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Where's the AI design Renaissance?

learnui.design

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Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#71

Post by tjr »

prerok wrote: post #54
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think that programming languages (well, at least some of them, maybe not all) have succeeded in being good ways of expressing programmatic thought. If I know what I want in (say) C, it can be faster for me to write C code than to write English that describes C code.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#72

Post by troupo »

daveguy wrote: post #65
troupo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From time to time I look at the explore page of various AI design tools, and they are as corporate-depressing as I didn't expect them to be [1]. It's not even a bell curve. It feels like they are overindexed on bland corporate aesthetic. Getting them to output anything but a Linear clone is an exercise in frustration. [1] https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1953750443248562431

Is there a reason you have two of each example in your post? Or did some tool produce literally exact designs from a single prompt? If so, what tool?

It's not two of each example. It's two screenshots. One from Lovable, one from v0 :)

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#73

Post by nitwit005 »

madrox wrote: post #58

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…

One of the bigger design battles at a prior company was designers insisting on pull to refresh, and the researchers insisting on removing it due to customer feedback.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#74

Post by kingkongjaffa »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #23
kingkongjaffa wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

on the other hand: > After 2.5 years of insane hype, there’s no evidence that current AI is making the design process faster I am designing prototypes faster today with LLMs this is just flat out wrong. And it's not really 2.5 years it's more like the last 6 months, GPT5, sonnet 4.0 and 4.5 have made this stuff viable to seriously use.

I've still not seen any good workflows for design prototypes, are you talking designing code prototypes or design?

Basically replacing showing a UI made in figma with a UI made with claude code or figma make, to show a customer see what they think and then throw away, not to put in production ever.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#75

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

prerok wrote: post #54
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I guess it depends on what you use it for. I found it quite relaxing to get AI to write a bunch of unit tests for existing code. Simple and easy to review, and not fun to write myself.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#76

Post by kingkongjaffa »

didibus wrote: post #66
kingkongjaffa wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

on the other hand: > After 2.5 years of insane hype, there’s no evidence that current AI is making the design process faster I am designing prototypes faster today with LLMs this is just flat out wrong. And it's not really 2.5 years it's more like the last 6 months, GPT5, sonnet 4.0 and 4.5 have made this stuff viable to seriously use.

> I am designing prototypes faster today with LLMs this is just flat out wrong One thing I've wondered and not been sure of, is that you can see productivity boost in parts of the process, but overall the end to end process doesn't seem to be getting done faster. I'm not sure of this, but it's what I've observed at work. You might be designing a lot of prototypes faster, but are you landing on something good quicker?…

> You might be designing a lot of prototypes faster, but are you landing on something good quicker? Are you getting the final product out faster?

Yeah, but not because of the LLM, more because I have a strong opinion and multiple design options I want to get in front of customers asap. Instead of coding a UI myself which I can do, or working with an engineer, I can try a bunch of stuff, show it to customers early and see what resonates.

Its a combination of having a strong opinion while taking into account what the customer says and does. Otherwise we’re just building faster horses (https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast)

And this speaks to the whole AI hype and tendency to shove it into everything. It’s just a tool. When we do build stuff that uses AI it has to be because we find a problem worth solving and the solution characteristics happen to align with LLM’s, not because we actively want to use the tech and shoehorn it in.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#78

Post by BoorishBears »

scuff3d wrote: post #61
BoorishBears wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admit it. You're the guy they have post-training on SVG pelican generation for human preference...

His reply to me got flagged, so I have no idea what he said but suddenly we are talking about sex work and pelicans and I'm super confused...

> vibes coding is massively saturated with early model-access poasters who define the narrative on each release.

not complicated.

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#79

Post by daxfohl »

gyomu wrote: post #70
daxfohl wrote: post #39

To me, the key quote is the simple "If you had told me in late 2022 I’d be saying these things 3 years later, I would’ve been pretty surprised." As someone with little exposure to the design industry, seeing how quickly AI could generate images, I'd been under the assumption that the AI takeover was already well underway there, so was surprised to learn that it's not. If anything, that gives some comfort around the f…

That quote stood out to me as well, but mostly because the 3 images shown by the author have nothing to do with product/interface/communications design. I guess they’re vaguely cool looking images? If the author had used them to talk about how “concept art” in games/movies was going to get upended by AI there would be a point there, but as it stands I find it very puzzling that someone who claims to teach design woul…

I think there's some benefit of hindsight in that perspective though. I can imagine how, at the time, you see the advancement, and it's not obvious what the barriers for AI takeover are. Similar to software now, plenty of SWEs have a nagging feeling about AI encroachment. But in all likelihood, eventually it'll become clear that most SWE work involves coordinating with other teams, planning incremental delivery and various testing and review phases, working with CS when users face issues, etc. The boundaries will be a lot clearer, and looking back at the current FUD because of a better autocomplete, it'll seem ridiculous by then. (At least I hope so!)

Re: Where's the AI design Renaissance?

#80

Post by sandworm101 »

krapp wrote: post #30
sandworm101 wrote: post #10

Because art, commercially viable art, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspirarion. AI can generate the first inspirational image but cannot do the 99%, all the hard work, to turn that image into a viable product.

If you're talking about commercial art, I think most of it is already done by AI wherever feasible. The interesting conversation is around art not as a product to be consumed but a medium of human expression with intent behind it.

Commercial art is not just paintings but also all product design.
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