Open Design: Use Your Coding Agent as a Design Engine

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.

Look I'm speaking here as a career designer:

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).

One use of design is signaling, but not all - successful design is that which fulfills its purpose.

Many designed things do not need to be differentiated and will benefit from a homogenous AI-powered design (internal documentation, local service business communications, etc) in the same way that desktop publishing replaced hand or type-written notes but did not replace professional designers (although it did require them to learn digital tooling).

For designs that do benefit from being differentiated it'll be interesting to see what happens. If anything, AI homogeneity provides more opportunity for talented human designers who can provide "design alpha" beyond whatever trends the LLMs sucked up in their last crawl.

Human communication moves ever closer to its final form: bullet pointed lists of lower case text and emoji

https://medium.com/luminasticity/art-as-a-tool-for-storing-m...

>The modern world is design rich and art poor. That is to say that with the introduction of mass production it became possible to distribute everywhere items that in previous eras would have been seen as full of Mana, but now, not unique — they have none.

That was in reference to mass produced design, but it seems to apply 10X to AI produced Art.

> 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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

No thing-you-don't-want. No second-thing-you-don't want. Just thing-you-want, the-way-you-want-it.

It's midness. People don't find it good, it's just less effort to meh it.

>Do people really see the Claude-salesman style of writing as something normal?

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.

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

If you're product first, you design the UX, which includes the UI.

If you're tech first, you do what you do.

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.