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.

On the other hand, I should be thanking Anthropic for making it so easy to spot, they might have done this intentionally.

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 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..

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?

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.

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.

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

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.