics,m); I don’t even feel like it matters - the devs just hand that off to an LLM anyway to meet their KPIs. I’m just thankful it didn’t go to prod.
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 think design as a "signaling function" for determining the quality of a thing was already broken. It was already possible to put up an impressive-looking site for anything; already possible to to dupe people with cheap product wrapped in fancy packaging.
Movies with insane budgets that spend forever in production are often still terrible. One of my favorite songs was written by the artist in a hotel room on a Sunday afternoon.
One thing to consider: if it's cheap and immediate to wrap any content in design, it can now also be cheap and immediate to customize the design of content. Maybe we can finally return to a user-focused internet like the one that was promised to us by browser custom style sheets.
Finally, I can see democratizing design in this way will make more content more pleasant to look a (which is a win). And we'll also make better decisions with design out of the decision matrixes it doesn't belong in (another win).
That idea around LLMs reducing the signaling value of certain types of work is very interesting, and I hadn’t really thought about it.
I think about this effect with targeted advertising a lot, every since I read this article about why targeted advertising is so useless for both consumers and advertisers, even when it seems like on the surface it should be better for both: https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/
Once it becomes very cheap to do something, it becomes completely useless as a way to differentiate quality from crap.
> 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.
This is why I beg people to send me their raw prompts rather than the output of running that prompt through a generic LLM. Same semantic content in a half page prompt as the 10 page stochastic text expansion LLM memo version but 1. takes me 1/10th the time to process and 2. I'm not forced to guess which ideas are real ideas I need to respond to and which are just text expansion ghosts.
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.
And the result will be people creating their own flawed but unique designs as a counter signal. Think of the early internet and the janky but wonderfully personal websites it spawned.
> 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.
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.
We have a service issue today with the rate of tooling, it reminds me of the old days using Napster or Kazaa, it's full of good stuff but the curve to get in is so high, so much cognitive energy required to understand and get value out of it and, once you do, you have this monstrous workflow that only you know how to operate.
Or maybe I'm getting old? Serious question, do people really open a project with a README like that and are able to hit the ground running quickly and getting value right out of the gate?
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..
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
LLM-created designs are already recognizable and are the new Microsoft keynote templates. Boring, vapid, devoid of personality, perfectly fine for business use.
So as a design engine, sure. What things like this are trying to claim is that you can get "good" design and well, that's subjective. Y'know how people who don't understand kerning can look at bad kerning and feel something's not right but lack the words to explain why? The same goes for LLM design.
I'm not a luddite, I enjoy using Claude to assist in coding tasks but visual design will never be something I choose to use any LLM for. Design is for humans and LLMs lack taste.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
We are getting pre-solutioned massive epics, dozens of files, from senior leaders (non-ICs); when shit goes sideways, what do you do? Our jobs are already at risk just in general, and we have new KPIs around generative AI (as do those senior leaders). I’m not sticking my neck out get chopped off.
Just last week I had to make some shit up in my uplevel status report to shift blame away from an AVP. Technically it’s my fault, for not digging into the 30 files (and tanking my own metrics,m); I don’t even feel like it matters - the devs just hand that off to an LLM anyway to meet their KPIs. I’m just thankful it didn’t go to prod.
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 think design as a "signaling function" for determining the quality of a thing was already broken. It was already possible to put up an impressive-looking site for anything; already possible to to dupe people with cheap product wrapped in fancy packaging.
Movies with insane budgets that spend forever in production are often still terrible. One of my favorite songs was written by the artist in a hotel room on a Sunday afternoon.
One thing to consider: if it's cheap and immediate to wrap any content in design, it can now also be cheap and immediate to customize the design of content. Maybe we can finally return to a user-focused internet like the one that was promised to us by browser custom style sheets.
Finally, I can see democratizing design in this way will make more content more pleasant to look a (which is a win). And we'll also make better decisions with design out of the decision matrixes it doesn't belong in (another win).
I think about this effect with targeted advertising a lot, every since I read this article about why targeted advertising is so useless for both consumers and advertisers, even when it seems like on the surface it should be better for both: https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/
Once it becomes very cheap to do something, it becomes completely useless as a way to differentiate quality from crap.
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.
On the other hand, I should be thanking Anthropic for making it so easy to spot, they might have done this intentionally.
What, you don't want your senior designer to have a working filesystem and checklist culture? No deterministic palettes?
That's impressive, although I'd hesitate to call that "standing", it's more a crawl I'd say.
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.
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.
Or maybe I'm getting old? Serious question, do people really open a project with a README like that and are able to hit the ground running quickly and getting value right out of the gate?
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..
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 tech first, you do what you do.
I created something slightly simpler that just generates a token system and allocates the UX to the LLM.
github.com/bmson/anchor-ui
https://github.com/bmson/anchor-ui
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.
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
LMAO, even.
LLM-created designs are already recognizable and are the new Microsoft keynote templates. Boring, vapid, devoid of personality, perfectly fine for business use.
So as a design engine, sure. What things like this are trying to claim is that you can get "good" design and well, that's subjective. Y'know how people who don't understand kerning can look at bad kerning and feel something's not right but lack the words to explain why? The same goes for LLM design.
I'm not a luddite, I enjoy using Claude to assist in coding tasks but visual design will never be something I choose to use any LLM for. Design is for humans and LLMs lack taste.
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.
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
But you're wrong in implying (if you are) that it's not valuable to be impressive to a non-expert.
To the non-expert, probably acceptable, even impressive.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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?
If people could generate an infinite variety of chairs in a few seconds, than yes, my sharing would be discouraged.
Your point is thin.