Thread

How our vibe coded website looks like a designer made it

137 points · 77 comments · yakkomajuri

fiatpandas · 1790723966 · focus · HN ↗
OP, you accidentally invented the design process that they teach in design school. You can officially call yourself a designer.
1) have a high level functional goal
2) be inspired and think of a motif
3) go wide within that motif and explore
4) narrow in on a single direction and iterate
5) fine tune the details until you are creatively satisfied and the design meets your goals from step 1.
1. socializer · 1790726629 · focus · HN ↗
  Yeah, and the trade-off here is that it takes time. In the same way, you can write insightful blog posts or work emails using AI if you maintain creative control, but all of sudden, you're not moving at 100x speed. You're moving a lot closer to human speed.
  This trade-off is something I like the least about AI. In the time it takes someone to produce excellent results using AI without giving up control, people unconcerned with quality or style can produce 100x as much. So by the end of the day, your inbox or your social media feed is mostly slop.
  1. agilek · 1790726929 · focus · HN ↗
    The fact it takes time is not a trade-off. It is an actual design work.
    xgulfie · 1790727251 · focus · HN ↗
    You forget that in any given blog post, work is bad, unless it's the kind of work the blog author does, then it's valuable
  2. augment_me · 1790727208 · focus · HN ↗
    I mean, one part of the trade-off is that you can be a designer without having gone to design school. If you can use the tools you can iterate on the averageness of all these professions and fill all those shoes.
    Choose 1:
    A UX-designer with that outputs design with AI at the speed of a UX-designer without AI
    A programmer that can output designs with AI at the same speed, and make your database, and make your helpdesk, and make your social media, booking systems, etc.
    hk1337 · 1790729835 · focus · HN ↗
    AI can do an awesome job at UI and come up with really nice look but I feel like there’s a lot of psychology behind UX that AI cannot necessarily pick up on the human element.
    augment_me · 1790731411 · focus · HN ↗
    Explain what cannot be picked up on and why.
    The LLMs have ingested courses and books on UI, UX, psychology, neuroscience, consumer neuroscience, etc. What makes it incapable of getting this information?
    UtopiaPunk · 1790736797 · focus · HN ↗
    Ugh, my little kid talks to me like this.
    Let's try again. What's a nicer way of saying that?
    augment_me · 1790740154 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    strangecasts · 1790755806 · focus · HN ↗
    Clicking through the website with computer use isn't currently part of the website generation chain for most models, and while there are gaze prediction models, to my knowledge none are productized or universal to the point where you can chuck them in and consistently predict what draws attention on any given page
    (Generally I think it is alright to interpret "can't do" in terms of "the common workflow that current models will afford" and not "definitionally incapable of")
    augment_me · 1790782237 · focus · HN ↗
    Humans have the same limitations in this, we model an idea using prior knowledge for what will draw attention, then we test it and evaluate it.
    strangecasts · 1790849584 · focus · HN ↗
    I was not making an argument about people, I was trying to identify specific reasons why models can produce samey UIs unless guided
    [deleted] · 1790799173 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
2. FlamingMoe · 1790729459 · focus · HN ↗
  I have never heard this, but I like it a lot.
3. hk1337 · 1790729686 · focus · HN ↗
  That sounds like basic project management
  1. echelon · 1790733531 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm sure this is all in the training data.
    I like hearing it articulated for me.
4. [deleted] · 1790731231 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
5. ch4s3 · 1790734052 · focus · HN ↗
  It’s funny, this is exactly how I used opus to design an iOS app I’m building. Unfortunately fable was released and it seems my taste lines up with fable’s training quite a bit[1]. Now my app looks like ai anyway. You win some you lose some I guess.
  [1] <a href="https://onda-cast.github.io/onda/" rel="nofollow">https://onda-cast.github.io/onda/
  1. number6 · 1790749714 · focus · HN ↗
    Before everything looked like bootstrap or one of the other 5 design systems. Website? Hero Image, 3 Colums, footer. This was peak design half a decade ago.
    ch4s3 · 1790781432 · focus · HN ↗
    I am deeply offended by the bootstrap comparison, I was more of a Milligram guy in the 2010s.
6. bbor · 1790734130 · focus · HN ↗
  I love the list, but the design process I taught in school was way different — it was a loop of two steps, started anywhere:
  1. Do something. (Many of the five above seem nice! But there’s lots of methods that fit different tasks)
  2. Ask some users please for the love of god! Show it to somebody! Get your mom’s feedback! Anybody!!!
  Etc. It was drilled into me pretty hard at GaTech by their HCI prof, but perhaps he spent so much time reiterating it because it’s heterodox.
  It doesn’t help that “design” covers everything from splash pages that sell SaaS to doors and blankets and stuff. I’m a little dubious of any single unified framework other than the aforementioned Frantic Dyad that could hope to cover all that space.
7. tallship · 1790735444 · focus · HN ↗
  I think, many of the folks commenting below, mentioning that the OP hasn't actually studied in a design program in school, also fail to mention that the attorney, and later U.S. President, Abraham Lincoln also had no formal education in learning to read.
  The latter, in his path toward literacy, and eventually a J.D. (That's what attorneys are nowadays anyway) was largely due to his stubborn autodidactism, the same mettle that the OP himself chronicles and showcases in his blog.
  If you put most people participating (or lurking) here on Hacker News through this scrutiny, you really shouldn't be surprised that this is generally the case with anyone who's been working in data processing, Management Information Systems, Information Technology, or WhatEv we're going to be calling it in the next decade.
  Nowadays, when I think of n00bs, I don't think about the computer illiterate, I think about the motivated neophytes who spent two years grinding along in an IT track in college at the snails pace of semester courses and now they can consider themselves entry level python programmers with an extra semester where they took "Introduction to Java - CS-107".
  If you're going to survive in this industry, you already have an insatiable curiosity for everything under the hood and morbid obsessions with break/fix - emphasis on 'fix' :)
  If it looks like Yakko (the OP of this thread) went through two semesters (that really is a freakin' year in trad educational systems) of design school, but in reality really didn't... You would be wrong. He just did it on his own and at a pace he was comfortable with, arriving at the same dock to berth his ship as someone who actually spent a year being forced learn it at a snails pace.
  Not everyone can be a network engineer, or a systems administrator, or full stack developer, etc., but those who thrive upon the work are almost always exceedingly autodidacts in those disciplines...
  You literally cannot keep up with the pace of evolving technologies if you're doing so in a legacy educational institution.
  Interview question: "Tell me about a nightmare scenario you were faced with when you were without the knowledge to fix the problem and yet, did so anyway - how and what did you do to rise to the occasion, and how did that make you feel like when everyone was back online again?"
  1. dprkh · 1790738003 · focus · HN ↗
    > If you're going to survive in this industry
    I really feel like it's very much random.
    When job hunting -> does the recruiter shortlist you?
    When on the job -> do you get laid off?
    Neither has anything to do with your skills at the actual job.
    themanmaran · 1790738145 · focus · HN ↗
    > do you get laid off?
    > Neither has anything to do with your skills at the actual job.
    I hate to break it to you. But it definitely does...
    8note · 1790738735 · focus · HN ↗
    it doesnt really. some layoffs yes, others no.
    the high performers in a whole org that gets cut, still gets cut.
    even the performance of the org itself doesnt matter if the business decides the opportunity cost of not doing something else is too expensive
  2. argee · 1790740711 · focus · HN ↗
    Where ignorance is bliss, / 'Tis folly to be wise
    I have such an insatiable curiosity, but it really strips the "magic" from the world more often than not. I think it's much more fun to make believe that no one understands LLMs, for example, than to know that not only do we understand them quite well enough, it is also quite boring in the end. As are all things once the curtain has been peeked.
    argee · 1790790860 · focus · HN ↗
    The reason I added that quote, by the way, was because although nowadays people typically use "ignorance is bliss" as a blanket justification for willful ignorance, intellectual laziness, or avoiding uncomfortable truths, when English poet Thomas Gray coined the phrase in his 1742 poem (Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College), he was expressing a sentiment about the inevitable loss of childhood innocence.
    Yet ah! why should they know their fate? Since sorrow never comes too late, And happiness too swiftly flies. Thought would destroy their paradise. No more; where ignorance is bliss, ’Tis folly to be wise.
    And yes, I knew I'd be downvoted for it.
    To each his suff'rings: all are men, Condemn'd alike to groan

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