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Back to The New Full-Stack Designer, with Aaron Epstein & Marvin Schwaibold.

Does AI Know What Looks Good?

Marvin Schwaibold says AI does not know what looks good and what looks bad. He decides and steers it. AI has raised the ceiling, and it is not a crafter. It can execute complexity and write code he was not able to hand-write.

His own design process has not really changed. It is still extremely iterative and sequenced, with many variations. The tooling has shifted from Figma and aesthetic layouts into an AI-driven workflow. Figma stays a scratch pad for early ideas, then the work moves quickly into real demos he can test on a phone or computer. He goes back into Figma only to lay something out or explain something to AI. The day-to-day work now runs through Codex and the terminal, away from the canvas, and the cycle stays iterative.

He drives AI to do the heavy lifting. Quality control and decisions stay with the designers, who remain in the driving seat. Output is no longer the issue. The job is being selective about what to take forward and curating what AI creates, in a continuous back and forth. AI can get a lot done when the complexity of the work is broken into subtasks and fed to the agent bit by bit. Designers are more the editors now than ever.

Grokipedia·Figma·AI driven

Transcript

The New Full-Stack Designer ·

Y Combinator

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  2. How Does Figma Help Codex Build Motion?Marvin Schwaibold uses Figma as a scratch pad so a broad sketch can carry motion he cannot put into words, then he gives the idea to Codex.
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