upvote
> It's not replacing designers.

Except it is. Plenty of places will say this is all good enough and not hire, or even lay off, the UI/UX person. I've seen this firsthand.

reply
I have seen this as well, except the UI ends up all looking similar, because the harness prompt and training data doesn’t change much

The average becomes the same shade of gray. Familiarity breeds contempt. New types of design will emerge that are expensive to copy, because differentiation drives competition

reply
Y’all would have much more productive conversations about AI if you were even for a second able to differentiate the aspects of $x that you care about as a craft via which the majority of people care about. HN has truly become the embodiment of the “this is fine” meme.
reply
Which is perfectly adequate for 95% of applications. Hell, it’d probably improve most applications if they adopted some proven shade of gray.

Why do people feel that each and every tool they use needs its own unique look and feel? And why are people willing to pay more for that? In some cases, sure. For my smart sprinkler app.. I don’t give a damn if it looks like 1000 other apps.

reply
I’d actually prefer if all of them looked and worked the same, especially useful if you have elderly family members you need to teach how to use app for XYZ. all government websites (especially functional ones that citizens use to do something on) for instance should be exactly the same
reply
Especially if you’re working on an established product with an existing design system. New features / layouts are really easy now.

These tools don’t solve big design problems, but they do resolve all the little design decisions often left up to devs at implementation time.

reply
Yeah, agreed. And realistically they are correct. I’d argue that “good enough” is how most things are done.
reply
That's how I see most of the system design capabilities of Opus. I've been an engineer for 15 years. It's so nice to describe what you want, it gets you in the ballpark, and you can refine and tweak to get it just right. Sometimes it's fun to have it design crazy stuff so you can play out a crazy idea without wasting too much time. I can see how it could easily translate to the visual design space.

Now, if I could only get a model to draw arch diagrams....

reply
1. This workflow is beneficial for a per design pricing model not hourly.

2. Long term you can expect the minimum bar for aesthetically pleasing design to be raised and there to be overall less demand for human produced generic design.

3. This will mean all designers get pushed into the same corner or complex, unique, uninferable design and trying to fight it out.

reply
Indeed. Kitbashing is a thing, and it was always a thing. Designers I worked with would spend hours doomscrolling pinterest, google images, etc. looking for their, uh... 'spark' when they were given a briefing.

This is just a really cool way of building.

I'm impressed. I tried Google Stitch but it was slow and useless. Sad, because Gemini has a pretty good creative flair, ironically enough.

reply
Stitch has been very good for me to prototype some designs, and the exporting design feature is great.

But jeez, is it buggy, slow and unintuitive at times.

Complete shift in google's old engineering culture of high quality - they seem to be shipping quickly in favor of stability

reply
That culture died forever ago, google has been launching half-baked shit that they kill in 18 months after no updates for a decade now.
reply
"in favor" is hard to parse; "instead"?
reply