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Open Design: Use Your Coding Agent as a Design Engine

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Re: Open Design: Use Your Coding Agent as a Design Engine

#71

Post by hmokiguess »

We have a service issue today with the rate of tooling, it reminds me of the old days using Napster or Kazaa, it's full of good stuff but the curve to get in is so high, so much cognitive energy required to understand and get value out of it and, once you do, you have this monstrous workflow that only you know how to operate.

Or maybe I'm getting old? Serious question, do people really open a project with a README like that and are able to hit the ground running quickly and getting value right out of the gate?

Re: Open Design: Use Your Coding Agent as a Design Engine

#72

Post by jshaqaw »

xnx wrote: post #57
jshaqaw wrote: post #26

The inevitable outcome here is that designed materials become so generic and infinitely produceable that they become worthless background noise. We are well on the way to that path. For almost all materials the only value of getting a seriously produced work of design (i.e., the "make me a magazine-style pitch deck for our seed round" this design engine mentions) is a signaling function that some combination of effor…

> The inevitable outcome here is that designed materials become so generic and infinitely produceable that they become worthless background noise. Hopefully. The process has taken way too long. Compare to something similar like PowerPoint animations. Fun the first time you see them, and then annoying after that. The best possible side effect of the cost of producing content dropping to zero would be more effort spent…

This is why I beg people to send me their raw prompts rather than the output of running that prompt through a generic LLM. Same semantic content in a half page prompt as the 10 page stochastic text expansion LLM memo version but 1. takes me 1/10th the time to process and 2. I'm not forced to guess which ideas are real ideas I need to respond to and which are just text expansion ghosts.

Re: Open Design: Use Your Coding Agent as a Design Engine

#73

Post by [deleted] »

hmokiguess wrote: post #71

We have a service issue today with the rate of tooling, it reminds me of the old days using Napster or Kazaa, it's full of good stuff but the curve to get in is so high, so much cognitive energy required to understand and get value out of it and, once you do, you have this monstrous workflow that only you know how to operate. Or maybe I'm getting old? Serious question, do people really open a project with a README li…

[deleted]

Re: Open Design: Use Your Coding Agent as a Design Engine

#76

Post by toddmorey »

jshaqaw wrote: post #26

The inevitable outcome here is that designed materials become so generic and infinitely produceable that they become worthless background noise. We are well on the way to that path. For almost all materials the only value of getting a seriously produced work of design (i.e., the "make me a magazine-style pitch deck for our seed round" this design engine mentions) is a signaling function that some combination of effor…

Look I'm speaking here as a career designer:

I think design as a "signaling function" for determining the quality of a thing was already broken. It was already possible to put up an impressive-looking site for anything; already possible to to dupe people with cheap product wrapped in fancy packaging.

Movies with insane budgets that spend forever in production are often still terrible. One of my favorite songs was written by the artist in a hotel room on a Sunday afternoon.

One thing to consider: if it's cheap and immediate to wrap any content in design, it can now also be cheap and immediate to customize the design of content. Maybe we can finally return to a user-focused internet like the one that was promised to us by browser custom style sheets.

Finally, I can see democratizing design in this way will make more content more pleasant to look a (which is a win). And we'll also make better decisions with design out of the decision matrixes it doesn't belong in (another win).

Re: Open Design: Use Your Coding Agent as a Design Engine

#77

Post by threecheese »

xienze wrote: post #42
jerojero wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously if you make the slides yourself then you'd know the content well. The way of using these tools is not to one-shot your slide deck (unless you have plenty time to learn the content) but give it a base product you've already worked on and ask it to make it pretty, interesting, etc. and perhaps make small changes to the content which you'd review and learn. You can probably use a knife as a fork but it wouldn'…

> The way of using these tools is not to one-shot your slide deck This line of thinking IMO is hopelessly naive. Yes, the responsible way to use AI and perhaps the way _you_ use it is to do some formatting/cleaning up/enhancement of slides that you primarily authored yourself. The reality is that _most_ people are using and will use AI as a way to breeze through as much work as possible either out of laziness or pres…

It’s even worse when you cant push back with “did you even read this”, because the politics haven’t evolved to constrain the slop.

We are getting pre-solutioned massive epics, dozens of files, from senior leaders (non-ICs); when shit goes sideways, what do you do? Our jobs are already at risk just in general, and we have new KPIs around generative AI (as do those senior leaders). I’m not sticking my neck out get chopped off.

Just last week I had to make some shit up in my uplevel status report to shift blame away from an AVP. Technically it’s my fault, for not digging into the 30 files (and tanking my own metrics,m); I don’t even feel like it matters - the devs just hand that off to an LLM anyway to meet their KPIs. I’m just thankful it didn’t go to prod.

Re: Open Design: Use Your Coding Agent as a Design Engine

#78

Post by NetOpWibby »

LOL

LMAO, even.

LLM-created designs are already recognizable and are the new Microsoft keynote templates. Boring, vapid, devoid of personality, perfectly fine for business use.

So as a design engine, sure. What things like this are trying to claim is that you can get "good" design and well, that's subjective. Y'know how people who don't understand kerning can look at bad kerning and feel something's not right but lack the words to explain why? The same goes for LLM design.

I'm not a luddite, I enjoy using Claude to assist in coding tasks but visual design will never be something I choose to use any LLM for. Design is for humans and LLMs lack taste.

Re: Open Design: Use Your Coding Agent as a Design Engine

#79

Post by cortesoft »

jshaqaw wrote: post #26

The inevitable outcome here is that designed materials become so generic and infinitely produceable that they become worthless background noise. We are well on the way to that path. For almost all materials the only value of getting a seriously produced work of design (i.e., the "make me a magazine-style pitch deck for our seed round" this design engine mentions) is a signaling function that some combination of effor…

That idea around LLMs reducing the signaling value of certain types of work is very interesting, and I hadn’t really thought about it.

I think about this effect with targeted advertising a lot, every since I read this article about why targeted advertising is so useless for both consumers and advertisers, even when it seems like on the surface it should be better for both: https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/

Once it becomes very cheap to do something, it becomes completely useless as a way to differentiate quality from crap.

Re: Open Design: Use Your Coding Agent as a Design Engine

#80

Post by slopinthebag »

jshaqaw wrote: post #26

The inevitable outcome here is that designed materials become so generic and infinitely produceable that they become worthless background noise. We are well on the way to that path. For almost all materials the only value of getting a seriously produced work of design (i.e., the "make me a magazine-style pitch deck for our seed round" this design engine mentions) is a signaling function that some combination of effor…

And the result will be people creating their own flawed but unique designs as a counter signal. Think of the early internet and the janky but wonderfully personal websites it spawned.
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