alt Hacker NewsOpen Design: Use Your Coding Agent as a Design Engine
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The README is unnerving. Do people really see the Claude-salesman style of writing as something normal?
On the other hand, I should be thanking Anthropic for making it so easy to spot, they might have done this intentionally.
To be fair I find the approach from claude design incredibly wasteful of tokens, and time-consuming since it needs to build a full website. Their website is also clearly vibe-coded and not homogeneous in style with the rest.
ChatGPT image 2 is much better at protoyping uis, cheaper and faster. I haven't tried the figma plugin but I suspect it's also more efficient.
Readme reads like a sales deck. Got to "six load-bearing ideas" and closed the tab. If your tool was actually good you'd just show what it does. Also 14k stars in a week is doing a lot of work here. Nobody finds a repo that fast organically.
I'm curious what flows folks find most productive here? We are a heavy vibe coding team, with heavy review. That has smoothed out for our backend work, but frontend feels much earlier.
We have AI driving a usual mix of storybook, pencil, figma, playwright, tailwind/react, per-pr staging servers, etc, and a few skill files on using these. PRs include autogenerated storybook and intool screenshots, and links to staging servers.
Except... Everyone works quite differently in how they flow through this. Likewise, it's unclear how valuable each pieces still is, and when. Our developers are doing more ownership now, which is shifting this too.
Are folks switching to Claude Design? Some super skills imports? Etc..
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?
Repo's been up for a week and already it has 14k stars.
Oh look, they are gaining stars at a rate of pretty much exactly 1400 per day: https://www.star-history.com/?repos=nexu-io%2Fopen-design&ty...
Yeah, nothing shady here at all.
Do people design UIs first?
I just basically define what I need in a UI in plain text
when the prototype is built.
I extract the repeating units, then add design to it.
This seems bloated to me
This seems like a lot and most people don’t need such as overly complex solution solving for both UI, UX and marketing.
I created something slightly simpler that just generates a token system and allocates the UX to the LLM.
github.com/bmson/anchor-ui
This feels so over complex. I did something similar but went with something quite a bit simple
curious how much of the output quality is the design systems and skill files doing real work vs claude just being very good at HTML. the prompt stack matters, but it's hard to know how much.
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.
I don't think I've ever wanted a README to fuck off more than this one, impressive.
Linux version?
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I really appreciate open source community for moving this fast
How does a human designer even compete? I just looked at all the demos and they look beautiful.
I hand designed my site https://www.nair.sh/ and it feels like it doesn't even compare.
Sure, there's some judgment as to what design is appropriate in a given situation, but it just feels like so much harder for a human's design to feel valuable now.
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 effort and capital went into its production. Yes, the 1 in a 10,000 work of design adds some actual value. But usually it's just a filtering mechanism. The purpose of making a powerpoint deck before a meeting is rarely the value of a deck. Rather it is signaling that someone spent some time actually organizing their thoughts instead of bloviating spontaneously.
All of this is lost with AI led design. Producing designed artifacts are free and instant. Yeah you will impress the old folks for a year or so who haven't caught onto the joke. Eventually this just becomes pointless table stakes. Just the same way desktop publishing was in the 90s. You impressed the old folks for a bit until it all became background noise table stakes.