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.
> 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?
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, you can't tell what's a link and what's not.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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, you can't tell what's a link and what's not.
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?