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ossa-ma 3 hours ago

The more I think about it the more this isn't good for design [EDIT], for a few reasons:

- The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive. An AI model is incapable of that, it's uninspired, it will absolutely converge to the norm and homogeneity (you see it everywhere now, just scroll on ShowHN and take a look at the UIs) and produce the safest design that appeals to its understanding of the ideal user.

- Good designers will reject this, they prefer to be hands-on and draw from multiple sources of inspiration which is what Figma boards and Canva is good for, also mainly for cross-collaboration. If you've seen how quickly a great design engineer can prototype you'll know that "speed" they advertise in this video is not worth the tradeoff.

- Creatives typically have a very very very high aversion to AI.

- Non-designers will not see a purpose for this tool, basic design can already be done through Claude Code and Claude.ai, I fail to see what this could offer unless they leverage a model that is more creative and unique by default (you can not prompt/context/harness engineer creativity believe me I've tried).

- Design is a lot more than just UI. Tools like this ignore so many other important aspects like: motion, typography, images, weight, whitespace, sound, feel.

gpt5 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive

Designing a user inteface involves thousands of small decisions. When trading off pros/cons for each of these decisions, in 99% of the cases, the right answer is ‘optimize familiarity.

That’s why Android and iOS look the same, and why the small differences between them are where contention happen.

If you adopt existing patterns, your users would be instantly familiar with your app, and the design will not get in their way.

ossa-ma 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You're arguing for familiarity in tactful design, while I agree that for most users this is a good thing, repeatability of existing patterns does create that immediate familiarity.

HOWEVER, that familiarity is only a virtue because someone, once, deviated hard enough that their deviation became the new familiar. AI can only optimise toward the current snapshot of "familiar". It cannot produce the next one. If designers outsource all their thinking to a model even in tactful design we would never have groundbreaking design concepts like "pull to refresh" or the command palette.

qkeast an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

>Designing a user inteface involves thousands of small decisions. When trading off pros/cons for each of these decisions…

Which needs to be done intentionally in context, not homogeneously as a rapid output of a generative tool.

toomim 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"An AI model is incapable of that."

"Good designers will reject this."

^ Famous last words.

Sir_Twist 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I could see there being an 80/20-style argument for this sort of tool being used for more generic usecases, with "good designers" using Figma et al. for programs where the UI itself is a selling point.

ossa-ma 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I will stand by the first point unless models start being trained with different objectives instead of RLHF's three objectives: Helpfulness, Harmlessness and Instruction-following

I will very likely be wrong on the second point.

Lalabadie 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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ctoth 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I noticed in your list that you didn't mention accessibility. I would personally rather have an accessible design than one which is "original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive." and here we are.

ossa-ma 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I should have mentioned accessibility. It supports my argument more than yours. Accessibility like captions, voice, keyboard nav, dark mode are all a deviation from the norm by a minority (something AI is completely incapable of doing) and a fight against familiarity which now serves as a great benefit to the majority.

ctoth 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This ... This is simply not true. I use a screen reader. I am using it right now. I can confirm that AI-generated code, by default, is far, far more accessible, cares far more about keyboard nav, about DOM order, about using the right semantic HTML, about the things that I care about than your average human-designed slop.

And no, it doesn't just add ARIA to everything as is so typical by poor practitioners.

ossa-ma 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I think we're arguing two different points. You're arguing about implementation, AI is great at this given the existing defaults and the right prompting. AI was trained on 30+ years of accessibility standards that a minority of great humans fought to establish as a familiar practice.

I'm arguing about invention. It is extremely unlikely that AI will be the one to invent the next accessibility paradigm, because that requires deviating from the training distribution, which it CAN'T DO.

I'm also arguing that this homogeneity in design will lead to an atrophy in inventive, unique and original thinking.

2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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dayvid an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is a great bridge between non-designers with taste and designers who can't fully technically implement their solutions (or want to more rapidly prototype their solutions). Well done AI implementation is like cosmetic surgery. The trashiest implementations you can tell immediately and the more tasteful ones are subtle

Lihh27 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive

most of those "breakthroughs" were just constraint hacks. no room for a reload button. no room for another menu.

enterprise buyers don't pay for counterintuitive. they pay so the new hire finds save without training.

sobellian an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

IMO AI will make plain the divergence between "good design" and what people actually want. You're absolutely right that from an artistic perspective, it will produce the heat death of UI. I just struggle to think if teams building will actually care. Boring but polished is completely fine for SaaS.

Oras 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Data suggest different outcomes, there was always a way to standardise interfaces, from Twitter bootstrap, all the way to shadcn.

Not everyone is looking for unique design, 70% of the web is still using Wordpress. I would say majority prefer familiarity and appreciate uniqueness.

recitedropper 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Plus: So much of excellent user interface design is done through iterating on feedback from live humans testing it with their human sensory system.

Until we have embodied AI's with eyes and hands that provide good enough approximations, the aspect of design bottlenecked on human experience will stay bottlenecked.

paul7986 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Web design / digital design is a dying field as businesses will start paying one person who does 3 to 4 roles (PM, UX Research, Design and UI Development - tho why use a design tool for web stuff when AI tools generate designs in code), as well now tons of ppl can do this work using AI tools. Further, is the future of digital experiences user interfaces aka the web or will there be an AI Phone where everything is done / seen on the lock screen (AI generates the visuals as you text or talk to it) and or its more of a text and voice digital experience less UI.

Overall after being laid off in January and a 17 year UX Research/Design/Dev career Im starting school in my early 50s to change careers.

itsevrgrn 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

i'm also curious what you're switching to

Uncorrelated 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What career are you aiming to switch to?

cjf101 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I hate to hand anything to Generative AI tools, but

While Great design breaks the mould, Very Good design is about surfacing the most expected outcomes for any action which reduces friction and lets people get work done. And this generation of Generative tools is very good at identifying the most common/most expected response to a prompt.

jayd16 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You could have said the same thing about powerpoint vs high quality marketing departments. The "pros don't want this" argument doesn't really hold weight.

This is for non-designers to crank out slop with less effort. They can still be swayed by all the shiny knobs to feel in control.

an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]
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f6v 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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