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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

#71

Post by alexdanilowicz »

lippihom wrote: post #69

Curious what the advantages are over something like Replit?

I wrote answer to that here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43752176#43757543 - let me know if I can answer anything specifically!

What I'll add is we are seeing customers use Magic Patterns + other 'vibe coding' tools in conjunction. For example, they might use Magic Patterns for brainstorming and to think through the design, and then they'll copy the code from Magic Patterns into Replit to "make it real" and add a database or authentication.

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

#72

Post by zalzal »

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.

You probably know this, but just want to say, founder to founder: don't listen to this argument at all.

People are so fond of saying "just wait and the new model will do this." And very smart people I know say it (especially when they work for OpenAI or Anthropic!).

It might be partly true (of course it's situational). But it's a glib and irrelevant thing to say. Model capabilities do not advance like some continuous exponential across all domains and skills. Not even close.

Product design is exploring the solution to human problems in a way that you can bundle and sell. Novel solutions to human problems tend to come from humans, applying effort over time (with the help of models of course) to understand the problem and separate out what's essential and what's irrelevant to the solution.

(A related comment on the adjacent thread.)

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

#73

Post by nrmitchi »

alexdanilowicz wrote: post #68
nrmitchi wrote: post #63

I don't normally comment on these things, but I gave it a quick shot for a project I'm working on (fairly generic dashboard-style prompt, but that's fine). I'm actually pretty impressed. A couple things though: 1. It took a _while_ to give me anything. Not sure if that's related to load, but it was ~17 files, and probably took 5+ minutes. It was not clear what was going on in that time, or what would happen if I left…

1. We're using Sonnet 3.7 for the first prompt. I've noticed with some prompts that require lots of files it can be PAINFULLY slow. Our servers also might be getting slammed from the HN traffic. We have a "fast" mode that uses 3.5 that you can toggle and that's the default for editing, however, it won't be as visually rich. We need to improve the loading experience for sure. One big UX/UI difference between our produ…

> When you say "custom value-based" are you referring to a "contact us for pricing" tier?

Ya. Not saying that it's applicable to everyone (or even most people), but really once a team gets above maybe 20+ people actively using this, they're not going to blink at $1200/month (good for you now, but you'll be leaving a ton of money on the table, and it's hard to adjust expectations later).

Maybe capping the size of a team on the "pro" plan would be an inbetween, but it's something to talk to your customers about.

Happy to chat more directly; my email's in my bio.

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

#74

Post by alexdanilowicz »

zalzal wrote: post #72
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.

You probably know this, but just want to say, founder to founder: don't listen to this argument at all. People are so fond of saying "just wait and the new model will do this." And very smart people I know say it (especially when they work for OpenAI or Anthropic!). It might be partly true (of course it's situational). But it's a glib and irrelevant thing to say. Model capabilities do not advance like some continuous…

I love what you wrote in the other thread too:

> "The hard part of being an engineer is not writing JavaScript. It is building a solution that addresses the essential complexity of a problem without adding accidental complexity."

I have been oversimplifying it as "LLMs cannot read you mind."

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

#75

Post by pglevy »

alexdanilowicz wrote: post #23
pglevy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

which tools are you using? And if you do end up trying us, let me know what you'd like to see or if we can help with anything! It is remarkable how fast pure prompting can get you an interactive prototype. We recently added the ability for our system to reference markdown files, so one thing you can do is paste a PRD into Magic Patterns and then tell it to reference that PRD as it builds out your spec.

I started out copying and pasting from Claude Pro. Then I hooked up MCP so it could edit files directly in my local repo.

I set up this template with all the shadcn components pre-installed so you can prompt something like, "make a prototype of this mockup using shadcn" and then just drop the page in without any extra importing or routing. https://github.com/pglevy/vibe-coding-boilerplate

We recently got Gemini at work so trying to use that now since everyone has access.

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

#76

Post by alexdanilowicz »

nrmitchi wrote: post #73
alexdanilowicz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. We're using Sonnet 3.7 for the first prompt. I've noticed with some prompts that require lots of files it can be PAINFULLY slow. Our servers also might be getting slammed from the HN traffic. We have a "fast" mode that uses 3.5 that you can toggle and that's the default for editing, however, it won't be as visually rich. We need to improve the loading experience for sure. One big UX/UI difference between our produ…

> When you say "custom value-based" are you referring to a "contact us for pricing" tier? Ya. Not saying that it's applicable to everyone (or even most people), but really once a team gets above maybe 20+ people actively using this, they're not going to blink at $1200/month (good for you now, but you'll be leaving a ton of money on the table, and it's hard to adjust expectations later). Maybe capping the size of a te…

> Maybe capping the size of a team on the "pro" plan would be an inbetween

That's interesting. We already have teams with 20+ folks on it today at very large companies, but haven't thought about that type of stuff too much - have been laser-focused on core product building. I think in the early days we spent a little too much time tweaking minor pricing plan details. You're right though we are now at a point where we are very likely leaving money on the table.

For example, "centralized billing" on our platform only exists because it was the result of a feature request from a larger customer.

P.S. I emailed you, but it bounced!

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

#77

Post by nrmitchi »

alexdanilowicz wrote: post #76
nrmitchi wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you say "custom value-based" are you referring to a "contact us for pricing" tier? Ya. Not saying that it's applicable to everyone (or even most people), but really once a team gets above maybe 20+ people actively using this, they're not going to blink at $1200/month (good for you now, but you'll be leaving a ton of money on the table, and it's hard to adjust expectations later). Maybe capping the size of a te…

> Maybe capping the size of a team on the "pro" plan would be an inbetween That's interesting. We already have teams with 20+ folks on it today at very large companies, but haven't thought about that type of stuff too much - have been laser-focused on core product building. I think in the early days we spent a little too much time tweaking minor pricing plan details. You're right though we are now at a point where we…

Email you too; thanks for the heads on the bounce. Should be fixed now.

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

#78

Post by pedalpete »

alexdanilowicz wrote: post #62
pedalpete wrote: post #61

I'm interested in understanding your desire to do design and prototyping as a single shot? My expectation was that I'd iterate on a few UX designs with the LLM and then when I'm happy with what the LLM is suggesting, I'd output to figma, and then maybe move to code. It's great that you're generating code, but isn't that increasing your cost and processing time to write code for each iteration?

What do you mean by "single shot?" Are you referring to one-shot prompting? I should have clarified in my post — we do have customers who one-shot designs - but that's very rare (it's usually landing pages because Sonnet 3.7 is really good at those). We heavily encourage iteration and expect it. The longest thread on the platform is 850+ messages in a single chat! We have a fine-tuned fast apply model for applying co…

I was thinking the process would be

1) as for a certain UX design 2) AI shows me an image of what it thinks I want 3) I make suggestions, changes to what I want 4) AI makes changes, shows me an image 5) back to step 3 and repeat until I'm ready to view code 6) have the AI write the code of the UX once.

I understand this may mean there are multiple images showing a flow, or different states, but in my mind, the time consuming part is the AI creating each JS file for the UX. I would think it could iterate quicker on designs and then output code.

This is how UX is designed today, designer does a bunch of iterations, gets feedback, then hands it to developer.

Right now, you're doing this all at once (or at least that is what my experience was).

I get what you mean about code as a method of communicating with the LLM, and I'm an engineer, so I kinda get that, but my first reaction wasn't "let's look at the code output", I was looking at the design output and thinking "is this what I want?"

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

#79

Post by alexdanilowicz »

pedalpete wrote: post #78
alexdanilowicz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "single shot?" Are you referring to one-shot prompting? I should have clarified in my post — we do have customers who one-shot designs - but that's very rare (it's usually landing pages because Sonnet 3.7 is really good at those). We heavily encourage iteration and expect it. The longest thread on the platform is 850+ messages in a single chat! We have a fine-tuned fast apply model for applying co…

I was thinking the process would be 1) as for a certain UX design 2) AI shows me an image of what it thinks I want 3) I make suggestions, changes to what I want 4) AI makes changes, shows me an image 5) back to step 3 and repeat until I'm ready to view code 6) have the AI write the code of the UX once. I understand this may mean there are multiple images showing a flow, or different states, but in my mind, the time c…

I don't think generating images would be faster than generating code, plus you lose all the interactivity. Many designers tell us where they get the most value out of Magic Patterns is that the designs are interactive by default, unlike traditional vector-based design tools.

I'm with you that the first reaction is not "let's look at code output." In fact, for most of our users, they never look at the code. It's abstracted away from them and just an implementation detail to unlock interactivity.

P.S. You might enjoy our /Inspiration command, which gives you 4 variations at once. Demo video: https://www.magicpatterns.com/docs/documentation/editor/edit...

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

#80

Post by perardi »

Hey kids, grizzled UI designer and developer at a startup here. You’ve got 2 keys correct right at the start.

1. Permissions/auth for prototypes. Stakeholders go for that. MBA folks don’t want to be sent crazy random obfuscated URLs, they want a nice login page that makes them feel secure. (Because MBA types will get weird about corporate secrets, even just high-level wireframes.)

2. Figma/Miro-esque infinite canvas with comments. Product managers and stakeholders love that flow.

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