Y Combinator Startup Podcast
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.
00:29:54 · Stephen Haney, Aaron Epstein
[00:29:54] S0: And I would love to see too, like, what is it actually doing? Because I can... I have AI enabled Kanban boards already. So why why does... What is making it special for construction? I would love to see that as as part of the value prop above. But to your point on on some of the fundamentals, like, very... You know, the bold is here. This looks like it may be an AI created some of it. Here's another great section. So here's one that would be cleaned up a lot by having fewer textiles. So you see, like, you know, one size, two sizes, three sizes, four sizes. That's probably another one too. If you take that down to three, it's gonna look so much better. So let's just try that real quick. And I can... I'll even ask the agent to do it for us. And again, use Paper Snapshot to grab it from the live site, paste it into Paper as editable layers. And then we'll just say... Let me just name this one. Here's another way you can do it. You can say... What was that? It's Cytex. This one we'll give to Cursor. We'll say, hey, Cursor, please clean up the Cytex frame using at most three font sizes and no bold, everything regular or below in weight. [00:30:59] S1: And so you named that frame SciText, and then you just gave it that context clue to the agent.
00:30:59 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:30:59] S1: And so you named that frame SciText, and then you just gave it that context clue to the agent. [00:31:04] S0: Exactly. Just different ways to kind of tell it what you want it to work on. Yeah. My favorite is actually leaving comments. And I... The thing with I noticed earlier as I was jumping around, you tend to change your selection a lot, and I'll accidentally, like, deselect. So I I love leaving comments. I think it's just the best way to do things. But here we go. So it's starting to work on this one, and it's gonna align... Just, you know, bring bring back some of that vibe coded stuff. Now in Paper, we actually give instructions to the model not to do these these common mistakes. And sometimes people go, like, what's your secret sauce? Like, how... Why is it better? Why does it look better? It's just like, honestly, all we're doing is these basic rules of typography and contrast. Yep. And we we had the more senior designers on the team, like, distill their knowledge into the instructions [00:31:45] S1: That's great. For the model. Yeah. Even that is is very powerful, though. Just putting those guardrails up around what the models are doing can just save a lot of time and energy.
00:31:45 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:31:45] S1: That's great. For the model. Yeah. Even that is is very powerful, though. Just putting those guardrails up around what the models are doing can just save a lot of time and energy. [00:31:54] S0: Yeah. Like, an expert, you know, kind of guiding the model Right. A little bit is is really helpful. In real life, I might have just done this by hand because it'd be faster. But if you had an entire site that you wanted to go through, for instance, using the agent is really useful. Or if you wanted to pull this back into your code base when you're done Mhmm. The agent can do that Yeah. For you. [00:32:09] S1: This already looks like a huge improvement. [00:32:12] S0: Yeah. I think very simple changes. Right? All we did was pull back the weight of the font, and we consolidated how many sizes there are. To me, it looks much more designed and more intentional. And so if we go pull the original again, here's kind of the... We'll pull up Paper and do a side by side. Now... And this is subjective. Right? And I know somebody probably spent some time on this design, and I think they nailed the content. But by pulling some of these AI out of it, to me, the side... The one on the right feels more trustworthy. It feels more intentional and more designed. [00:32:42] S1: It's interesting you talk about some of those AI tells. Yeah. What are some of the most common ones you've seen? What are the clues when you look at a page or you look at a design and you go, somebody just spit out whatever the model spit out and called it good and moved on?