Example from the comments...
> Great question. I haven’t found a perfect tool. A combination of Figma and Storybook and Zeroheight do a good job pulling it all together. But the real magic is the designer-developer relationship that stay in lock step. Those relationships are what it takes to be in tight sync.
_But the real magic is the designer-developer relationship that stay in lock step. Those relationships are what it takes to be in tight sync._
Who writes like this?
I mean there is a good reason to think it might be AI, but just as much reason to think the person who wrote isn't that good a writer but needs to write some stuff because engagement or whatever and then this is what comes out.
That said I wrote something I was pretty proud of where the narrator was depressed and burnt out, in a very small bit of a much longer and complicated narrative, and somebody assumed it was written by AI because the writing seemed emotionally detached - so I personally dislike casting accusations of AI at writing just because it doesn't match my taste.
Who writes like this?
The core idea (designers solving problems instead of pushing pixels) is sound. But these kinds of posts are always packaged with this kind of missionary zeal, as if discovering the usefulness of sketching or systems thinking is some kind of personal enlightenment.
This is key and the title/introduction makes it seem like AI is capable of crafting UIs. It is not. AI is capable of laying out your components on top of each other. I used to "craft" most of my app UI[1] and am using Carbon Design System[2]. There are a bunch of open design systems available.
If you haven't used a full Design System before, then you should try that now: https://storybook.js.org/showcase/projects
For any given system, there will be a bit of a learning curve and setup cost; but the payoff is incredible comparing to most of tailwind offerings out there. Bonus: Most of design systems are free! Tailwind frameworks made by amateurs, small companies, etc... can serve a small niche but if you need a bit more of components and people who care about accessibility and usability, then you are much better using a design system supported by a major corporation with infinite resources.
So, the secret sauce is the design system, not the AI. The design system saves you immeasurable time and also standardize the process opening the gate for GenAI to create interfaces. I've tried multiple times with Sonnet 3.7 to craft custom components (for Carbon) and it failed miserably even when I hand-held it constantly.
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This isn’t really ambitious. Tools like Chef[0] can already one shot full stack apps with db and API integrations.
So the question is what the “limit” will be.
The two major areas are writing and design, where way too much blog style tech writing injects so many side comments that it conceals any substance, and design has become about the expression of the designer as opposed to connecting users to what they are trying to achieve. The emergence of these chat interfaces side steps both, although unfortunately the writing style of LLMs tends to ape many of the worst aspects of human writing it can at least be told to filter it out.
I once worked with a product team that wrote a user story "The system should establish the user intention and then do it" and they're dangerously close to getting something resembling what they asked for, but it will get rid of our current work divisions of product/dev/design in the process, along with the associated tooling.
Do you have to ask for them to be included? Is the AI going to refuse their inclusion? Or will a future version of that AI service include them every time without asking, and you have to either scrape the code out by hand or move to the extra premium tier?
> This morning, I designed an entire enterprise dashboard without opening Figma. I sketched the core flow on paper, annotated it with handwritten notes, dropped them into my generative AI tool. Within a few seconds, my hand-drawn flows and page layouts were turned into, production-ready code using our design system.
> The future didn’t start with “AI”. It started with getting organized with our materials. Most notably, a mature design system. Our design system stopped being a rigid set of components and instead became system infrastructure. Tokens, foundational elements, assembly components, patterns, and templates became the full suite of options to build with.
> When tools like UIzard and UX Pilot hit the market, most people didn’t find them very impressive. But when they finally hit their stride, it felt like cheating. We’d sketch a few screens on paper, a tablet, or whiteboard, add a few annotations, and the generative AI would churn out a few working UI options. Soon, these systems merged with products like Builder.io and Cursor. And then mind-blowing magic started to happen.
This sounds great, but I don't understand what their 'design system' actually is - is it a set of files (e.g. like .cursorrules but stating colour, spacing, and design preferences etc), or a collection of files, or something more nebulous like the existing patterns in an app, or something else entirely?
It's definitely a great tool to quickly bootstrap something, but I find myself thinking "I should have better done that myself" more and more.
artursapek•38m ago