I want something which looks like design for engineers. I'm a programmer, code completion is nice, but I already know how to code. What I am terrible at is design.
Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams
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Re: Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams
#12i recently used Magic Patterns for a very niche use case and had a great experience: i wanted to do show new customers examples of how they can use my product, which lives primarily in email. to do it via Loom I would need to create tons of fake email addresses and juggle a whole complicated set of scenerios. and to do it in after effects would take forever. so i used magic patterns to make an app that lets me upload…
Hey, your demo is great! (Neat use of Magic Patterns). Curious, do you provide outlook functionality?
Re: Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams
#13So how are you different?
The biggest difference is that we only do frontend, and that's very intentional. There's no database provisioning, no integration with an auth provider.
At first this may sound like a disadvantage, but it helps us stay very focused on actual product teams and their workflows.
Examples include: 1. we have an infinite, real-time canvas for collaborating, 2. reusable components and leveraging your existing brand, 3. export to Figma, 4. password protection on designs, 5. feedback collection. These are all features that customers have asked for; we haven't found that product teams need to spin up a database or leverage a Stripe integration.
Last note: this space is absolutely massive and we find all the other tools popping up very motivating. We first launched in October 2023 (before most other tools) when all you could generate with GPT 3.5 was a small React component. Our long-term vision is to be the one-stop shop for frontend.
Re: Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams
#14Appreciate the HN guest login. That's a good idea :)
hey thanks! spun that up over the weekend. I noticed another Launch HN did that and thought it was brilliant. we are here for feedback, so wanted to make trying it as easy as possible!
Re: Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams
#15This is super cool—love how you’re flipping the AI-assisted creation story to focus on design-first workflows. The frontend-only scope is such a smart constraint, especially for PMs and non-designers trying to validate ideas fast without diving into fullstack territory.
I’ve seen firsthand how hard it can be for non-designers to clearly communicate product ideas, and Magic Patterns seems to lower that barrier in a really meaningful way.
I noticed the GitHub Sync option—curious how teams are using that today. Is it more of a dev handoff (e.g. PR previews) or a starting point for custom builds? Would love to hear how that fits into engineering workflows—especially for folks skipping Figma entirely.
Also really appreciate the collaborative angle. Real-time team prototyping on a canvas feels like the future of internal product reviews.
Rooting for you both—this is such a focused and thoughtful approach to a real gap in the market.
Re: Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams
#16I want something which looks like design for engineers. I'm a programmer, code completion is nice, but I already know how to code. What I am terrible at is design.
I think sometimes people think design is purely making things "look good", but I come to realize it's also making things "work good!" a.k.a making it intuitive. "Don't make people think!"
It's been pretty cool to see how a tool like Magic Patterns is helpful for software builders to think through the flow for whatever feature their building. This is largely how I use it internally. For example, when I added our deploy feature, I first used Magic Patterns to think through what steps I needed to add: https://www.magicpatterns.com/c/d9sb9eavgnpjv1d5vaw6wa
This is long way of saying that one way I have become a better designer is by using AI as a creative assistant, but then also recognizing when to not reinvent the wheel. You also want to leverage existing patterns as much as possible.
Re: Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams
#17This is super cool—love how you’re flipping the AI-assisted creation story to focus on design-first workflows. The frontend-only scope is such a smart constraint, especially for PMs and non-designers trying to validate ideas fast without diving into fullstack territory. I’ve seen firsthand how hard it can be for non-designers to clearly communicate product ideas, and Magic Patterns seems to lower that barrier in a re…
The Github sync is used by solo entrepreneurs or hobbyists to get what they've designed in Magic Patterns into their IDE. 99% of the time that's an AI-IDE, like Cursor. And then from their they might add backend functionality. It's pretty interesting seeing how Cursor is the "next step" after these types of tools for that persona.
On the other hand, for product teams with mature engineering workflows, it usually goes like this: 1. Designers/PM brainstorms an idea in Magic Patterns 2. They get feedback in a design crit or from their users by sharing the Magic Patterns URL. 3. They iterate on it further and then either export it to figma or hand it off to engineering directly. But! engineering won't use the code because we output React + Tailwind CSS, and they are very likely using custom components or have their own nuances.
I do think as the foundational models get better the dev/design handoff will get smoother, but I don't think we are there yet, especially for existing code bases. For new projects, it's a different story and our two-way Github sync plays a role.
Re: Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams
#18Played around with it, really nice, will definitely use it in the future!
Re: Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams
#19Why would you limit the tool to strictly be for React?
"As per my limitations, I am designed to work specifically with React and TypeScript/JavaScript only. I cannot provide direct conversions to plain HTML/CSS or other frameworks."
Re: Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams
#20Interesting. So, if you're targeting the PM and only building a frontend, are you actually competing with Figma? With the many use case of creating/iterating a UX prototype? In which case - you mention that MagicPatterns creates components, but can it also reuse existing components? E.g. sometimes I'd want to create a UX prototype, but use a pre-existing UI / design language to match how my sites/apps are already imp…
While we target the PM, it's a healthy mix of personas. We have many founders and designers who use us as well. Some of the designers are indeed now skipping Figma, a direct quote from one of them ( https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stephenwitmer_you-gotta-love-... ): > "I spend 80-90% less time drawing boxes in Figma - and more time using my insights, creativity, and words to create working prototypes [...] - to shorte…
Not using Magic Patterns but absolutely +1 this workflow. I'm a designer working across multiple teams and it's so fast and fluid to get react prototypes out of an LLM. I put together a vite project to drop the resulting typescript files into. Much quicker iteration with PMs and then we capture spec from the prototype. I see this as a way to scale our design efforts across the org since we can get higher resolution iteration done faster.