Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:15:36 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:15:36] S1: they give it to the developers. And then maybe it wouldn't actually be built and shipped in the way, you know, the designer originally intended when they were working in the canvas. Yep. Or even if it was, things would just get out of sync, and the code would evolve, and it would never get wrapped back into the design. Yeah. Which... And so it's what is the source of truth. And what's really nice about this is the code is the source of truth, and both systems know how to work on that same code base. [00:16:03] S0: Exactly. Yeah. We we see so many teams maintain two copies of their design system. Yeah. And it's not a tractable problem to keep them in sync. It's impossible, really. And and so you have a lot of maintenance costs with keeping both updated, and you just have accuracy problems. So what we see from the newer companies, the more agentic builders, is they are treating the code base as a source of truth. And we don't have components in Paper yet. It's this common complaint. People want components really a lot, and we're working on that. But you don't need them because your code base is a source of truth, you can summon things in as you need them. And we took that a step farther, too. We built a Chrome extension where you can grab your live site and copy that into the Paper Canvas, which is a really nice way to start from what your users are seeing and build on top of it and iterate. [00:16:48] S1: Maybe that's a good segue. Should we review some some user submitted sites? And [00:16:52] S0: then I would love to. I would
00:16:52 · Stephen Haney, Aaron Epstein
[00:16:52] S0: then I would love to. I would [00:16:54] S1: love to use that feature to be able to pull some of them into Paper Yeah. And make some tweaks on it and just see what we can live edit to to try to improve some of the sites. [00:17:03] S0: Oh, that's it. It's always my favorite section of the show. Okay. Awesome. Let's do it. [00:17:07] S1: So the first one we got here is Legion Health psychiatry as low as $0 with insurance, online medication management for ADHD, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and more. I don't know. When I first look at this, I see the little pill up there at the top, and this kinda... It makes me think this was just like a vibe coded thing because it matches so much of the style that we see Yeah. That the agents are just spitting out. [00:17:31] S0: There's definitely, like, a fit and finish thing here. I think little things, like how these these these sections kind of, like, leave a little gap. The the pill is very generic. I think overall, though, the... I can understand the value prop Mhmm. Yep. Very clearly, which I think is great. You know, that's a big part of design too is, like, can you comprehend what's going on? It shows the benefit over on the right of, like, being Being [00:17:49] S1: very happy in the field or something.
00:17:49 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:17:49] S1: very happy in the field or something. [00:17:51] S0: Yeah. You're having a great life. Yeah. So I think, like, those parts are working. I think it's more about just tightening up. Here again, you know, tightening up some of the design would really help the brand feel more serious, more elevated, a little more trustworthy, I think. Yeah. This feels... You know, I I don't know if I trust this brand right now. And this is an area where you have to have trust. Right? [00:18:10] S1: Yeah. So what is the thing when you look at this that makes you not trust it?
00:18:10 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:18:10] S1: Yeah. So what is the thing when you look at this that makes you not trust it? [00:18:14] S0: Some of the design elements is, like, the the alignment of things, the contrast choices. They feel maybe vibe coded or, like, somebody didn't spend a lot of attention to this. And then your mind goes to what else don't they spend Right. Attention on. The one other thing is, like, this must be a YC company, but I don't see that here. And I would say that'd be a great thing to call out Yeah. As a little bit of social proof Yeah. Or evidence. But, like, this is nice. I mean, there's a lot to like here. Mhmm. I would just... I would work on the fit and finish a little bit. I'll show you Paper Snapshot. Paper Snapshot is a way to grab content from your live site. This replaces taking screenshots of things. So we'll just grab this section because I think this is a cool one to work on. And we'll paste it into Paper. And these are all live sections. Right? So this is not a screenshot. This is actual stuff that you can come in here and edit, and you can, like, alt drag and get another copy of it, all these things. So let's ask the agent to work on this little bit. And one of the things I like to do is actually just ask it for a bunch of variations. Mhmm. So we'll use con... Let's... Conductor. Hey, Conductor. This is using GPT 5.5. Mhmm. Can you make three new variations of my selection in paper focusing on the craft and alignment and contrast choices to elevate the visuals. You can do a lot of prompting, but I often find, like, simple prompting is is fine, honestly.
00:19:34 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:19:34] S1: What's really powerful about this... A couple things. One, I love this concept of just spitting out a bunch of different variations. It's the best way to get inspiration. And sometimes, you know, you have a sense of what you want, but you don't really know. And this is a great way to look at a bunch of things and go, I like that from this one. I like this from this one, and combine it and and make so much more progress so much faster rather than being stuck in that creative rut. And then the other thing that's really cool is you're able to just say, hey. The thing that is my selection on the canvas Yeah. And paper, and it knows what that is. Yep. And now it's able to go to work on that, which is which is really powerful. [00:20:09] S0: I think I had the wrong selection, though. Grab the, the YC card. Let me let me restart it there. One more time using my selection. Oh, I see what happens. It it changed it, with the ADHD content. Oh, actually, know what, this is a good way to show another thing we can do. So we can leave a comment on this frame and say, please make three new variations of this content, explore the layout for visual impact. And instead, what I'll do, so I left a comment in Paper. [00:20:40] S1: Uh-huh.
00:20:40 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:20:40] S1: Uh-huh. [00:20:41] S0: And I'll switch over to the agent now and say, please address my comments in Paper. There's only one. And this will be another way that you can kind of like target. And so you can imagine having a big design and leaving all of your feedback and then just setting your agent on it, it spin. But we see a lot of folks are leaving these running overnight. They're setting up loops of an agent just generating hundreds of variations. And it's actually a challenge for us to be, like, agent scale with our servers and everything. Like, they're they're doing a lot more work than I thought they were gonna be doing. And it's so cool. And they they... Now they come in and they curate. You know, they come in, oh, that's a good idea. That's a good idea. Let me combine these things together. Yep. It's kind of this new curation design process that I think is really interesting. [00:21:20] S1: It's so cool to think about this world where you just go in, you leave a bunch of comments on the work, you go to bed, you wake up in the morning, and they're all either addressed or lots of iterations for you to choose from are just sitting there waiting for you. [00:21:32] S0: Exactly. I think it's [00:21:33] S1: really cool. It's a new world.