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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

#31

Post by alexdanilowicz »

jonplackett wrote: post #26
sumitkumar wrote: post #25

Hi, Thank you for sharing. I tried this prompt. ``` create a Rubik's cube app with all available moves and show the cube and the animations. add a scrambler and a solver. Also add timer to time the moves. ``` I got this. https://www.magicpatterns.com/c/psesccrmk41jibfhwp7wh1 Which looks like a good starting point but doesn't work at all. After this it is daunting to look at code. I still have to figure out how to tel…

I’m constantly intrigued how people are getting funding for entire companies that are essentially going to be a feature of all LLMs pretty soon.

There's a lot of work around UX and how you interact with the LLM. For example, given an entire React app + a user prompt to update it, which code snippet do you feed to the LLM? The LLM cannot read your mind. In a way it feels like the application layer's job to help it read your mind.

Re: Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams

#32

Post by airstrike »

teddarific wrote: post #30
lgas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the other products in this space.

Other tools are AMAZING for spinning up actual fullstack apps and use cases that require persistent storage. But actual product teams aren’t asking for that. Also, our customers tell us that anecdotally it feels like we error less compared to other tools because we are focused entirely on frontend (there’s less room for error). Of course, we still error a lot - not easy when natural language is your input set!! - but…

I love the idea. I just tried it for the office software suite I'm building and although I wouldn't copy-and-paste the design it suggested, it gave me a few ideas to iterate on, and that's already useful. I'll explore it further when it's time for more design thinking (I'm pretty set on my current design for now)

Interestingly, part of the value of the project I'm working on comes from bundling an AI assistant so that you can get documents (spreadsheets, presentations, documents) from natural language, so there's some overlap--the obvious difference being I'm trying to build complex documents instead of complex UI

Re: Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams

#33

Post by jonplackett »

alexdanilowicz wrote: post #31
jonplackett wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m constantly intrigued how people are getting funding for entire companies that are essentially going to be a feature of all LLMs pretty soon.

There's a lot of work around UX and how you interact with the LLM. For example, given an entire React app + a user prompt to update it, which code snippet do you feed to the LLM? The LLM cannot read your mind. In a way it feels like the application layer's job to help it read your mind.

Do you not think that’ll get solved by a future generation of cleverer LLMs though? As someone pointed out in another comment, they get better results with Gemini 2.5 already.

People already seem quite annoyed with Cursor based on that thread the other day with the hallucinated customer support.

Interested in anyone’s opinion

Re: Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams

#34

Post by alexdanilowicz »

sumitkumar wrote: post #25

Hi, Thank you for sharing. I tried this prompt. ``` create a Rubik's cube app with all available moves and show the cube and the animations. add a scrambler and a solver. Also add timer to time the moves. ``` I got this. https://www.magicpatterns.com/c/psesccrmk41jibfhwp7wh1 Which looks like a good starting point but doesn't work at all. After this it is daunting to look at code. I still have to figure out how to tel…

Do you have the prompt you used for Gemini 2.5 pro? I think it would be interesting comparing prompt for prompt!

In this case, it looks like the Gemini output that you linked — as you mentioned — doesn't include the requirement for a scrambler/solver/timer, so it's hard for me to comment directly on the comparison.

I ask because we can totally add Gemini 2.5 pro as one of the models we use under the hood!

Re: Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams

#35

Post by teddarific »

airstrike wrote: post #32
teddarific wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other tools are AMAZING for spinning up actual fullstack apps and use cases that require persistent storage. But actual product teams aren’t asking for that. Also, our customers tell us that anecdotally it feels like we error less compared to other tools because we are focused entirely on frontend (there’s less room for error). Of course, we still error a lot - not easy when natural language is your input set!! - but…

I love the idea. I just tried it for the office software suite I'm building and although I wouldn't copy-and-paste the design it suggested, it gave me a few ideas to iterate on, and that's already useful. I'll explore it further when it's time for more design thinking (I'm pretty set on my current design for now) Interestingly, part of the value of the project I'm working on comes from bundling an AI assistant so tha…

Awesome to hear — our goal is to get to a point where you can copy/paste the design, but we totally recognize that it doesn't always get you to a full high fidelity mock up with the current limitations. So the main use case we've seen a lot of success with is ideating and validating different branches, quickly.

Oh that sounds very neat — definitely similar in nature! Documents and UI are both complex and can require a lot of iterations to get right

Re: Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams

#36

Post by jcgr »

I'm CTO at a startup and Magic Patterns is amazing, my current workflow is to ideate using MP then implement straight to my codebase.

The instant feedback-loop of iterating over components is great and perfect for me when I'm designing a feature that's heavy on the client side of things.

For example it took me half a day to go from idea -> design -> implementation

Re: Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams

#37

Post by alexdanilowicz »

jonplackett wrote: post #33
alexdanilowicz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of work around UX and how you interact with the LLM. For example, given an entire React app + a user prompt to update it, which code snippet do you feed to the LLM? The LLM cannot read your mind. In a way it feels like the application layer's job to help it read your mind.

Do you not think that’ll get solved by a future generation of cleverer LLMs though? As someone pointed out in another comment, they get better results with Gemini 2.5 already. People already seem quite annoyed with Cursor based on that thread the other day with the hallucinated customer support. Interested in anyone’s opinion

> Do you not think that’ll get solved by a future generation of cleverer LLMs though?

I don't. But obviously I'm biased + have spent perhaps too much time at application layer. I think there will still be a large amount of tooling + feeding of context to get the best result and I don't see a world in which we let LLMs run hog wild on our computers any time soon, especially for prototyping workflows at the enterprise level.

And for the sake of discussion: let's say these cleverer, future generation LLMs do exist... then I think the entire workflow will be very different. Hard to say how. Perhaps knowledge work as we know it will be unrecognizable.

Re: the Gemini 2.5 comment, I would love to compare it prompt for prompt. Looks like the prompt they are comparing it to didn't include the requirements for the Rubik's cubes scrambler/timer/solver. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if one LLM — Gemini 2.5 in this case — is better at creating a Rubik's cube compared to Sonnet 3.7/3.5 with our system prompt. (Not a lot of product teams are prompting our platform to build Rubik's cube in three.js lol). But if it is better, what's great is we can easily swap it out and start using Gemini.

Re: Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams

#38

Post by alexdanilowicz »

jcgr wrote: post #36

I'm CTO at a startup and Magic Patterns is amazing, my current workflow is to ideate using MP then implement straight to my codebase. The instant feedback-loop of iterating over components is great and perfect for me when I'm designing a feature that's heavy on the client side of things. For example it took me half a day to go from idea -> design -> implementation

That's largely how we use it internally too. I often use Magic Patterns first to think through the steps and user interactions, and then I'll jump into cursor to start implementing.

p.s. great to see a customer on here. appreciate it.

Re: Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams

#40

Post by lnenad »

alexdanilowicz wrote: post #22
lnenad wrote: post #18

Played around with it, really nice, will definitely use it in the future!

thanks for commenting! Anything we could be doing better or initial thoughts?

To be honest I was up and running in less than a minute so nothing stands out. I didn't dive deeper right now but if I could do this and export to Figma directly that would be 100% of my use cases right now.
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