How I Design with AI | Hacker News Reader

How I Design with AI

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24 pointsreactiverobot12 comments

The insight about agents loving to add stuff is spot on for more than just design. They'll do this for technical architecture, adding unnecessary guards, complexity to cover irrelevant edge cases. They'll do this for writing too, unnecessary caveats, clarifications, etc.

Yes, as the article says:

> This should be very familiar because agents do exactly the same thing in code and plans. They love belt-and-suspenders, wrapping an extra try-catch or re-implementing the same utility over and over.

This feels like it can be a "skill" :)

Anyways, one thing to point out is the "constraints". Constraints are something you cannot change (and AI should abide to it).

I liked the fact that the author used "add" or "remove", and not used "modify/update" because constraints should be added or removed only unlike non-functional requirements, which can be modified.

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The author's recommneded book "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" looks cool (will check it out)

My pain point is that design tools imitate Figma in using JSON to represent the design, which originates in JS, but without rendering it into HTML and CSS to get a pixel perfect representation. Instead, the MCP imagines what the JSON will be, and it is never perfect.

So the existing tools can't even go in one direction accurately. None of them let you edit the 'rendered' visual and reflect it accurately back to code, or sync with Figma.

There is money to be made.

Thanks for sharing this, mate.

Lately, I’ve been trying to design some websites completely using AI as side projects, and all I’ve gotten is disappointment at how AI-ish the websites can look and how easily people get repelled just by seeing them.

This kinda sounds like so-called "design thinking" but with ai and extra steps

anyone know how to design webapp effectively using claude design?

because I feel always end up with similar web designs everytime I tell claude to revamp my web app

Had some success with https://impeccable.style/

This seems like a good next step. ty for sharing as first time seeing it.

The author's way is more bespoke (and less aislop path), so if you are not familiar with web design, you might get lost.

Since you gotta start somewhere, If you are prototyping without web design experience, navigite to https://getdesign.md/ and find ones you like and make AI use it.

Less is more. When you end up creating something try to strip away all the bloat and only use the essentials (nav bars/menus) and then iterate on that with fonts that you like or pleasing colorschemes. My best go to piece of advice is to just go here https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel and mess around with the various color harmonies until you get something you like. Then you take that font + color scheme back into Claude Design and tell it to apply it to your stripped down design.

I paid an actual designer to come up with a design system for my project, which I then made Claude follow. Works like a charm.

To give more details, the designer created the system in Figma and created a guideline document for a human to follow on how to use the system. I then gave those files to Claude Fable using Claude Design to turn it into code.

Then when I need to do anything design-related in the project, I make Claude follow the system. And I can use the guidelines to see if it’s following everything correctly or not.

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