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How our vibe coded website looks like a designer made it

137 points · 77 comments · yakkomajuri

  1. fiatpandas · · 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 · · 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. augment_me · · 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.

        1. hk1337 · · 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.
          1. augment_me · · 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?

            1. UtopiaPunk · · focus · HN ↗
              Ugh, my little kid talks to me like this.

              Let's try again. What's a nicer way of saying that?

              1. augment_me · · focus · HN ↗

                [dead]

            2. strangecasts · · 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")

              1. augment_me · · 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.
                1. strangecasts · · 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
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