How To Stand Out In A World Of AI Designs

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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-backed 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.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  Alex, thank you for joining.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Thanks, Aaron. Thanks for having me. I've been watching the show for a long time.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  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?

• 0:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  You don't come from a design background, and so talk a little bit about the inspiration for building this.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  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 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?

• 1:37Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  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?

• 2:20Speaker 01

  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-end engineering and implementing Figma mockups by code. And then, so then, during all of our pivots, that's pretty much what we focused on.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  How long did it take you to get to the idea that ultimately became Magic Patterns?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  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?

• 4:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  I'd love to see a demo. Can you show us a little bit about how it works?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  And you're always dog fooding your product, right?

• 4:41Speaker 01

  We are obsessed with dog fooding, but we never force the dog fooding, because then you're not getting actual...

• 4:46Speaker 00

  Right, it has to be good enough that you actually want that and you choose that to be your tool, right?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  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 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 indicator that merges the inspiration of the Claude code,

• 5:36Speaker 01

  icon, and the Grok bot." 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 ASCII 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 Cursor or Claude code, whether it's PRDs 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.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  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.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  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 Claude code, but it gave me local host. I can't share my prototype with anybody." So, "Oh, well, we have a solution for you." 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. You 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 Claude code-esque. We're just kind of getting inspiration here to make our own loading indicator.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  And it generated this entire page showing off the work that it had done.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So like, 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 and exploration. That's where we see users get the most value in a tool like ours.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  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. It'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.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  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 product and they might be using it

• 9:00Speaker 01

  through cursor or Claude code or Codex and thinking through what that might look like. And through MagicOS, we actually brainstormed kind of this like LED style design.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  And so is this whole page a canvas?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is all a canvas. And what's cool is we also think of it as almost like an artboard, 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

• 9:44Speaker 01

  when we first created our first design here on this canvas.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  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.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Totally. So I'll actually show that where we've had a canvas for a long time. What you just kind of saw is 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

• 10:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's, it's more like you've, you've got canvas like artboards 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?

• 11:18Speaker 01

  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 stamped travel notes field poster.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  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

• 12:20Speaker 01

  for every single city and image.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  Cool. So you've got images for Medellin, Singapore, you've got Statue of Liberty, so New York, and then Toronto.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  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, in the file system, what's on this artboard here, and it can go ahead and then make, 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, the image that, 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.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  They now make a design of a postcard

• 13:21Speaker 01

  that references the description thanking users 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.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  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?

• 13:44Speaker 01

  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, our tool is how much we have been kind of democratizing design.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  You can export to Figma as well, so you play nicely with the other tools.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  One thing that's very different about our tool is that we're model agnostic and in a way feature agnostic, right? Where we encourage folks to export to Figma if they want to and get high fidelity precision or export to the coding agent of their choice, right? Some of our other competitors, like Claude Design as an example, it's only the anthropic models. You're only exporting to Claude Code. There's no integration with Figma versus a tool like ours, you know, we have integrations with anything you can think of.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  So prompting is obviously very important here. What's your advice for how people should improve their prompts and get better results from them?

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's leveraging the features that tools offer. I think it's really interesting that I've seen is there's more and more AI enablement teams popping up 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 in Magic Patterns where you can go ahead and, 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.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  What's one of the coolest things that, that you've seen created with Magic Patterns?

• 15:32Speaker 01

  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 dropdown. Like the models were so bad. And now suddenly, you know, we're seeing folks literally bring in, like building entire video game 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.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  And what was this created for?

• 16:02Speaker 01

  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 Roller Coaster Tycoon, the track is a component, the chocolate bar twister ride is a component, the path 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?

• 16:38Speaker 00

  Very cool. And you can even get right in there, see all the little people walking around.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And again, it's amazing. We're like, this is literally just, you know, WebGL rendering in the, in the browser, right? And we can see that we, again, the way that we did this is we used 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, and updating it is really as simple as prompting something like no trees, just lollipops and more chocolate rivers.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  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.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  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 with 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. And I think it's a taste of the, of the future where people can really design full-on interactions that are high fidelity, you know, and using their, their components.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's going to be a wild future for sure.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  YC's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you? Apply at ycombinator.com/apply. It's never too early and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay, back to the video.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  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?

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Let's review some websites. This will be a lot of fun.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  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.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  What do we think?

• 18:24Speaker 01

  So first off, I mean, it's cool. Here's, 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, 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 Ronin?

• 18:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. What do, what do you think they want us to do here?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  I mean, my initial reaction is like, I should just keep scrolling.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Right?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  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?

• 19:17Speaker 00

  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? Uh, I guess there's a waitlist, so maybe it's not live yet.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's see.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  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.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  Like the site should start here with this, because this is the call to action, which is join the waitlist. But we had to scroll down pretty far in order to even get to this point.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  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?

• 20:08Speaker 00

  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.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, we see a lot of, there's blinking dots everywhere and, um, 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 what's going on. 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, 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, and I almost missed it because it's not clear to me that it exists.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is another kind of vibe coded smell that I, I commonly see is you can see my, 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, whoa, what's going on?

• 21:49Speaker 00

  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, and interactive.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:57Speaker 00

  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, but you're actually not able to.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think it's important to talk about like, why does this matter? Why 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, join the waitlist.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's cool if you scroll down, you see, um, the pictures, 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, um, 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, um, 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 Ronin.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  I don't know what Ronin is. The company's called Ego. I guess it says here, Ronin launching September. Is Ronin a product? Is it a model? Is it, it's not clear to me what this is. And so I think ultimately I'm just left very confused.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  This is another vibe coded smell, by the way, it says scroll right here.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  I'm naturally going to scroll, like, I don't think, personally, I don't know many instances where, 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, to do something. Should we take a look at another one?

• 23:52Speaker 00

  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.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Whoa, okay.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  Okay, and it closes when you scroll. Hold on, go back for a second.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  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.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  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, Decacorn company ever do any kind of scroll jacking.

• 24:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Why don't they do any kind of scroll jacking? 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, I missed it.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Right? Again, go to like the top Fortune 500 company sites that are, have millions and millions of page views. They are not scroll jacking.

• 25:04Speaker 00

  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've stopped touching the mouse or the trackpad. It messes things up and it feels unnatural. And so please, everybody, please stop scroll jacking. It's very simple, just keep the normal scroll. Because there's some cool stuff that's happening here, right? Like, like, okay, we started out with laptop screen open, a bunch of things are going into it.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  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 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 going, 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.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Totally, I mean, it's, it's definitely helping me understand what this product does. Uh, but I would also, I always think when you're, 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, right? Also, just speaking about that button for a second, this kind of glow,

• 26:51Speaker 01

  another bit of a vibe coding smell again, and hey, it's definitely getting my, 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, like, 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.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  Yep, and then what do we have further down the page here?

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Let's see.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  Recipes.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  I think what what's interesting here is, again, this is that main CTA, right? I scrolled through the whole thing and I'm just, I, you really want me to click this button? Or perhaps even do this homebrew installation, but it's so small. Like, I'm at like 100% and I can barely see it, right? Uh, and like this has this kind of hover effect. I guess this brings me to the GitHub. I can barely read that.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really tough to read those.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Right, like free. There's a reason that free is giant on pricing pages.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, download for free.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, right? Right? And I swear it's, it's, you know, perhaps it's because of the angle, but it doesn't really matter. I cannot see the word free.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  Right.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Right now.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  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.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  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, I guess they have an FAQ here to try to answer some of this, but this is actually an interesting problem in new world of AI apps and LLMs 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

• 28:59Speaker 00

  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.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Totally agree. As someone who applied to YC with a text message analyzer that was open source and read your iMessages all locally on the computer, I completely agree.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  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?

• 29:37Speaker 01

  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, in on-device LLM.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  But it's funny, like, like, is it the word and relieved and necessary? Like, it's, 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? Like, but just communicating those kind of, that most important thing, which is that it's on-device.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  The thing that kind of makes me laugh is this font. Let's see what the font is. Space grotesque is, is always the, the font that is, uh, oh, instrument serif is another one.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Instrument serif, Claude Code loves instrument serif. Uh, 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.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  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 eighties or something like that. And you're like, man, this looks like an outdated kitchen, but in the eighties, 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, uh, site design that will feel outdated um, 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, or 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.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  And that's the way to create more timeless design, I think.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and establishing that brand book early on, 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? Uh, you're really your design system. Companies should do that earlier for sure.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  All right, well, thank you, Sentient OS.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Let's do another one.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  All right, Serenovis, institutional intelligence and decision infrastructure.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  I don't really know what that means, but, uh, Serenovis is your AI operating partner. It reads every record your company produces, finds the operational inefficiencies, nobody's tracking it, warns you while problems are still small. Okay, um, 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. Um, it's a decision infrastructure. I don't know what that means. So I, 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, it's too unclear.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  I was interested in me, like, the, there's so much padding, right? Like, there's just a lot of white space where this is, 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 right now, right? Um, unfortunately, this is also kind of like a classic vibe coding smell, uh, this.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  Small all caps.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. Um, 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.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  Nothing installed, no interviews, but I still don't even know what the product does.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  I didn't even know it was going to be something that was installed. That was not my assumption to begin with, so.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, nothing installed where? Like, am I dealing with hardware? Um.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  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, it's, this is like who they go after.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  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 Serenovis help solve this problem for me?

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Right, it's almost like right now I have to think through, am I enterprise middle market? Like, who am I?

• 34:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Let's pretend I'm secondary, is there, I'm continuation vehicles. I have to look at this. But I had to like click to decide who I am. You're making me think, you know?

• 34:22Speaker 00

  Too much work.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  And again, to your point, what I really want to see are the solutions.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, this is, um, 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, um, it's, it's almost like it makes a slide deck for the company that's kind of pitching the company, um, almost to investors a lot of times, or like the, 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, um, 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.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  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. Uh, 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, um, in a main navigation of a site. Um, 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? Um, I would not be surprised to see this become a more common pattern

• 35:52Speaker 00

  that we're going to see across, um, AI sites trying to talk about the product and get people to entrust them with lots of sensitive information.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  Well, overall, I feel like the style is very clean, it's, it's very fresh, it's very modern. Um, so from a visual perspective, I think it looks very nice from a copy and, you know, overall description and are you communicating what the product does into your users? I, 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.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  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. Um, but you know, you need users to tell you if it's resonating with them.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  That's the ultimate test.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  That is absolutely the ultimate test. We're just two people that are here behind some cameras, you know, talk to your users.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  All right, and let's do another one here. Slashy, your intelligent inbox. Um, 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, um, if I had just seen that without the context of like slashy.com, I think I would have thought this was S slash Ashy. Um, 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. Um, 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.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  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.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  That's, that's fair. I, 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 Gmail replacement, right? I actually have this problem myself, my email is overloaded. Um, 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.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  Yep. Um replies drafted in seconds. Okay.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  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. Um, and these are just seem to be on a timer. Yeah, you can see the line going across at the bottom there. Um, which is cool, but the problem with anytime you have tabs is you have to expect that people will not see anything that is behind the other tabs.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  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, when 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.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think when we got down here the first time, voice drafts was the thing that was highlighted. Um, and maybe because we were just kind of scrolling back and forth. And so we started the timer without actually reading them. Um, 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 uh communicate what is happening with each of these.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  Rather than showing all the um granularity and level of detail of the actual interface.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  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, I don't know. So, all right, so some people use this and, and again, they've got a security uh link up at the top. They've got social proof here on here's people that are actually using this because you're again, you're asking them to entrust you with their, your inbox. And that is one of the most sensitive areas to give uh 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?

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, and 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 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, 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?

• 41:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, maybe it is that they're targeting founders and VCs. I'm not sure. Um, or is it for general consumers? They say for busy people, so maybe this is like a prosumer, 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 um and making edits uh that actually match the style like that view right there.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:55Speaker 00

  And handle your inbox from iMessage. Again, we got more of these tabs. It started at the third one down there, so uh there was a review and approve.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  But yeah, same, same as above.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  That's cool too, though. It's, 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 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.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, and 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.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  One more thing that I think is great is actually just how long this landing page is. I learned this from the Posthog guys, actually. So the Posthog 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.

• 43:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it does a good job of spacing down the page, um calling out the main points that it wants to hit on, trying to build trust. And it looks very nicely professionally designed, um which helps build that trust as well, which is really important. Um, so overall, I think this, this is really well done. Great. Thank you, Slashy. As someone who comes from a, a front-end engineering background, how did you get better at design and improving your design taste?

• 43:27Speaker 01

  So one thing I, I try and just look at beautiful things, like as an example, there's a Matisse exhibit uh here in, in San Francisco. Um, 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, that's beautiful, right? But.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  Yep. 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, and always keep that voice of the user in your head?

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, like a couple of 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 CTA's 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, and fixing it because they experienced 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.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Spend time on the extra 20%, don't just have the vibe coded output and not take it to the next level.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  And how do you balance that? Because obviously doing that sounds great. The trade-offs 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, and making something that that is, is actually excellent rather than the thing that was just okay?

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you have to, it's all about trade-offs, 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, 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 it 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, not really, you can still be really fast, especially considering how much everything is sped up. Uh, when it comes to writing code.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's actually really interesting. Those trade-offs don't have to exist anymore. Historically, they had to exist. What's next for magic patterns? What's, what's next on the roadmap for you and, and where do you think design is going from here?

• 46:11Speaker 01

  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. Uh, 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, 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 good. And that is the ultimate medium for um production and for your users.

• 46:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's interesting. Um, 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 seem like they never would be. And so um it's awesome to have you on and see how you guys are enabling that with magic patterns and really appreciate you joining.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks so much.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  Well, that does it for this episode of Design Review and we'll see you on the next one.