1006: Can AI Make Good Design?

**Wes Bos** (0:00)
Welcome to Syntax. We lost the first like 20 seconds of this episode on Riverside, so I'm here recording it again. I went to find the shirt that I was wearing. I spilled shawarma poutine on it, so it's dirty. So listen up, we're gonna get the editor to try cut it in perfectly. And I'm just gonna start saying what I was saying at the beginning of it. We have a show on AI design, and don't turn it off just yet, because this isn't the AI design show where guys are like, oh, I one-shotted this, but it looks amazing to me, and I think designers are toast. No, that's not what this show is about. This show is about, we know that AI can write pretty good code, and that's great because it's very deterministic, it can be tested, things like that. But design, can a model create something that is good, that is functionally useful, that converts well for the business, that helps the actual end user? We're in this weird space right now where it seems like everybody is just ripping each other off, every app looks exactly the same and there's tons of new tools to help you. So in order to get to the bottom of this, we're going to attempt to answer some of the following questions. Can AI be creative? Can it make you creative? Can good design be extrapolated? What about user experience? Can AI make a good user experience? You know, does it know about all of the complexities of your UI, of what people are trying to get done?
Can you make good design programmatic? We've talked about this in the previous many episodes of like, can you programmatically pick good colors?
Like with math, those things are kind of hard to get to. So we'll answer that question. Can AI make design that influences the end goal? So buying something, you know, or helping somebody get to the end use. Why are they using your application at the end of the day? Can you help them with that? And then we're going to end it off with just like tools and thoughts of, if you want to design something, whether you're a designer or not, what tools should you be looking at and how should you be thinking about using these things? My name is Wes. With me as always is Mr. Scott Tolinski. You're ready to get into it, Scott?

**Scott Tolinski** (2:00)
Oh, I'm so ready to get into it. This is a topic that I think a lot about, especially given just how many vibe coded designs you see. And it's such a tell. There's so many tells these days.
Once you've worked with AI, I feel like I could even tell Wes which model designs something at this point, which there are specific tells for GPT versus Anthropic, etc. So I'm really interested to hear your thoughts on this, but also in general, man, design is something that I'm constantly looking to get better at and feel like I'm constantly not good enough at. So let's get into it.

**Wes Bos** (2:42)
I know, sort of an aside from that, I know that there are many architects which can look at a building and say, I know which software this building was designed in due to the way that the curves fit together. As soon as they add a new fillet tool, then all of the buildings have that, which is absolutely crazy. I feel like I'm going to be on Antiques Roadshow when I'm older being like, well, yes, that was done with Sonnet for five, not for six, it might be a little bit confusing. I'm going to be able to pick it out. So stay tuned for that.
But let's talk about-

**Scott Tolinski** (3:15)
Yes, the border left here is indicative of the era.

**Wes Bos** (3:20)
So I got on to this whole thing because I get these e-mails every single day from these slop-coded startups and they say like, here, check it out. Let me know if you want to use it.
I always click through to the website and see what it is. It's the same thing of everything. Someone just logged in to V0 or Lovable or Cloud or whatever and typed like, make me a business, make no mistakes, and it shat out some business out the other end. And what's interesting is that on all of these, I see the same name over and over again. I see Sarah Chen on there. And I was like, where is Sarah Chen coming from? And I was like, I got to get to the bottom of this. So first of all, I thought like, maybe this is just the same person doing this over and over again. And it turns out that wasn't the case. It was many websites. So I was like, where is Sarah Chen coming from? Maybe it's coming from one of these site builders. Maybe they have seeded it with a template that has Sarah Chen as a testimonial and just uses that. And I looked into it and it didn't seem to be the case because all of the examples that I had found, I looked on GitHub and the use of Sarah Chen in the last year has just skyrocketed.