Y Combinator Startup Podcast
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?
00:11:00 · Aaron Epstein, Alex Danilowicz
[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? [00:11:18] S1: Cool. So, yeah, let's do another example here. One thing that is really, really fun for us is we do what we call Magic Patterns meetups all over the world. Mhmm. And I've been thinking about I wanna send our users postcards from these meetups. So let's take this from the top. So let's go ahead and add some context. So I have basically these pictures that I've pulled and all of these descriptions from our events that we hosted. So as an example, I was just in Colombia actually hosting what I called Magic Patterns Medellin, and we met some power users there. I learned that Magic Patterns was taught at a university, which is super cool. And I also have this prompt. Right? Where if we open this up here, this is a prompt that I just kinda came up with, like a rubber stamp travel notes field poster. And so what's cool is I can go ahead and just tell our agent, reference my prompt on the canvas, and then make postcards for every single city and image. [00:12:24] S0: Cool. So you've got images for Medellin, Singapore. You've got Statue Of Liberty, so New York, and then Toronto.
00:12:24 · Aaron Epstein, Alex Danilowicz
[00:12:24] S0: Cool. So you've got images for Medellin, Singapore. You've got Statue Of Liberty, so New York, and then Toronto. [00:12:31] S1: Exactly. Right. And notice how, like, the agent has all of the context that is on the the canvas already. Right? It automatically knows what is really in the in the file system Mhmm. And what's on this artboard here, and it can go ahead and then make make its updates. So what's cool here is we see it generated all four postcards at once. We can go ahead and just see a bigger version of this here. My prompt was basically telling it to make kind of like a stamp of the the image that that it had. And now we... Because we're on a canvas, I can go ahead and just grab kinda my description of our Singapore event. Right here, I have kinda just some random notes from when our meetup was. It was on May 17. And I can go ahead and select these two. They now make a design of a postcard that references the description thanking users for attending. And when this is done, of course, we can iterate on just the Singapore one specifically, and then apply all of these changes to all the cities at once, right, without having to redo it. [00:13:36] S0: And who are the people, within your team that are actually using this and creating these postcards? Because it seems like it it doesn't necessarily need to be designers. Right?