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Where's the AI design Renaissance?

learnui.design

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Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#51

Post by pphysch »

couchdb_ouchdb wrote: post #41

"After 2.5 years of insane hype, there’s no evidence that current AI is making the design process faster" This is antidotally untrue. I work for a small startup. We don't have the money / aren't willing to pay for a full-time designer. So, let's just say, our UI design has always been pretty terrible. With AI, using claude, to generate design and HTML / CSS based on requirements, the design that has been generated ha…

AI can definitely help bootstrap from Terrible -> Okay. But provides little/negative guidance on going from Okay -> Exceptional.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#52

Post by daxfohl »

lysace wrote: post #17
jampa wrote: post #13

LLMs are architected to aim toward the center of the bell curve of their training data. You shouldn't expect them to produce innovative ideas, but the upside is they also won't produce terrible ones. The same applies to design. Most of the time, you get something that "doesn't suck", which is perfectly fine for projects where using a designer isn't worth it, like internal corporate pages. But consumer-facing pages re…

Tangent: Google keeps doing the same with GCP/Firebase/etc. Every year they launch a bunch of really well-crafted services that make it easy to build the most average kind of product in whatever area is trendy that year. Every year I am left intrigued but needing more to actually make use of them. The next year it's something else. I guess this is primarily a business pattern. Or anti-pattern?

Assuming you mean cloud platforms in general, I don't even think it's that tangential. In fact it may cut to the heart of the matter: if React-over-REST-over-SQL-plus-some-background-jobs was all we needed, cloud platform innovation would've stopped at Heroku and Rails 20 years ago, and AI could probably make a run on replacing SWE jobs entirely.

But as it's played out, there are a ton of use cases that don't fit neatly into that model, and each year the cloud platforms offer new tools that fit some of those use cases. AI will probably be able to string together existing tools as IaaS providers offer them, perhaps without even involving an engineer, but for use cases that are still outside cloud platform offerings, seem like things that require some ingenuity and creativity that AI wouldn't be able to grok.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#53

Post by AaronAPU »

couchdb_ouchdb wrote: post #41

"After 2.5 years of insane hype, there’s no evidence that current AI is making the design process faster" This is antidotally untrue. I work for a small startup. We don't have the money / aren't willing to pay for a full-time designer. So, let's just say, our UI design has always been pretty terrible. With AI, using claude, to generate design and HTML / CSS based on requirements, the design that has been generated ha…

It doesn’t lead, but it brings up to speed.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#54

Post by prerok »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #26
zdragnar wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is missing an important point: the developers in question thought they were being faster, when they were in fact the opposite. I'd love to see a larger study on more experienced users. The mismatch between their perception and reality is really curious.

Just a guess, but maybe they were really estimating how much effort they made. It's quite possible that it took less overall mental effort from the developers using AI, but it took more elapsed time.

That has not been my experience at all. Whenever I tried asking the AI to do something, it took an inordinate amount of time and thought to go through its changes.

The mistakes were subtle but critical. Like copying a mutex by value. Now, if I would be writing the code, I would not make the mistake. But when reviewing, it almost slipped by.

And that's where the issue is: you have to review the code as if it's written by a clueless junior dev. So, building up the mental model when reviewing, going through all the cases and thinking of the mistakes that could possibly have happened... sorry, no help.

Maybe 10% of typing it out but when I think about it, it's taking more time because I have to create the mental model in my mind then create the mental model out of the thing that AI typed out and then have to compare the two. This latter is much more time consuming than creating the model in my mind and typing it out.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#55

Post by system2 »

I totally agree with this post. The AI only helped the scammers who sell courses, claiming they made so much money from their crappy mobile apps or their other types of web apps. It is just a social media hype. Can a newbie without any understanding of database structures or modular design create a perfect flow? With the current technology, it is not possible. People are so impatient to understand what it takes to make a functioning app, to create a structured app flow, so the vibe coding project gets messy in a few prompts. It is just a hype, at least for coding, and people will soon realize it.

Suno and image generators are totally different and riding the AI wave at the moment. YouTube turned into crap, and Instagram content as well. AI fatigue is here.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#56

Post by agentcoops »

jampa wrote: post #13

LLMs are architected to aim toward the center of the bell curve of their training data. You shouldn't expect them to produce innovative ideas, but the upside is they also won't produce terrible ones. The same applies to design. Most of the time, you get something that "doesn't suck", which is perfectly fine for projects where using a designer isn't worth it, like internal corporate pages. But consumer-facing pages re…

I think the big issue with design is the ux to LLMs at the moment: it’s really hard to iterate on a design, see the output, make changes etc. I’ve had terrible luck getting good design from ChatGPT/Codex, but V0 is probably one of the most impressive AI UX experiences I’ve encountered — I often show it to non-technical friends who are ai skeptical.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#57

Post by immibis »

mwigdahl wrote: post #49
monooso wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on your criticism? OP stated that: > Developers who use AI think they're quicker and better, but they're actually slower and worse. You responded that this is a "gross overgeneralization of the content of the actual study", but the study appears to back up the original statement. To quote the summary: > When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant…

> Could you expand on your criticism? Sure! The study focused on experienced devs working in complex codebases they already knew thoroughly. This was and is the worst case for using AI tooling from a cold start, _particularly_ AI tooling as it existed at the time. There were also only 16 developers involved in the study. Time has passed since the study and we've had an entirely new class of tool introduced (the agent…

Which would be non-news if the developers also thought it wasn't going to be helpful because they already knew their codebases thoroughly. Or at least if they did the task, and then reported that AI made it harder. But in reality, they expected it to be faster, and then after doing it slower, said they'd done it faster. That's weird.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#58

Post by madrox »

Design moves at the speed of culture; not technology. It took 3 years of people messing with mobile phones before it occurred to someone to implement "pull down to refresh" and much longer for it to be common practice that people just expect from UX. I think people are still learning what they want from an AI experience.

I do think you have to be pretty targeted with your predictions, though. Consumer product design seems to be evolving differently from B2B and at a different pace. Growth curves are different for each.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#59

Post by [deleted] »

daxfohl wrote: post #52
lysace wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangent: Google keeps doing the same with GCP/Firebase/etc. Every year they launch a bunch of really well-crafted services that make it easy to build the most average kind of product in whatever area is trendy that year. Every year I am left intrigued but needing more to actually make use of them. The next year it's something else. I guess this is primarily a business pattern. Or anti-pattern?

Assuming you mean cloud platforms in general, I don't even think it's that tangential. In fact it may cut to the heart of the matter: if React-over-REST-over-SQL-plus-some-background-jobs was all we needed, cloud platform innovation would've stopped at Heroku and Rails 20 years ago, and AI could probably make a run on replacing SWE jobs entirely. But as it's played out, there are a ton of use cases that don't fit nea…

[deleted]

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#60

Post by fidotron »

I thought a huge part of the perceived value of ChatGPT etc. is the ability to bypass the work of designers. The whole dream of AI is not having to deal with what someone else thought the solution to your problem was, and instead just skipping to the end.
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