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Ask HN: How Are People Designing Apps in the Age of AI?

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Ask HN: How Are People Designing Apps in the Age of AI?

#1

Post by hhimanshu »

In the age of AI, I’m curious to know how people are designing apps, especially if they’re solo founders or small teams. Are there tools out there that can help design app workflows from end to end? What does the process look like for solopreneurs who are juggling both development and design?

Specifically, with frameworks like TailwindUI, TailwindCSS, and ShadCN being mature and widely available, why does designing quickly and efficiently still feel like a challenge? Is there a gap between the tooling available and the ability to build great UX fast?

Also, how do people handle UX variants when designing and iterating on their apps? Do tools exist that simplify managing and testing different versions of the UI?

Would love to hear about how people are approaching app design, especially in small or one-person teams, and whether there are tools or processes that bridge this gap effectively.

Re: Ask HN: How Are People Designing Apps in the Age of AI?

#3

Post by purple-leafy »

Yes I can help with this!

I go straight to code, but I use my design copilot chrome extension [0][1] to constantly give me component-level design feedback as I build.

It basically forms my entire design system now.

Currently it’s a manual process - you use the built in screenshot tool and it kicks off the design feedback flow.

But I’ve been playing with adding data-attributes for automatic feedback whenever the component changes :)

Try it out and leave a review, it’s 100% free and operates on a BYO API key model to remain free. You can get a free Google Gemini API key with a very awesome free tier

I’m a solo dev but I’ve started using my tool at work! I also used the tool itself to design its own look and feel

[0] - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/design-copilot/hgal...

[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/s/bG8ssXiBRR

Re: Ask HN: How Are People Designing Apps in the Age of AI?

#4

Post by skydhash »

Balsamiq. It's a step up from paper and whiteboard. I do the first iteration in it to test out the flow. After that, I switch to Figma for the design system, branding and colors. Then I code.

All the designs are mostly suggestions, I usually don't try to be pixel perfect, just to be consistent visually.

Re: Ask HN: How Are People Designing Apps in the Age of AI?

#5

Post by andrei_says_ »

skydhash wrote: post #4

Balsamiq. It's a step up from paper and whiteboard. I do the first iteration in it to test out the flow. After that, I switch to Figma for the design system, branding and colors. Then I code. All the designs are mostly suggestions, I usually don't try to be pixel perfect, just to be consistent visually.

I use it and love it. A great way to get a feel of the ui and ui copy. Makes it easy to add simple interactivity if you need a click through demo.

Nicely separates UX + ui from graphic design.

Re: Ask HN: How Are People Designing Apps in the Age of AI?

#6

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

I'll be honest, mostly I just ask AI to keep generating boilerplate vanilla JavaScript+jQuery and CSS until I truly hit a point where that is infeasible. Then I switch to React and Bootstrap (yes, I still use Bootstrap).

But I hail from the underground catacombs of system administration. Creaky venerable lovable command line tools. Heck, even "traditional" engineering (my degree was in EE, and my first love was physics). Design is both not my strong suit, and also something I have strange opinions about (I'd probably be classed as a "power user" for just about every program I regularly pay conscious attention to). I'm doing this mostly to finally become the 'true' full-stack engineer I've dreamed of being since I was a kid, who understands what's happening to some level from the electron.

All that to say: I really suck at it, and AI puts me on the lower end of mediocre. Progress!

f I was living in my own hermetically sealed chamber, everything I make would look and feel like https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/finstem , but I'm not. And that's a good thing! I'm a cantankerous dude at times, it's great that even I can get pulled out of my shell to mess around with like, AJAX and modal dialogs and such.

Re: Ask HN: How Are People Designing Apps in the Age of AI?

#7

Post by bgun »

It seems to me that AI-based coding assistants are better at writing code for more established frameworks, which has led me to defaulting to vanilla or tried-and-true/"boring technology" because AI has trouble with newer or more frequently changing stuff. Curious if this has been the case for anyone else.

Re: Ask HN: How Are People Designing Apps in the Age of AI?

#8

Post by hhimanshu »

tikkun wrote: post #2

mostly they're going straight to code, designing in code it'd be cool to have generative ux tools for wireframing though, if that's what you're getting at

Yes, I love using the code and AI tools like Claude, Github CoPilot are great at it. But when solving a business problem, we still need to "see it" before start writing the code (at least this is my preferred way)

Re: Ask HN: How Are People Designing Apps in the Age of AI?

#10

Post by mjomaa »

Because AI is not there yet. Boilerplates are the better option until AI generation catches up. Here is what I do:

1. Explore an idea, research what competitors do, etc.

2. Use my own boilerplate for a greenfield project https://achromatic.dev (sorry for self-promo)

3. Write down what I actually want and paste the text and screenshot to v0 to see if it can generate something useful.

4. Improve/write the initial code by hand.

5. Paste the code into Claude and improve it more manually in an iterative fashion.

6. Make sure it is consistent with the rest of the codebase.

PS: I'm deep into developer tools now. Have forked the original drawIO/mxGraph, resolved all monkey patches, translated everything to TypeScript, added Multiplayer and more (~250k slocs) - ready as a base to explore some tools like one that solves your described problem. Here is a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/opiu7z4.png I do envision Achromatic as a dev/design tool company.

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