Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:24:10 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:24:10] S1: Yeah. What you're going for. I think one of the things that's interesting is it gives you a lot of, inspiration and ideas, and then you can start branching and going down a path. But it's still the models that's doing the design, and it still has some of the hallmarks of the things that you see Yeah. Models do frequently for better or for worse. And so how do you... When you're designing and you've got this inspiration, you're like, okay. This list is interesting. I hadn't really thought of doing that. Maybe I wanna go with that. How do you then make it more your own and get out of kind of the the standard slop that a lot of them will spit out? [00:24:44] S0: Yeah. Well, I have some, like, very specific rules I can share with you. One is that models love bold. They love bold styles. And and, really, like, try to pull your font weights back. You know? It's so tempting to bold things. Just try to pull them back as light as you can get, and it'll just magically look better designed. Another thing is too many too many sizes. Models love having five, six, seven, eight different font sizes. Yeah. Try to work with three. If you get down to three... So let's let's just try it real quick on this one. If we if we bring this down to, let's see, like, like, a 500. Even that's maybe heavier than it needs to be. Same here. Like, these don't actually need to be bold. This is such a tell of a of a... This one [00:25:23] S1: up here. The care [00:25:23] S0: organized black is so heavy. Let's just pull that back, and suddenly it looks more designed already. Right. Right.
00:25:23 · Stephen Haney, Aaron Epstein
[00:25:23] S0: organized black is so heavy. Let's just pull that back, and suddenly it looks more designed already. Right. Right. [00:25:29] S1: It looks cleaner. [00:25:30] S0: It looks cleaner and more approachable. Black here too. Let's just pull that back. These are really simple tweaks that, like, you can make. The contrast here is pretty good. A lot of times models screw up contrast. Yep. So I would... That's another step. You can just make sure it's like, is the text readable? [00:25:44] S1: Right. [00:25:44] S0: These these little two, three, four, these are a little too contrasty for my taste. I would probably pull these these back. They're supposed to be a [00:25:51] S1: supporting delete them? I mean, those are the kind of things where the models like to add numbers or little icons or things like that there. And, yeah, it's really cool that you can just go through and delete it, and it just snaps everything else up rather than leaving a blank space there.
00:25:51 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:25:51] S1: supporting delete them? I mean, those are the kind of things where the models like to add numbers or little icons or things like that there. And, yeah, it's really cool that you can just go through and delete it, and it just snaps everything else up rather than leaving a blank space there. [00:26:03] S0: Totally. Totally. Well, that's one of the powers of of of this tool in general is that Paper is a design tool first. It's a human design tool first that happens to be really, really good with agents. Mhmm. And so that means you can customize whatever you need to do. It's... You're not stuck with, like, the track you're on. You don't you don't prompt again. You can start reaching in and and changing things. So, yeah, a 100% agree. Maybe get rid of that one too. The first thing I do is is try to get down to, three font sizes and just pull all that bold way back. Yep. And you'll immediately get something that feels more designed and intentional. [00:26:30] S1: Yeah. Yeah. And then what do you do from here? Great. You've got the new section. You're excited about it. How do you then wrap it back in?
00:26:30 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:26:30] S1: Yeah. Yeah. And then what do you do from here? Great. You've got the new section. You're excited about it. How do you then wrap it back in? [00:26:36] S0: Well, so there's a couple of ways. You can you can right click and, let me actually grab here. You can copy it as React. Mhmm. So that's kind of the long way, though. So I can get this out as code and paste it into my IDE. You can also just ask the agent to pull this back. So I have the Paper code base open. But you can just say, please build my selection in Paper into a new component in the code base, which we will not actually ship in Paper. It can read everything that we just did. And it knows my code base really well because it's the agent that I use. And so it can actually pull in this design, it'll match the coding styles that we have and the conventions that we have and build it into the code base. And if it already existed, usually you would already have this as a component, and we just update it. And it's really, really fast. So we see a lot of people are just like, this is the whole loop now. There isn't even a handoff anymore. It's just one person making these changes and iterating and shipping, which is really cool. I think really it's cool. [00:27:30] S1: Yeah. That's what's so powerful is, you know, it's easier than ever for designers to actually build and ship things in the way that they see it. [00:27:38] S0: Yes.
00:27:38 · Stephen Haney, Aaron Epstein
[00:27:38] S0: Yes. [00:27:39] S1: And to to actually get that last mile and get something alive and iterate on it and make it better. And it's it's tools like this that I think are giving people superpowers, which is, it's it's a whole new world where one person can do the work of an entire team. [00:27:53] S0: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think even in Teams, we're seeing a lot of this too. Mhmm. So Teams are speeding up using this, but but I think the core of it is agentic workflows. Mhmm. If you... If you're using agents to accomplish your work, you need tools that speak to the agents, you know, in a... Really well. And so that's what we're, you know, focusing on. [00:28:11] S1: 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. Should we do one more? [00:28:25] S0: Let's do it. Here's another one. [00:28:27] S1: Alright. We got SciTechs. Accelerate field infrastructure operations. Plan the process, execute in the field, and turn every action into one living knowledge base that you can monitor, automate, and just ask. Okay. I mean, right away, the first thing I noticed is same super bold headline, just like you were talking about. We've got some of those glows, the colors, feel vibe coded, a lot of purple again Yeah. You know, tends to be another tell. The animation here looks cool. It's kinda like showing how the product works. I love that. [00:29:00] S0: That's great. [00:29:01] S1: That gets my attention.
00:29:01 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:29:01] S1: That gets my attention. [00:29:02] S0: Yeah. Also, I had no idea what it was until we got to the animation. [00:29:06] S1: Yeah. I still am not quite sure. Mhmm. But, yeah, it's something that looks like a Kanban board, I guess. [00:29:11] S0: Yeah. And I... I'm getting the sense that I can have my information in such a way that I can monitor it more easily. And then I I think I would... The... My feedback here for design is actually make it more clear what what I'm getting out of it Yeah. [00:29:23] S1: As a user. Well, it's interesting because then they've got this this image down here, this video that's playing. It's showing construction trucks and somebody with a hard hat on working on their phone. And you go back up, and it's like the field operations or, yeah, field infrastructure operations. And then it's like, okay. This is something with managing operations for... Involving construction or heavy machinery or something like that. But it's not obvious above the fold here. No. Because that that biggest clue right there is right below the fold.