Y Combinator Startup Podcast - How To Stand Out In A World Of AI Designs

Episode Date: October 22, 2026

Magic Patterns (YC W23) is one of the fastest-growing design tools in AI, helping product teams turn ideas into interactive, code-backed prototypes in minutes. Alex Danilowicz and his co-founder, both front-end engineers, built Magic Patterns to solve a problem they had themselves: finding a better way to turn ideas into something visual. They were among the first teams building prompt-to-design tools back in 2023.In this episode of Design Review, Alex joins YC’s Aaron Epstein to demo Magic Patterns and its new MagicOS canvas, where teams can bring together prompts, images, PRDs, and other context to explore ideas visually. Then they review a handful of startup websites to break down what makes a site feel “vibe coded,” where founders go wrong, and how to make AI-generated design feel more intentional.Chapters:00:00 - What Magic Patterns is03:01 - Nine months of pivots05:59 - Using the MCP from Cursor08:21 - The end stage is compressed now11:23 - Demo: postcards for every meetup city15:35 - The RollerCoaster Tycoon chocolate theme park18:17 - Site 1: Ego21:39 - Inputs you can't type into23:59 - Site 2: Sentient OS27:57 - "Free" should be giant30:20 - Instrument Serif and the em dash32:01 - Site 3: CeraNovus36:59 - Site 4: Slashy38:36 - Nobody clicks your tabs43:08 - Getting better at design as an engineer46:07 - What's next: Magic OSApply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

Today, I'm joined by Alex Danilovich, co-founder and CEO of Magic Patterns, an AI design tool that takes you from an idea to a real, interactive code-back prototype in minutes. We'll look under the hood to see how Magic Patterns works, hear his origin story as a non-designer, and then review some startup websites to help make them look a little bit less vibe-coded. Alex, thank you for joining. Thanks, Aaron. Thanks for having me.

I've been watching the show for a long time. Oh, it's awesome to have you on. Maybe to start, tell us more, what is Magic Patterns and what were your goals in building it? Yeah, so Magic Patterns is an AI design tool. Product managers, founders, professional designers all use us to visually communicate their ideas, whether it's through a prototype, interactive mock-up, or a code-ready export for production. You don't come from a design background, and so talk a little bit about the inspiration for building this. Yeah, it does.

We are unique in that we are non-designers, my co-founder and I. We are by trade front-end engineers. And actually, when we got into the YC batch, our YC partner told us, do something that you're really good at. What are you, what do you know really well? And for us, that was translating Figma mockups into code. And that's how Magic Patterns was born. It was the product that we always wanted ourselves. There was something always there where I was never really good at Figma.

And we just felt like, well, wait a second, I'm doing lots of front-end engineering. As a founder, I have to do lots of design. what is a tool that is more intuitive and easier for non-designers like myself? And this was the early days of a lot of prompt to design tools or prompt to prototype tools coming out, right? You guys were actually one of the first that was doing that. We were certainly one of the first. When we launched in October 2023, the only other tool on the market similar to us was V0. And if you look back, that was before even chat was a thing.

The models were so bad that there was no chat. There was no back and forth conversation. It was literally just prompt. You get a design. Prompt, you get a design, no actual interaction with the agent. You applied to YC and you had a different idea. And so maybe talk about some of the origin story of how you met your co-founder, your time during YC, and then ultimately what led you to building this.

Yeah. So my co-founder and I, we actually applied to YC with a text message analyzer, your top group chat, your top word. What's the funniest thing you sent in 2026? across all your group chats. And we had revenue, which I think is why we got into YC. But we get in and our YC partner tells us, hey, this is your company.

It's an okay idea, but I highly recommend you do something that you know really, really well. And for us, again, that was front-in engineering and implementing Figma Makos by code. And so then during all of our pivots, that's pretty much what we focused on. How long did it take you to get to the idea that ultimately became magic patterns?

It took us about nine months. We were always circulating around it. So again, we were doing a component library editor. We were doing kind of storybook on steroids. We'd had a Chrome extension that allowed you to bring local host and instantly publish it on the internet as kind of like a feedback tool. That later became a feature of magic patterns. And throughout all of that, the main thing that I learned was that classic PG advice,

find 10 users who really love you. None of those pivots, we didn't have any 10 users that really loved us. Where love is defined as they're paying you and they're using you. And then once we launched what became magic patterns, those 10 users came very quickly. How do you stay differentiated in a world where it feels like the design tools keep leveling up significantly every six months? And you guys were one of the original prompt to design products that are out there. And so how do you find your audience in that and keep staying ahead of the game, especially as the models? continue to improve as well.

I've said this before on a video, like customers are our religion, talking to them every single day, and then also adapting to new workflows. As an example, we released an MCP about a year ago as part of a hackathon project internally. We didn't think it would go anywhere. And now MCP usage has completely exploded. It's one of the main ways that people interact with magic patterns. And so you always have to be almost rebirthing your company to adjust to new workflows, especially in the AI world. I'd love to see a demo. Can you show us a little bit about how it works?

Yeah, let's do it. I think one thing that would be good to start is I'll show you how we use it internally. And you're always dog fooding your product, right? We are obsessed with dog fooding, but we never force the dog fooding, because then you're not getting actual... Right, it has to be good enough

that you actually want that and you choose that to be your tool, right? Exactly, and then noting when you don't choose it. And so we've been dog fooding, creating our loading indicator for our own product. So, you know, we have Wally, Eve from Wally, or some of the, if you ever played Portal, the video game, we were thinking through that kind of what that might look like as a loading indicator. What's neat here is everything here is a global chat. So we can make any updates and make several updates at once, right?

Like, as an example, I could select the two of these. Say, give me a new style of loading index. that merges the inspiration of the Cloud Code, icon, and the Grochbox. And what's really neat too is, of course, you can use the MCP. So let's go ahead and do that just to kind of show it. I'm going to go into cursor here, and through using our MCP, I can just go ahead and prompt, right, add an ASCY version of my agent. What's really neat is we're seeing lots of enterprises use this where they have so much context, like in cursory.

like in cursor or Claude code, whether it's PRGs and meeting notes. So they can leverage all the skills that they already have, but then instantly kind of put it on this visual canvas to better communicate. Yeah, it's interesting. So you've got this powerful canvas in magic patterns, where when that's the best tool for the job, you can be working directly in there. And when you want to be working in code or in cursor or another app,

you can just pull directly from that through the MCP. Yeah, exactly. And what's cool, too, is we have so many customers. that come up to us and say, I'm using cursor and cloud code, but it gave me a local host. I can't share, I can't share my prototype with anybody. Yeah. So we have a solution for you, right? Yeah, so what's cool here is actually we can see my colleague on here, as well as the cursor agent from that cursor prompt that we fired off, right?

And so they're working simultaneously, and we can go ahead and just open this up here. We can see this is like that ASCII version of Claude code, right? And kind of playing around, oh, what would it look like? with different colors. Now, obviously, this is very Claudec. We're just kind of getting inspiration here to make our own loading indicator. And it generated this entire page showing off

the work that it had done. Yeah, exactly. So one thing that we encourage users to do, and we've seen users do ourselves, is explaining kind of the choices and the different states. So as another example here, if you kind of look at this one, we were thinking through, well, what does it look like at different screen sizes. What does it, again, look like if it's Claude code,

kind of playing around with should it look more like a helmet or like a pillow, right? Again, just brainstorming an exploration. That's where we see users get the most value in a tool like ours. Yeah, I mean, that's, I think, one of the most valuable things at the idea and inspiration stage is just being able to fire off a bunch of different variations. And a lot of times, it's hard to manage those and they're all in different tabs and stuff. And it seems like magic patterns is able to just give you a bunch of, nice tabs and options and kind of enumerates everything's like here's a bunch of color options here's body options here's different agent options and it's really cool to do that in a very

centralized uniform way to actually make the tweaks and explore find what you like and then be able to move on faster to the next step in the flow totally because i think what's changed about software development in the last year especially is the end stage is so compressed now it's so easy everyone's talking about this right how engineers are just moving at the speed of light there's too many PRs to review. And so as a result, we can spend more time actually brainstorming, thinking about what to build and what not to build, and using something like Magic OS

to really visualize and think through the different ideas and concepts, error states, loading states, what happens when it's multiple agents working on a file. Here's actually, I think this one is really cool, where we were thinking through, well, okay, lots of folks use the MCP to use our process. and they might be using it through cursor or Claude Code or Codex and thinking through what that might look like. And through Magic OS, we actually brainstorm kind of this LED style design.

And so is this whole page a canvas? Yeah, so this is all a canvas. And what's cool is we also think of it as almost like an art board, right, where you can bring in any of your context, whether that's images or PRDs or documentation. And again, what's neat is we're not blocked here. by a single thread, right? So historically, when you use lots of these design tools and prototyping tools, you kind of have to wait for the AI agent to finish, right? But on any of these, we have many, many threads here.

So I can go back to kind of what we first did, when we first created our first design here on this canvas. I know you've kind of gone back and forth on canvases in general as an interface. And just talk about your thinking and what you've discovered kind of being at the frontier of that for when it makes sense and when it doesn't. Totally. So I'll actually show that where we've had a canvas for a long time. What you just kind of saw as Canvas 2.0, but we've had a canvas for roughly two years now.

And what we learned, and actually we're hiring, by the way, we're hiring a designer. One of the reasons that we're hiring a designer is one of our issues that we've had is thinking through that initial onboarding experience and almost like this progressive disclosure of, okay, when does it make sense for users to know that they can use a canvas versus just kind of a single chat thread? One of the initial learnings that we had is like a canvas is not necessarily for everyone. And actually, this new product that we've released, we're intentionally calling it an OS because it's an operating system for all of your context. So of course, like the interface is a canvas, right? We see here our images and you can bring in documents and then make designs.

but it's not a canvas in the traditional sense where something like Figma and having a bunch of tools on one side. Yeah, so it's more like you've got canvas like art boards that you can get in there and you can customize. You also talked about front end and being able to see what it's like

to actually experience the design that you're making and not just have these static files. Maybe can you show us something around that? Cool. So, yeah, let's do another example here. One thing that is really, really fun for us is we do what we call magic patterns meetups all over the world. And I've been thinking about I want to send our users postcards from these meetups. So let's take this from the top.

So let's go ahead and add some context. So I have basically these pictures that I've pulled and all of these descriptions from our events that we hosted. So as an example, I was just in Columbia actually hosting what I called Magic Patterns Medellin. And we met some power users there. I learned that Magic Patterns was taught at a university, which is super cool. And I also have this prompt, right, where if we open this up here, this is a prompt that I just kind of came up with, like a rubber stamp travel notes field poster. And so what's cool is I can go ahead and just tell our agent reference my prompt on the canvas and then make postcards for every single city and image. Cool. So you've got images for Medellin, Singapore.

You've got the Statue of Liberty, so New York and then Toronto. Exactly, right? And notice how, like, the agent has all of the context that is on the canvas already, right? It automatically knows what is really in the file system, what's on this art board here, and it can go ahead and then make its updates. So what's cool here is we see it generated all four postcards at once. We can go ahead and just see a bigger version of this here. my prompt was basically telling it to make kind of like a stamp of the image that it had. And now because we're on a canvas, I can go ahead and just grab kind of my description of our Singapore event. Right here, I have kind of just some random notes from when our meetup was.

It was on May 17th. And I can go ahead and select these two. They now make a design of a postcard that references the description, thanking, user. for attending. And when this is done, of course, we can iterate on just the Singapore one specifically and then apply all of those changes to all the cities at once, right, without having to redo it. And who are the people within your team that are actually using this and creating these postcards? Because it seems like it doesn't necessarily need to be designers, right? Yes. So we have everyone from our ops team to our sales team using magic patterns.

So as an example, our go-to-market person is creating these postcards in magic patterns. to send out to users. And historically, this was someone that didn't know how to use Figma would have to outsource this type of work. And so that's what's really, I think, special about our tool is how much we have been kind of democratizing design. You can export to Figma as well. So you play nicely with the other tools.

One thing that's very different about our tool is that we're model agnostic and, in a way, feature agnostic, where we encourage folks to export to Figma if they want, to and get high fidelity of precision, or export to the coding agent of their choice, right? Some of our other competitors, like Cloud Design as an example, it's only the Anthropic models. You're only exporting to Cloud Code.

There's no integration with Figma, versus a tool like ours, you know, we have integrations with anything you can think of. So prompting is obviously very important here. What's your advice for how people should improve their prompts and get better results from them? Yeah, I think it's leveraging the features that tools offer. I think it's really interesting that I've seen.

seen is there's more and more AI enablement teams popping up for that, especially large companies. And what are they doing? They're leveraging things like skills, agents MD, right, and bringing in your unique context that's relevant to your company. So of course, we have, you know, skills feature and magic patterns where you can go ahead and add your skills. Or as we were talking about, add your design system and bring in your components. And that's what I always recommend first is like, spend the 10 minutes to bring in your existing context. It'll save you hours in the long run. What's one of the coolest things that you've seen created with magic patterns?

Yeah, one of the most fun is this roller coaster tycoon theme park. It's like a chocolate park, which is crazy because when we first started this, you know, you would prompt like a form and it would give you back like a drop down. Like the models were so bad. And now suddenly, you know, we're seeing folks literally bring in like building an entire video games. experiences. Again, this is not a very common use case, but it's kind of sharing what's possible when the input and output is code. And what was this created for? This is really just created for fun, you know, experimenting with what is possible like in, in the browser and actually thinking

through how components can help you design in a tool like this, right? So actually, when you think about a chocolate factory theme park in Rollocoaster Tycoon, the track is a component. the chocolate bar twister ride is a component, the pass that guests walk on are components. And so when you give the AI those guardrails, how can it output like a theme park in one shot or two shots, bringing in that context? Very cool.

And you can even get right in there, see all the little people walking around. Yeah. And again, it's amazing. We're like, this is literally just, you know, WebGL rendering in the browser, right? And we can see that we, again, the way that we did this is we use a design system that we called the 3D theme park, right, so I can go ahead and update that to bring in my

my latest components. And updating it is really as simple as prompting something like no trees, just lollipops and more chocolate rivers. What does this tell you now about what might be possible with magic patterns? It seems like this is far beyond just making a postcard or website design or something. Yeah, I think it's shown me that design has historically been 2D, right? And it's been really hard. if you worked on a software team four years ago, going back and forth, the designer and the engineer and the PM, what should the exact interaction be? Then you see something like this where people are, you know, one-shotting 3D theme parks. I think it's a taste of the future where people can really design full-on interactions that are high fidelity, you know, and using their components.

Yeah, it's going to be a wild future for sure. Definitely. YC's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you. Apply at Ycombinator.com slash apply. It's never too early, and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay, back to the video. You talked about how you've seen thousands of vibe-coded designs.

You're probably a world expert on this. Should we review some websites? Let's review some websites. This will be a lot of fun. Okay, great. All right. First looks like we got ego. Agents are machines.

We make them people. Ego is an applied AI research lab building personal agents indistinguishable from humans. Okay. What do we think? So first off, I mean, it's cool. Here's the thing that I think people miss about landing pages in general. The real metric to track is does it convert?

And I obviously don't know what, if this is converting or not. But my sense is like, I don't know, it's not accessible. I don't know where the CTA is. The CTA Ronan. Yeah, what do you think they want us to do here? here. I mean, my initial reaction is like, I should just keep scrolling. Yeah. Right. Um, one interesting thing that we've learned about our own landing page is, you know, everyone that has a vibe coded tool, has that input to prompt to get started. And for a little

while, we removed it to try and be more creative. And our conversion rate totally tanked. We learned why people do that, right? And so I always encourage folks to think about, like, What are you ultimately trying to do here? Okay. So then there's like an app in there. Yeah, I guess I'm halfway down the page and I'm still unclear what is this and who is it for? I guess there's a wait list. So maybe it's not live yet.

Yeah, let's see. And now they're getting into more of the description. It's a voice agent with a personality, a memory, and a mind of its own. That feels like the kind of thing that should have been all the way at the top. Right. Like the site should start here with this because this is the call to action, which is join the wait list. but we had to scroll down pretty far in order to even get to this point.

Totally. And I'm kind of laughing here that like this main CTA to join, I had to do, there was an interaction there. That's another, almost an example of something that maybe was potentially vibe coded.

AI agents, they love adding animations and things like that, right? Overly animating. And so, you know, why not just start it with that, right?

Yeah, that's actually interesting. We ran some tests at, my company Creative Market. And when you had the input form visible and expanded directly on the page, conversion rate was much higher than requiring somebody to click through to then put in an email address or pop up a window or get to the form or something like that. So I would recommend whenever possible, yeah, just start with the text box open and people can just type right in it.

It's pretty shocking how that actually significantly impacts conversion rate of people entering information there. Yeah, and that's what I encourage. Like, think about the human. I think AI agents, they're, again, they're rewarded of doing fun things like motion and overly animating, right? But the human is not going to spend a lot of time on your site. They're in a rush.

Yeah, we see a lot of, there's blinking dots everywhere. And I don't know if music is playing, but it looks like there's some type of, you know, like music faders or something going there. And so, yeah, it's kind of hard to tell it's going. I like the overall vibe. It's like it's got this kind of dark mode red. It feels very like 80s video game kind of, which I think is interesting.

But it's also hard to read some of the things. Like it actually looks like maybe there's an input box or something over on the right hand side. And I almost missed it because it's not clear to me that it exists. Yeah, this is another kind of vibe coded smell that I commonly see. is you can see my mouse here is letting me interact with this, but I can't actually type anything. Right. And so, you know, and then I'm like, well, what's going on? Yeah. Yeah, there's a pattern that I've seen where sometimes you have actual UI elements embedded in the page, but they're actually real and interactive. Right. And that's cool to be able to do that. That's something that I think

agents make a lot simpler now that was much harder to do before. And so it can feel very interactive and like you can actually try out the product live on the page and that's super cool. But yeah, the flip side is when it looks like something like that and it becomes misleading and you think that you can interact with something, but you're actually not able to. Yeah, and I think it's important to talk about like, why does this matter? What does it matter if there's a vibe coded smell on the website, right? And I think it matters because you can notice how distracted we are by this input trying to type and we're distracted from the core thing, which is whatever the CTA is supposed to be, I

guess in this case, right? It's join the wait list. Yeah, it's cool. If you scroll down, you see the pictures of the people. They match that vibe, that kind of 80s video game throwback vibe, which I think is cool. You know, they had that eyeball up at the top, which is like very provocative. It creeps me out a little bit. There's like an eyeball looking directly at me. But it's interesting and it becomes memorable if that's the vibe that you're going for. But yeah, it just wasn't obvious to me what this is until we got halfway down the page. And so I think just a little more about what it is and what's the action that you want people to take. Even that call to action in the top right, that button,

it just says Ronan. I don't know what Ronin is. The company's called Ego. I guess it says here Ronan launching September. Is Ronan a product? Is it a model? It's not clear to me what this is. And so I think ultimately I'm just left very confused. This is another vibe code of smell, by the way. It says scroll right here. I'm naturally going to scroll. Like, I don't think personally, I don't know many instances where a human would feel the need to put scroll there because naturally you're going to do that

versus I commonly see agents trying to always nudge the user to do something. So we take a look at another one? Yeah. Okay, we got Sentient OS, your Mac, Sentient. An on-device LLM understands your entire life, then proactively offers to get your work done through computer use.

Okay, that's interesting. And then I guess we have an image here of a laptop that's open. Whoa, okay. Okay, and it closes when you scroll. Go back for a side. Oh. So, all right, so there's a bunch of stuff

going into the middle. And then when you scroll down a little, and it says, while you sleep, your Mac understands your entire life. Okay. And I think notice something here. I'm really struggling to like perfectly match the scroll.

One thing I I never see a, you know, decad corn company ever do any kind of scrolljacking. Yes. Why don't they do any kind of scroll tracking? Well, because it does not convert and it's frustrating. Another thing that I see AI agents doing doing a lot, right? I mean, just notice like, okay, if I missed it. Right.

Again, go to like the top Fortune 500 company sites that have millions and millions of page views, they are not scrolljacking. Yeah. What's frustrating about it is you're used to the precision of how you move through a site when you're scrolling. And when you hit a site and it's different precision, you know, it keeps scrolling after you stop touching the mouse or the track pad. It messes things up and it feels unnatural.

And so please, everybody, please stop scrolljacking. It's very simple. Just keep the normal scrolljole. Because there's some cool stuff that's happening here, right? Like, okay, we started out with laptop screen open, a bunch of things are going into it. Right. The lid closes. And I think it's trying to tell you, like, all this stuff happens while you sleep.

The lid is closed. And then you wake up to your finished work. And so it wakes up and here's all the things that it's done. And then it takes you through that. So the visual and the experience, what I like about this one is it's actually reinforcing the concepts that it's trying to tell you about. When it talks about when you sleep, the lid closes. the computer is asleep. And then it's like, oh, it wakes up, it does all the work while you sleep.

So when you wake up and then boom, the laptop comes back out, we have all the work is done and it's showing it to us. That's, I think, the best version of an animation is not animation for animation's sake, but animation that actually reinforces the point that you're trying to make and communicate something in a way that just being static would not have been able to do. Totally. I mean, it's definitely helping me understand what this product does. but I would also I always think when you're trying to be

too creative or something, that's great on like a product page or a video. Not your landing page. Your landing page, the number one thing you want to try and get me to do is click this button, download for Mac OS. Also, just speaking about that button for a second, this kind of glow.

Another bit of a vibe coding smell. Again, hey, it's definitely getting my attention. but one thing that I've noticed is AI agents, they love to overdo it on this kind of gradient, on this massive drop shadow. And again, look,

it got my attention, but it's just one thing to be wary of if that's something that you're trying to not do. Yeah. And then what do we have further down the page here? Let's see. Recipes. I think what's interesting here is,

again, this is that main CTA, right? I scroll through the whole thing. thing and I'm, I, I, you really want me to click this button or perhaps even do this home brew installation, but it's so small. Like, I'm at like 100% and I can barely see it. Right. And like, this has this kind of hover effect. I guess this brings me to the GitHub. I can barely read that. Yeah. It's really tough to read those. Right. Like free. There's a reason that free is giant on

pricing pages. Yeah. Download for free. Yeah, exactly. Right. Right. And I swear, I'd it's, you know, perhaps it's because of the angle, but it doesn't really matter. I cannot see the word free right now. If you have something important to communicate, it shouldn't matter the angle that the user is looking at it. It should be painfully obvious. Yes, exactly. All right.

I mean, I guess maybe, you know, one of the other pieces of feedback for a product like this that runs locally on your machine, privacy and trust is something that's very important. What do they do with the data? I guess they have an FAQ here to try to answer some of this. but this is actually an interesting problem in the new world of AI apps and LMs is they need so much data and so much context to be really valuable and especially a product like this that's going to run locally on your machine and have access presumably to everything that's on

your computer. And so there's a new bar that needs to be established for trust and privacy and security for all of these types of products. My take is that I actually think the products that really lean into that and go above and beyond to make users feel super comfortable around what is the data we're going to have access to? How are we going to use it? What are our retention policies? Is this secure or not? All these things. And being very proactive about that are the ones that I think are going to have more success of getting users to download and try it and spread the word and tell their friends.

Totally agree. As someone who applied a YC with a text message analyzer that was open source and read your eye messages, all locally on the computer, I completely agree. And so what were the things when you were working on that product that you thought about that you felt like you had to do in order to get people to trust your product and give it access to all of their text messages? Hero on the landing page was open source completely on device, right? Communicating that the internet doesn't touch it in any single way. And that's what we learned that people really, really cared about, right? And they do it here, you know, an on-device LLM. But it's funny, like, is it the word N relieved?

necessary. Like it's interesting to me they're like bolding these words. Another sign of AI writing actually is you can look this up on Wikipedia is when random words are bolded right. But just communicating those kind of that most important thing which is that it's on

device. Yeah. Another thing that kind of makes me laugh is this font. Let's see what the font is. Space grotesque is always the font that is Oh, instrument serif is another one. Instrument serif.

Claude Cod Code loves instrument serif, which is funny. And this kind of reminds me of the M-Dash, right? It's like you can still use the M-Dash in your writing. But unfortunately, people are going to look at it and go, oh, he used AI, right? Instrument serif, space grotesque. It's interesting how these things are trends

that sometimes are hard to spot in the moment. I feel like we're on it and, you know, we can spot it in the moment here. But it's like you see a kitchen. that was designed in the 80s or something like that. And you're like, man, this looks like an outdated kitchen. But in the 80s, it probably looks like a modern kitchen. And that's what some of this feels like.

It's something that feels like of the moment now. But five, 10 years, we're going to look back at this. We're going to be like, oh, yeah, that's a hallmark mid-2020s site design that will feel outdated at that point. And so I don't know, I would encourage people just resist the urge to do the default that the agents are spitting out when they're designing or the default fonts. use something that is more unique to you and communicates what you want to communicate rather than just using the thing that everybody else is using. And that's the way to create more timeless design, I think. Yeah. And establishing that brand book earlier. That's one thing that I regret that we didn't do earlier for our own company was establishing a brand book, deciding on what is the

brand, what is your font, really your design system. Companies should do that earlier for sure. All right. Well, thank you, Sentient OS. Let's do another one. All right. Sarah Novus, institutional intelligence and decision infrastructure. I don't really know what that means, but Sarah Novus is your AI operating partner. It reads every record your company produces, finds the operational inefficiencies, nobody's tracking, and warns you while problems are still small. Okay. I don't know. This is, I think the copy could be improved here. It's very generalized. It's very vague. I'm kind of like, is this something I need? I'm not really sure.

it does everything that my company wants and finds inefficiencies. It's a decision infrastructure. I don't know what that means. So I think something that would be helpful is just getting to more specifics or more specific language around who should use this and why, because right now I think it's too unclear. It's interesting to me, like there's so much padding, right? Like there's just a lot of white space where this is what they call above the fold, right? Before I scroll, it's such an important section, the hero section of the landing page.

and yet immediately my eyes, I'm like looking at white space for now. Right. Unfortunately, this is also kind of like a classic vibe coding smell. This small all caps. Exactly. Yeah. And again, it's like, okay,

is there anything inherently wrong with small all caps? Not necessarily, but when I read it, every claim cited years of history live from day one. Nothing installed, no interviews. But I still don't even know what the product does. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I didn't even know it was going to be something that was installed.

That was not my assumption to begin with. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, nothing installed where? Like, am I dealing with hardware? Oversight over the operations. It finds the inefficiencies, foresight with receipts. Yeah, I just need specific examples. Like, as we're scrolling, do they give specific examples?

Start with the problem on your desk, enterprise, middle market, private equity. Yeah, this is like who they go after. Hmm. And which is, this is not helpful because it's about them. It's not about the user, right? The user doesn't care who they go after. The user cares about they have a problem that they want solved. And can Serinovus help solve this problem for me?

Right. It's almost like right now I have to think through. Am I enterprise middle? Like, who am I? Yeah. Let's pretend I'm secondaries or I'm continuation vehicles. I have to look at this. But I had to like click to decide who I.

I am. You're making me think, you know. Too much work. And again, to your point, what I really want to see are the solutions. Yeah, you know, this is a trend that I see with vibe-coded sites. And especially we see this a lot in YC applications. One of the things that we see is it's almost like it makes a slide deck for the company that's kind of pitching the company, almost to investors a lot of times. or like the models think that is the intended audience for a startup or a startup website. And sometimes it is. Like investors will look at the thing, but that's not who you should be speaking to and who you should be targeting. You should be talking about your product.

Who should use it? Why? Why it's valuable. What problem it solves for them? Social proof of, you know, other people that use this that are like those users and how much it's helped them. These are the things that I think real users want to find rather than a pitch deck about who they target.

And yeah, here's the four guarantees. And it's like, I don't even know. I still can't even figure out what you do. One thing that's interesting, I noticed because we just talked about this, there's a link at the top that says trust and security. And that's not something that you normally see in a main navigation of a site. And, you know, coming off the discussion we just had around maybe companies should put more emphasis on this.

It's actually interesting to see them doing that and putting it up there and having an FAQ, what data do we collect, where does the data live? I would not be surprised to see this become a more common pattern that we're going to see across AI sites trying to talk about the product and get people to entrust them with lots of sensitive information. Totally. Well, overall, I feel like the style is very clean. It's very fresh. It's very modern. So from a visual perspective, I think it looks very nice from a copy and overall description. and are you communicating what the product does into your users, I'm still very confused on what it actually does and who should use it and why.

And so I think there's a lot of room for improvement on that. Totally. And what I would encourage all kind of founders to do something that we did in the early days is you should go to your users and ask them, what do you think of this website? Try not to make it clear that it's your website, because they're going to be too nice to you and not tell you the truth. But, you know, you need users to tell you if it's resonating with them.

That's the ultimate test. That is absolutely the ultimate test. We're just two people that are here behind some cameras, you know, talk to your users. All right. And let's do another one here. Slashy, your intelligent inbox. So, first of all, their logo kind of confused me a little bit. It looks like S slash ashy is what it makes me think of.

So I get that it's clever and it's got a slash in the slashy. But if I had just seen that without the context of like slashy.com, I think I would have thought this was s slash ash ash, ashi. Okay, your intelligent inbox slashy drafts replies in your voice, schedules meetings, and handles follow-ups so you spend less time managing email. Okay, cool. So it's like a new email product. And they've got a demo here that's pretty big.

It's cool to show a demo, but there's so much going on. There's so much text in the demo. It's hard for me to mentally orient around what's happening and what it wants me to take away from this. So I see Pied Piper. metrics before Thursday. I see something happening in an agent in the bottom right that it keeps flipping over to, but it's not slow enough where I can get my head around what it's actually typing, what's happening, and what the product is doing here.

That's fair. I will say what they're doing well is I know immediately what it is. I know that, okay, this is kind of like superhuman. This is a Gmail replacement, right? I actually have this problem myself. My email is overloaded. But yeah, it's like maybe this would be better as just showing kind of the chat inbox, almost like an animation versus a screen recorded video.

I would encourage this founder to get an agency to do a really cool animation that might go here and might actually work better than kind of this full screen video right here. Yep. Replies drafted in seconds. Okay. And I guess it's going through these tabs here on the side. And the problem with these is if you scroll through, it's you will miss. the other ones. And these are just seemed to be on a timer. Yeah, you can see the line going across

at the bottom there, which is cool. But the problem with any time you have tabs is you have to expect that people will not see anything that is behind the other tabs. Totally. You have to assume that I am just going to see. Well, what's interesting? Wait, let's refresh this because I think this is always a good thing to pay attention to. Let's pretend we spent time on intelligent inbox. Is the timer going? Yeah, like it doesn't look like it. It looks like it's probably actually just starting right when I actually, which I scroll, which is great. But what's interesting, sometimes I notice on sites that the timer might start going before the user is seeing it. And so you don't even realize this, but everyone is actually seeing snippets, even though you might consider it the fourth most important thing.

Yeah, I think when we got down here the first time, voice drafts was the thing that was highlighted. And maybe because we were just kind of scrolling back and forth. and so we started the timer without actually reading them. Maybe the other thing that I'll mention here is I can't tell again what's happening in the screenshots. And I think if I was like really, okay, AI drafts and what's happening and I tried to really orient myself and pay attention, I could try to figure it out. But most users are not actually looking at something for the first time and spending that level of depth and scrutiny on what's happening. And so it's cool they're showing the product. I wonder if there's a more focused, dumbed-down way to actually communicate what is happening

with each of these rather than showing all the granularity and level of detail of the actual interface. Totally. Okay. So we got some social proof here, loved by the busiest people. We've got an investor at Redpoint. We've got a content creator who I don't know. So, all right.

So some people use this. And again, they've got a security. link up at the top. They've got social proof here on here's people that are actually using this because, again, you're asking them to entrust you with your inbox. And that is one of the most sensitive areas to give anybody access to. So it's an interesting challenge for how can you build that trust and get people to download and start using it. Yeah, social proof is so important. Right. That's always why typically you see logos above the fold. I think founders should always consider, though, who they're using as social proof. Like, just as an engagement.

example, I see investors and founders and I think, okay, this is for investors and founders, which, you know, kind of makes sense. Like they are busy people, which have lots of emails. But immediately, I just, like, even with both investors on this side, on the left hand side, I think, oh, wait a second, is this just an inbox for VCs? Yeah, maybe it is that they're targeting founders and VCs. I'm not sure. Or is it for general consumers. They say for busy people. So maybe this is like a pro-sumer superhuman kind of thing, then writes in your style. Okay, this is cool because, you know,

it's showing that it's going through and making edits that actually match the style. Like that view right there. That's awesome. This is really, this is like kind of the animation that I was talking about. Something that you could design in magic patterns, by the way. But this is really, really neat where I totally get what it's doing here.

And handle your inbox from iMessage. Again, we got more of these tabs. It started at the third one down there. So there was a review and approve. but yeah, same as above. That's cool too, though. It's interesting to me. Like, this is kind of what's resonating with me, right?

Like, oh, my, you know, there's so many problems with you. You have so many inboxes, whether it's text messages, WhatsApp, your Gmail, your Slack. And it's kind of consolidating that. Like, this is really resonating. And, yeah, it would be cool if that was maybe that should be pushed to the top if users are appreciating that. Yeah. I mean, that's a problem I have.

Too many inboxes. And so that would have resonated with me to the extent that, I am both a founder and a investor that would be interested in this. One more thing that I think is great is actually just how long this landing page is. I learned this from the post hoc guys, actually. So the post hoc folks had a massive footer to communicate that they were, you know, a big company, right? And so I always encourage folks to think about like what is kind of the meta thing that's being communicated? And just by the sheer fact that it's a really long landing page, I think, oh, this company's been around a while.

Yeah, it does a good job of spacing down the page, calling out the main points that it wants to hit on, trying to build trust. And it looks very nicely professionally designed, which helps build that trust as well, which is really important. So overall, I think this is really well done. Great. Thank you, Slashie. As someone who comes from a front-end engineering background, how did you get better at design and improving your design taste? So one thing I try and just look at beautiful things. Like, as an example, there's a Matisse exhibit here in San Francisco,

or just kind of consuming things that you enjoy aesthetically. A great book to read is like the design of everyday things. And again, always considering the human and the user, I think there's this big misconception in Silicon Valley that design is pixel-perfect border radius. And it's not. It's thinking through the user experience. And of course, having high fidelity UI.

That's beautiful, right? but yeah and how do you do that what are some things that you do maybe in your day to day as you're building magic patterns and leading the company as well that you do to try to put the user front and center and always keep that voice of the user in your head you know like a couple things that we do is everyone in our company does customer support so every single person is in the support inbox talking to users every single day seeing their frustrations when they can't find the share button because we have two CTAs that are the exact same color, two primary buttons, right? And the next thing you know, because the engineers there, they're going ahead and fixing it because they experience the user problem firsthand. And also just having a very high bar, right, where if something looks off and it just feels off, we encourage all of our team to go ahead and tackle that. Spend time on the extra 20%. Don't just have the vibe coded output. and not take it to the next level.

And how do you balance that? Because obviously doing that sounds great. The tradeoffs are now it's going to take longer to ship something. How do you balance the speed of shipping quickly with actually, you know, going above and beyond and making something that that is actually excellent rather than the thing that was just okay? Yeah. Well, you have to, it's all about tradeoffs, right?

And if you don't do that, you might have tons of users that are on your site and then they're leaving. They're not understanding it. their workflow is blocked, right? And so you have to have faith that it is worth it. And for us, we have tremendous faith that it is worth it, that this is important to think through and to take your time doing something. And I think it's also like people love saying,

if it's well designed, it must have taken so long to ship and they're so slow. I can practice not really. You can still be really fast, especially considering how much everything is sped up when it comes to writing code. Yeah, it's actually really interesting. Those tradeoffs don't have to exist anymore. Historically, they had to exist. What's next for magic patterns?

What's next on the roadmap for you? And where do you think design is going from here? Yeah, so this week we released Magic OS, which again is our new version of our canvas. It's like Pinterest and Figma had a baby. And you can chat with it, prompt with it to make designs, bring your PRDs and your context. I think what's next for the future of design, well, one thing's for sure, it's moving very, very fast. And anyone who thinks that they know for sure, you know, probably is just making it up, right? But I think one thing that's certainly true is code as a medium is here to

stay because clearly the frontier labs and everyone is working on making coding agents very, very, very good. And that is the ultimate medium for production and for your users. Yeah, it's interesting. Code is just another medium, like you said. And there's lots of different mediums by which products are created and users experience products. And this is just a new one that has now new tools to be able to build things that weren't possible before. And it's really exciting to see everything get taken to a new level and new things being possible that almost seemed like they never would be. And so it's awesome to have you on and see how you guys are enabling that with magic patterns and really appreciate you joining. Yeah, thanks so much. Well, that does it

for this episode of Design Review and we'll see you on the next one.