Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:39:39 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:39:39] S1: Yeah. Which is cool. That's something that I I haven't seen very much before. [00:39:43] S0: It makes me wanna interact with it. Yeah. It's inviting. Yep. Yeah. The overall feeling, the vibe is... If we can make it a little more trustworthy [00:39:49] S1: Yeah. [00:39:49] S0: But I like the excitement. I like the energy. I like the invitation that I have. [00:39:53] S1: Yeah. It's almost too easy to miss it down in that corner, though, too, because, you know, you're so used to seeing the chat with us box down, and you just assume there's a bunch of things that you should ignore. There... Unless you have a problem, like, that's where you look. And I don't know. Maybe they should bring that QR code up to the main area and say, try it now. [00:40:08] S0: Speedy the... In the hero. Yeah. Yeah. I do. I feel like this hero could be working a lot harder for them. Yeah. Because when when I start getting down here, I'm like, yeah. This is this is solid. It seems to get more trustworthy the further you go. Mhmm. [00:40:19] S1: Yeah. It it is interesting your point that, you know, at the end of the day, the models are the ones that are generating the design, when you use them to generate the design. And you're kind of at the mercy for how... Like, what they've been trained on and how they like to design. [00:40:35] S0: Yes. Yeah.
00:40:35 · Stephen Haney, Aaron Epstein
[00:40:35] S0: Yes. Yeah. [00:40:36] S1: And so what's important is using the right models and the... Those models getting better at design, which will inevitably happen over time. And then the next thing that you need is just more control over it quickly. Yeah. And so to have that control, to be able to edit it, and make it more in your own vision is actually the really powerful missing piece here that I think is is a lot of what Paper is providing right here. [00:40:58] S0: The agents can speed you up. They can save you a lot of work, and they can do tasks like translation or resizing for you. But we're big believers in the human element of design and and how important that is. And so we're trying to create a tool that lets humans work really fast with agents. [00:41:11] S1: Do you think the agents can learn taste in the same [00:41:15] S0: way that a human can? They'll get better at things like letter space. The the little tactical things will get better [00:41:21] S1: Yeah.
00:41:21 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:41:21] S1: Yeah. [00:41:21] S0: Over time. And I think what I'm encouraged by is a model like Fable seems much more thoughtful. It feels like it actually put some thought into its decisions compared to previous models. And so I think that is a piece of design, is that thoughtfulness. Now, do I ever think it's going to replace a human making these design decisions? No, no way. Because a lot of design is actually a very human task of decision making in an organization. It's showing people comps and being and people can be like, oh, not like that. I don't like that. The role of design is you see the pixels at the end, but the role of design in an org is decisions and stakeholders and bringing in requirements and problem space. And those are not things that agents have any skill at, really. Who knows over time? They're going to get smarter and smarter and smarter. But I just think humans are just such an essential piece of building stuff that stands out Right. From the crowd.
00:42:10 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:42:10] S1: Yeah. It's interesting. I I was having a very similar conversation with someone who leads design at a multibillion dollar design forward company about... There's a thought process that goes through a human's head where they're reacting to something and a criteria they're evaluating. Yeah. And it's very, implicit for us as humans right now. And the question is, can you verbalize what those things are? Like, what is the process of you deciding whether something is good or not or looks good or not or Very subjective. Hits hits the bar or not. Can you literally go through and quantify all of that and teach that to a model to the point where it has taste like a human would? And then the question becomes, well, if all the models were able to do that, does everything just look the same again? And then you always need the humans to be drive... To finding the next thing that's actually gonna be new and stands out and [00:43:03] S0: Yeah. [00:43:03] S1: And pushes the limits more.
00:43:03 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:43:03] S1: And pushes the limits more. [00:43:05] S0: We see that even within human... Pre... Premodels as trends take over. Yeah. And everyone kind of looks like linear for a couple years, and then somebody else figures out something. Right? I do think the models will get good at tactics. Mhmm. They'll get better at not making everything bold. Mhmm. You know? And I think that... That's great, that'll be really that'll be really nice. But the... Just the thought, the product... There's so much of design. Again, it's like, was this showing value prop or not? That stuff's more important. This site, for instance, that I think is a little too wild, maybe it's really important for them to be really fun and exciting. Maybe that's what their market needs. You know? And so maybe it's a higher order thing for them to be very exciting. And can a model make that decision? Can it... Know, maybe with enough information, you could start to get there. But I think we're pretty far away from that. You know? Maybe ten years, something like that. [00:43:47] S1: Yeah. [00:43:47] S0: May... I don't know. Maybe I'm too pessimistic. Maybe it'll come sooner. But I I still see humans as just this essential piece of the of the puzzle. [00:43:53] S1: Yeah. We certainly hope so. [00:43:55] S0: Yeah. Let's hope so. [00:43:56] S1: I'm curious. How how are you guys using agents internally at Paper? In some ways, we
00:43:56 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:43:56] S1: I'm curious. How how are you guys using agents internally at Paper? In some ways, we [00:44:00] S0: use them a lot. And then in other ways, we use them... We're kind of like dinosaurs in some ways. Like like, we don't have agents in our Slack. And we don't have... We use agents for coding quite a bit, but we still read our code. We read all of our code, every single line. Every line. Usually, multiple humans reads every single line. [00:44:12] S1: Why is that?