Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:06:10 · Aaron Epstein, Alex Danilowicz
[00:06:10] S0: Mhmm. Yeah. It's interesting. So you've got this powerful canvas in in Magic Patterns, where when that's the best tool for the job, you can be working directly in there. And when you want to be working in code or in cursor or another app, you can just pull directly from that through the MCP. [00:06:26] S1: Yeah. Exactly. And what's cool too is we have so many customers that come up to us and say, I'm using cursor and cloud code, but it gave me local host. I can't share Mhmm. I can't share my prototype with anybody. Yep. Say, oh, well, we have a solution for you. Right? Yeah. So what's cool here is actually we can see my colleague on here as well as the cursor agent from that cursor prompt that we fired off. Right? And so they're working simultaneously. And we can go ahead and just open this up here. We can see this is like that ASCII version of of Claude Code. Right? And kinda playing around, oh, what would it look like with different colors? Now, obviously, this is very Claude code esque. We're just kinda getting inspiration here, to make our own loading indicator. [00:07:06] S0: And it generated this entire page showing off the work that it had done. [00:07:11] S1: Yeah. Exactly. So like one thing that we encourage users to do, and we've seen users do ourselves, is explaining kind of the choices [00:07:19] S0: Mhmm.
00:07:19 · Aaron Epstein, Alex Danilowicz
[00:07:19] S0: Mhmm. [00:07:20] S1: And the different states. So as another example here, you kinda look at this one. We were thinking through, well, does it look like at different screen sizes? What does it, again, look like if it's Claude code? Kinda playing around with, should it look more like a helmet or like a pillow. Right? Again, just brainstorming and exploration. Where we see users get the most value in a tool like ours. [00:07:42] S0: Yeah. I mean, that's, I think, one of the most valuable things at the idea and inspiration stage is just being able to fire off a bunch of different variations. And a lot of times, it's hard to manage those, and they're all in different tabs and stuff. And it seems like Magic Patterns is able to just give you a bunch of nice tabs and options and kind of enumerates everything. It's like like, here's a bunch of color options. Here's body options. Here's different agent options. And it's really cool to do that in a very, centralized uniform way to actually make the tweaks and explore, find what you like, and then be able to move on faster to the next step in the flow.
00:08:16 · Alex Danilowicz, Aaron Epstein
[00:08:16] S1: Totally. Because I think what's changed about software development in the last year especially is the end stage is so compressed now. It's so easy. Everyone's talking about this. Right? How engineers are just moving at the speed of light. There's too many PRs to review. And so as a result, we can spend more time actually brainstorming, thinking about what to build and what not to build, and using something like MagicOS to really visualize and think through the different ideas and concepts, error states, loading states, what happens when it's multiple agents working on a file. Here's actually... I think this one is really cool. Where we were thinking through, well, okay. Lots of folks use the MCP to use our product, and they might be using it through cursor or Claude code or codex and thinking through what that might look like. And through MagicOS, we actually brainstorm kind of this, like, LED style Mhmm. Design. [00:09:11] S0: And so is this whole page a canvas? [00:09:13] S1: Yeah. So this is all a canvas. And what's cool is we also think of it as almost like an art board, right, where you can bring in any of your context, whether that's images or PRDs or documentation. And and again, what's needed is we're not blocked here by a single thread. Right? So historically, when you use lots of these design tools and prototyping tools, you kinda have to wait for the AI agent to finish. Mhmm. Right? But on any of these, we have many, many threads here. So I can go back to kind of what we first did when we first created our our first design here on this canvas.
00:09:13 · Alex Danilowicz, Aaron Epstein
[00:09:13] S1: Yeah. So this is all a canvas. And what's cool is we also think of it as almost like an art board, right, where you can bring in any of your context, whether that's images or PRDs or documentation. And and again, what's needed is we're not blocked here by a single thread. Right? So historically, when you use lots of these design tools and prototyping tools, you kinda have to wait for the AI agent to finish. Mhmm. Right? But on any of these, we have many, many threads here. So I can go back to kind of what we first did when we first created our our first design here on this canvas. [00:09:47] S0: I know you've kinda gone back and forth on canvases in general as as an interface. And just talk about your thinking and and what you've discovered kinda being at the frontier of that for when it makes sense and when it doesn't.
00:09:47 · Aaron Epstein, Alex Danilowicz
[00:09:47] S0: I know you've kinda gone back and forth on canvases in general as as an interface. And just talk about your thinking and and what you've discovered kinda being at the frontier of that for when it makes sense and when it doesn't. [00:09:59] S1: Totally. So I'll actually show that where we've had a Canvas for a long time. What you just kinda saw is Canvas two point o. Mhmm. But we've had a Canvas for roughly two years now. And what we learned... Actually, we're hiring... By the way, we're hiring a designer. One of the reasons that we're hiring a designer is one of our issues that we've had is thinking through that initial onboarding experience. Almost like this progressive disclosure of, okay, when does it make sense for users to know that they can use a Canvas versus just kind of a single chat thread? One of the initial learnings that we had is like a Canvas is not necessarily for everyone. And actually, this new product that we've released, we're intentionally calling it an OS because it's an operating system for all of your context. So of course, like the interface is a Canvas. Right? We see here our images, and you can bring in documents, and then make designs. But it's not a Canvas in the traditional sense where something like Figma and having a bunch of tools on one side.
00:09:59 · Alex Danilowicz, Aaron Epstein
[00:09:59] S1: Totally. So I'll actually show that where we've had a Canvas for a long time. What you just kinda saw is Canvas two point o. Mhmm. But we've had a Canvas for roughly two years now. And what we learned... Actually, we're hiring... By the way, we're hiring a designer. One of the reasons that we're hiring a designer is one of our issues that we've had is thinking through that initial onboarding experience. Almost like this progressive disclosure of, okay, when does it make sense for users to know that they can use a Canvas versus just kind of a single chat thread? One of the initial learnings that we had is like a Canvas is not necessarily for everyone. And actually, this new product that we've released, we're intentionally calling it an OS because it's an operating system for all of your context. So of course, like the interface is a Canvas. Right? We see here our images, and you can bring in documents, and then make designs. But it's not a Canvas in the traditional sense where something like Figma and having a bunch of tools on one side. [00:11:00] S0: Yeah. So it's it's more like you've you've got Canvas like artboards that you can get in there and you can customize. You also talked about front end and being able to see what it's like to actually experience the design that you're making and not just have these static files. Maybe can you show us something around that?