Prompts vs Pixels

Mentioned

• V0 by Vercel that generates front-end code
• Builder.io for creating UI flows from language prompts
• UXPilot for generating UI from specs
• Lovable for different design styles
• Perplexity as a tool that bypasses SEO spam
• Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?
• Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience
• 23:48 Brian says he didn’t do a great job unpacking the confusion and buzz around “agentic AI” and that many people conflate multi-shot prompts, agentic AI and AI agents. Most real world “agentic AI” today doesn’t exactly match the definition used in research papers around AI agents.
• 38:00 Great story of a UX designer using Figma’s MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server and Cursor to create functional code.
• 41:00 The Shape of AI | UX Patterns for Artificial Intelligence Design

Topics Discussed

• Large Language Models (LLMs) vs other AI technologies
• The rapid standardization of AI interface patterns
• AI tools in designers' current workflows
• Multi-shot prompts and agentic systems
• The tension between "prompts vs pixels" in product development
• How AI is changing the designer's role
• The new "industrial revolution" we're experiencing with AI

Pull Quotes

• "Most AI researchers believe that the AI models have already reached 100% scouring of the web, right? So anything that's public is probably in those foundational models, which means they're not really going to grow much in the next five years." –Brian
• "It will make the most basic patterns. It will pull the most basic stuff... But what it won't do is it won't make it interesting." –Joe
• "I was a little bit stunned by how quickly that locked into amber... that they're all chat-based interfaces. They all use magic wands or sparkles or something." –Joe
• "A society that prioritizes productivity is a society without imagination... if the goal is to just get the data as fast as possible to do things better and faster, you are saving time for what?" –Joe
• "This is a new enlightenment. This is a new industrial revolution... Everything is changing." –Joe

Other Resources on AI & Design

• The case against conversational interfaces
• Emerging UI/UX Patterns in Generative AI: A Visual Guide
• UX patterns for AI-powered experiences
• Emerging UX patterns in Generative AI experiences
• What I’ve learned from 18 mths of AI conversational UI design
• Generative AI UX Design Patterns
• Scarcity and Abundance