Ask HN: How do developers learn design intuition?

As the title says: as a programmer and a wanna-be solopreneur, I often catch myself thinking way more about app architecture than about what actually matters for the user experience and satisfaction. Stuff like the API between frontend and backend, how the components are laid out, what data structures I’ll need, which questions the database queries answer. Which abstractions to introduce and how early in the development lifecycle, how to organize files so I do not confuse myself later.

On the flip side, when I build something, I am doing it for customer satisfaction. Any tool or product should solve someone’s problem. I can sketch a Problem Statement. And I can more or less orchestrate the code - how to capture the problem, solve it and pass the results along.

But showing it — that is the main problem for me. Yes, I can work in Figma. Yes, there are decent AI tools for generating designs now, but they mostly spit out the same thing. And a UI that looks average at best. It feels like as soon as I touch design, I start thinking it is not quite what I like and I often drift back to what I do like — app architecture, how everything connects and all that I already described. Wireframes are one thing, but when it gets to higher fidelity design, I end up leaning on pre-packaged UI tools and libraries like shadcn and similar stuff.

I would love to internalize at least a bit of the intuition that seasoned designers have, the folks who have done this for years and know how to lay things out.

I also get that this is like a designer asking a developer how to become a developer while knowing only 10% of what devs know and still shipping. But I will be a bit bold and say that visual design and the tools we have to create it still have fewer dimensions than software development.

I think it is also clear from my post that I have consumed tons of content and taken design courses, but nothing sticks (even after applying some to practice). If you are a developer who also designs, what advice would you give? Are there any foundational rules you can stick on the wall and lean on before you dive into a design from one angle or another? And how do you usually validate a design? Especially for views that are data heavy or where the user needs tools to get the job done, so they do not have to click too much to reach a goal.