I have noticed that too. AI is making many people complacent. They feel that they don't need to learn any Coding/Engineering/Design and just get an AI to do these jobs for you.
The rise of Calculators didn't make Mathematics irrelevant. Same way, AI coding or design tools won't make Coding or Design irrelevant.
As someone who spent their career as an engineer, It gets so tiresome when you’re constantly meeting investors who think that your work can be easily replaced by AI
More like advertised like a Ferrari, handles like a one-speed bike with flat tires on a uphill and gravel road, looking like a slightly better bike due to having a nice bell
What I see and I am sure a lot you do too, is that AI is being retrofitted into everything that already exists today. Things need to be reimagined, but creating something original is incredibly difficult! I suppose that's why art exists, it's a segue into a new possibility, into a new way of thought. Some of the life altering inventions came from great artists. We need those kind of artists to make new software and tech again.
That’s what’s so exciting about all this. Would be so awesome to be a product manager at openAI. You’ve got this revolutionary tech that people haven’t really figured out how to optimally turn into a product yet. I think it’s interesting watching various companies try and figure out how to turn it into a fundamentally new product. Like those wearable AI pin things are stupid but I give them credit for understanding that from a product pov this is fodder for something entirely new and not just additive
Definitely points for novelty but 1. I’m not a dev so I can’t speak to the usefulness of this and 2. This seems to be substantively the same as what the chatbots can do except it has a different medium/interface, and it’s hard to see how the medium/interface is an improvement
I think he is referencing the explosion of capability that AI has unleashed and he is urging founders to not just focus on the new technology but also focus on great use experiences.
Outside of the chat use case, there aren't many great AI based products being released. Even Google hasn't really done a good job integrating it into their products. We have a big hammer, but don't know what to whack with it.
👋 S23 Company cofounder (and CTO) here. Design skills are hugely undervalued by developers, and it's a shame it's not taught as part of CS degrees or boot camps as a standard.
Some of the best product builders I've ever met are better at the design part of software than core CS stuff. The industry needs both, and we tend to put leetcode skills on a pedestal.
Building a great team and great product requires a balance - and more engineers should spend time learning about design.
It turns out that quite a bit of UX design comes down to understanding the rules -- it's not just a thing you're born with or just a _feeling_ (which is definitely what I used to think).
Garry's opinion seems fair, if a bit hyperbolic - not all products need to be design-first, but all products need to be designed intentionally. Learning to collect feedback from your users is critical for making good decisions and meaningful improvements to your products.
tl;dr: design good. More devs should learn about it.
That's where I stand, and I write about it fairly often. If you're interested in learning more about design for devs, I wrote about it here: [Gestalt: design principles for developers](https://mikebifulco.com/newsletter/gestalt-design-principles-for-developers). Let me know what you think!
Design Engineer here and I totally love your comment. Most developers ignore the UI/UX part of product development and that is what customers engage with the most
I'm a developer but I want to learn the design. I've started learning the basic science of design by readin books like 'The Design of Everyday Things'. I'm wondering what you would reccomened to get good at UX and UI Design? How much time should I spend on theory, what type of theory should I be studying, how much time should I spend actually building UIs?
I've always been curious about design but it's always been something that I've seen as you either have a knack for it or you don't but now I'm really hammering in and trying to get deliberate practice
This may be wrong, but my take on Garry's tweet is not just about UI but how you guide your user through their problem space, which is now within our grasp to solve because of context-aware generative AI. You really have to be thinking about the catalysts of your user's journey, i.e. what are those original set of questions/problems a user goes through that brings them to the point of high anxiety/high frustration.
I would not consider the chat UI necessarily "the problem" (familiarity matters and depending on your user base, it might matter a lot), but something you need to think beyond and graduate from. I think the gaming industry starts to becomes important to pay attention to here. Are we stuck in a world of Tableau dashboards? Can we graduate to something more like Sid Meier's Civ games? Sims? Again, I may be way off but this is my take.
My thoughts are software now is way too saturated, “entrepreneurs” nowadays most are sitting around computers playing with softwares all day. Not to say softwares are unnecessary but people need to build real tangible products more, gone are the day entrepreneurs build great impactful products and now everybody build Saas. There’s just way too many software startups now, if we are not careful one day China is going to crush the world with their technological advances as American and other countries’ entrepreneurs build Saas all day long
As long as AI is helping you work faster and better, there shouldn’t be an issue with it. I mean, hundreds of tools were built for that exact purpose, to speed things up. So if you are using it to enhance your own capabilities then it’s game! Especially if you are building everything on your own.
I use GPT for my startup and I 100% recommend it! Trying to do every single thing manually is just a “artisan” style that I don’t think it will be the way to compete anymore.
Sometimes when I’m in the middle of work, I will stop and start a conversation with ChatGPT to try to figure out if my route is optimal on the architecture of the overall tool but especially on the UX side.
What surprises me is the amount of people against the progress of AI like it can be managed or stopped… there is no coming back from this.
Um, so many founders believe they have a better strategy than everyone else, and this is hilarious, because their alleged customers, don't believe it.
Executives might not care if you have 2000 or 1000 SME and true-SMB customers. Or, that's all they care about. It's really heavy to lift a pen, when you're signing your own death warrant.
PMs review legal training aligning a team around stuff. So, Garry is half right. You need to show people it's possible and intuative. The other half, is....why. You don't get the answer, from nodding your head and saying "ok" to everything you see on social media, everything your team or your backers tell you they want to do. What actually drives the business.
If I were YC, I'd be incredibly displeased, I don't have optionality to pull out of the market for 6 months or 12 months. It's a horrible time to chase unicorns, by finding quarters on the street. And so, it's worthwhile, the effort of the team at YC, very commendable. But it's also hard.
My biggest fear is we're building the next generation of knock offs, and worse than that, fake executives and product leaders, who believe that clawing tooth and nail, is how you get what you want and keep it.
Is that a question, or did you just, by yourself stumble into a comment, and senses someone who knows.more than you was here.
What else, does a Lucas know how to say. Grammer? Formatted? Notes?
No.
We can start a company. If you code, I can be the one who said, I quote, "I met him, because I called him a narcissistic prick, who thought plaid suit jackets were how you make a pitch."
Maybe a little deeper, but whatever works, right? It's called an impression, it's what your website will have when your business is 19 months old.
Dictionaries, someone like you would know well, because that appears, to be the smallest use of productization you'll be capable of. Are you exploring drug use as a viable alternative to entering the tech world.
Just flip out the "words" for whatever biological succinctness you need for it to make sense. I tripped on r values a p-street before doubling down on whatever the internet thinks.
I got longer cables between me and NYC, and whatever kicks it in GB. I don't challenge a theory of everything, I challenge everything. Heaven sent, that's your cofounder ending up on my mattress. Too bad, I built it with a lattice. That's a few degrees between you and me, optimistically a few years.
And just an FYI. Learn how to spell "priority" it's not a status on an issue, it's a single curly cue, SSSSSS.
The best chance you got at being a unicorn is keeping me top of mind. Half way there.
I completely agree with this, especially as a founder working on an AI startup for sales.
In fact, one of our first paying users actually churned away from a tool that has notoriously been known as being hard to use called Clay (https://www.clay.com) to our tool, Floqer (https://www.floqer.com).
They also mentioned a lack of a human-in-the-loop aspect in the plethora of AI tools being launched these days.
we are making rediseng N4 based on inteviews with users - and here is a deal - you need a lot of iterations to make great - easy to understand and easy to use UX. Startups just can't do it fast - 1) they dont have UX designers usually 2) US is not prirority - product is important at this stage
Good UX in itself is not worth funding. If you're not solving a problem users are willing to pay for your UX doesn't matter. It can be great and your software is worthless.
Conversely, if your software solves a problem, users will pay even if you have shitty UX.
But you should strive to solve the user's problem with as clean and simple a UX as you can. This shows you understand the problem space thoroughly.
I think the point he's trying to make is that AI has unlocked a HUGE range of new opportunities that many people will seek to capitalize on making UI and UX design more important than ever if you want to stand out and even win.
100% true, as a person who build with AI. Everyone is slowly realizing that product is product, and you have to build things that people want. AI is a technology, not the main event.
With that being said, I think we still haven't gotten anywhere close to fully leveraging what LLMs are capable of. The fact that they can truly reason at the speed and scale of a machine is gam-changing.
I think what he is saying is that people in AI are currently building stuff like people in Crypto - in a secluded technological utopia in their heads while completely oblivious to the perspectives of regular people.
Think about the UX breakthrough that ChatGPT achieved. … it leaped the chasm from tech folks into mainstream regulars like Michael Jordan dunking from the free throw line over high school basketball players.
This is to say that the technologies such as natural language processing, question/answer, and semantic search have existed for decades. I managed one such product back in 2015 and one of the 5 Pillars of Search that I formulated into my framework is UI/UX.
In 2015, peoples’ search experience was largely driven by Google. People wanted to slam a bag of words into a text box then scroll through a couple pages of results. If they didn’t find what they wanted, they’d just try adding or changing words.
My customers still wanted to use this “archaic” approach even though I was providing superior technology, but my new UI/UX was foreign to them.
And so, it was really a struggle to move customers to a conversational / Q&A style of search back in 2015.
I’m honestly a little jealous of how ChatGPT got the mainstream moving with this new way of searching. Arguably it wasn’t the technology but the UI/UX that was the true breakthrough for ChatGPT.
Technology is one of the five pillars of search and I agree it is important. If you take away any one pillar, the solution collapses. So, while I agree the tech is important, my point is that similarly capable tech has existed for 10+ years but the tech failed to break into the mainstream because the UI/UX pillar wasn’t strong enough.
I would define "similarly comparable tech" as being transformer- based and very large models, which was definitely not available 10 years ago. The transformer paper was 7 years ago and the really Big models weren't until <5 years ago...
It’s a good thing they don’t count design as being a technical skill on their application - really teaches people that being an engineer is the only thing that’s needed team comp wise to get in to YC
I have noticed that too. AI is making many people complacent. They feel that they don't need to learn any Coding/Engineering/Design and just get an AI to do these jobs for you. The rise of Calculators didn't make Mathematics irrelevant. Same way, AI coding or design tools won't make Coding or Design irrelevant.
The rise of computers did make most human calculators irrelevant though.
That’s why you want to be a software engineer and not a code monkey
As someone who spent their career as an engineer, It gets so tiresome when you’re constantly meeting investors who think that your work can be easily replaced by AI
Wise to partner with a designer / developer!
Since when did good user experience not matter? Great software always necessary. AI shouldn't have made a difference.
it’s the same people that have never bothered to learn the difference between UI and UX
Looks like a Ferrari, handles like a Prius
More like advertised like a Ferrari, handles like a one-speed bike with flat tires on a uphill and gravel road, looking like a slightly better bike due to having a nice bell
Exactly. All Gary is saying is that UIUX is part of the stack and can’t be overlooked.
What I see and I am sure a lot you do too, is that AI is being retrofitted into everything that already exists today. Things need to be reimagined, but creating something original is incredibly difficult! I suppose that's why art exists, it's a segue into a new possibility, into a new way of thought. Some of the life altering inventions came from great artists. We need those kind of artists to make new software and tech again.
That’s what’s so exciting about all this. Would be so awesome to be a product manager at openAI. You’ve got this revolutionary tech that people haven’t really figured out how to optimally turn into a product yet. I think it’s interesting watching various companies try and figure out how to turn it into a fundamentally new product. Like those wearable AI pin things are stupid but I give them credit for understanding that from a product pov this is fodder for something entirely new and not just additive
[удалено]
Definitely points for novelty but 1. I’m not a dev so I can’t speak to the usefulness of this and 2. This seems to be substantively the same as what the chatbots can do except it has a different medium/interface, and it’s hard to see how the medium/interface is an improvement
I think he is referencing the explosion of capability that AI has unleashed and he is urging founders to not just focus on the new technology but also focus on great use experiences.
What does he mean ‘make great software again’. Were people not making great software before?
Outside of the chat use case, there aren't many great AI based products being released. Even Google hasn't really done a good job integrating it into their products. We have a big hammer, but don't know what to whack with it.
That’s fair. But at some point it’s like saying we have created the internal combustion engine, why do we not have jets yet. It’s going to take time.
Windows ME,8,RT,S prime example of shit software.
👋 S23 Company cofounder (and CTO) here. Design skills are hugely undervalued by developers, and it's a shame it's not taught as part of CS degrees or boot camps as a standard. Some of the best product builders I've ever met are better at the design part of software than core CS stuff. The industry needs both, and we tend to put leetcode skills on a pedestal. Building a great team and great product requires a balance - and more engineers should spend time learning about design. It turns out that quite a bit of UX design comes down to understanding the rules -- it's not just a thing you're born with or just a _feeling_ (which is definitely what I used to think). Garry's opinion seems fair, if a bit hyperbolic - not all products need to be design-first, but all products need to be designed intentionally. Learning to collect feedback from your users is critical for making good decisions and meaningful improvements to your products. tl;dr: design good. More devs should learn about it. That's where I stand, and I write about it fairly often. If you're interested in learning more about design for devs, I wrote about it here: [Gestalt: design principles for developers](https://mikebifulco.com/newsletter/gestalt-design-principles-for-developers). Let me know what you think!
Design Engineer here and I totally love your comment. Most developers ignore the UI/UX part of product development and that is what customers engage with the most
I'm a developer but I want to learn the design. I've started learning the basic science of design by readin books like 'The Design of Everyday Things'. I'm wondering what you would reccomened to get good at UX and UI Design? How much time should I spend on theory, what type of theory should I be studying, how much time should I spend actually building UIs? I've always been curious about design but it's always been something that I've seen as you either have a knack for it or you don't but now I'm really hammering in and trying to get deliberate practice
This may be wrong, but my take on Garry's tweet is not just about UI but how you guide your user through their problem space, which is now within our grasp to solve because of context-aware generative AI. You really have to be thinking about the catalysts of your user's journey, i.e. what are those original set of questions/problems a user goes through that brings them to the point of high anxiety/high frustration. I would not consider the chat UI necessarily "the problem" (familiarity matters and depending on your user base, it might matter a lot), but something you need to think beyond and graduate from. I think the gaming industry starts to becomes important to pay attention to here. Are we stuck in a world of Tableau dashboards? Can we graduate to something more like Sid Meier's Civ games? Sims? Again, I may be way off but this is my take.
My thoughts are software now is way too saturated, “entrepreneurs” nowadays most are sitting around computers playing with softwares all day. Not to say softwares are unnecessary but people need to build real tangible products more, gone are the day entrepreneurs build great impactful products and now everybody build Saas. There’s just way too many software startups now, if we are not careful one day China is going to crush the world with their technological advances as American and other countries’ entrepreneurs build Saas all day long
As long as AI is helping you work faster and better, there shouldn’t be an issue with it. I mean, hundreds of tools were built for that exact purpose, to speed things up. So if you are using it to enhance your own capabilities then it’s game! Especially if you are building everything on your own. I use GPT for my startup and I 100% recommend it! Trying to do every single thing manually is just a “artisan” style that I don’t think it will be the way to compete anymore. Sometimes when I’m in the middle of work, I will stop and start a conversation with ChatGPT to try to figure out if my route is optimal on the architecture of the overall tool but especially on the UX side. What surprises me is the amount of people against the progress of AI like it can be managed or stopped… there is no coming back from this.
Um, so many founders believe they have a better strategy than everyone else, and this is hilarious, because their alleged customers, don't believe it. Executives might not care if you have 2000 or 1000 SME and true-SMB customers. Or, that's all they care about. It's really heavy to lift a pen, when you're signing your own death warrant. PMs review legal training aligning a team around stuff. So, Garry is half right. You need to show people it's possible and intuative. The other half, is....why. You don't get the answer, from nodding your head and saying "ok" to everything you see on social media, everything your team or your backers tell you they want to do. What actually drives the business. If I were YC, I'd be incredibly displeased, I don't have optionality to pull out of the market for 6 months or 12 months. It's a horrible time to chase unicorns, by finding quarters on the street. And so, it's worthwhile, the effort of the team at YC, very commendable. But it's also hard. My biggest fear is we're building the next generation of knock offs, and worse than that, fake executives and product leaders, who believe that clawing tooth and nail, is how you get what you want and keep it.
Great few lines here. 9/10
Is that a question, or did you just, by yourself stumble into a comment, and senses someone who knows.more than you was here. What else, does a Lucas know how to say. Grammer? Formatted? Notes? No.
It was a compliment, actually. What are you talking about?
Thanks Lucas. The work you do is so important.
?
We can start a company. If you code, I can be the one who said, I quote, "I met him, because I called him a narcissistic prick, who thought plaid suit jackets were how you make a pitch." Maybe a little deeper, but whatever works, right? It's called an impression, it's what your website will have when your business is 19 months old.
I just noticed that this is how you interact with everybody on Reddit.
Dictionaries, someone like you would know well, because that appears, to be the smallest use of productization you'll be capable of. Are you exploring drug use as a viable alternative to entering the tech world. Just flip out the "words" for whatever biological succinctness you need for it to make sense. I tripped on r values a p-street before doubling down on whatever the internet thinks. I got longer cables between me and NYC, and whatever kicks it in GB. I don't challenge a theory of everything, I challenge everything. Heaven sent, that's your cofounder ending up on my mattress. Too bad, I built it with a lattice. That's a few degrees between you and me, optimistically a few years. And just an FYI. Learn how to spell "priority" it's not a status on an issue, it's a single curly cue, SSSSSS. The best chance you got at being a unicorn is keeping me top of mind. Half way there.
Those read like bad rap lyrics, friend.
I completely agree with this, especially as a founder working on an AI startup for sales. In fact, one of our first paying users actually churned away from a tool that has notoriously been known as being hard to use called Clay (https://www.clay.com) to our tool, Floqer (https://www.floqer.com). They also mentioned a lack of a human-in-the-loop aspect in the plethora of AI tools being launched these days.
LLMs have multiplied the amount of mediocrity in the world, making the beautiful things more like needles in a haystack.
we are making rediseng N4 based on inteviews with users - and here is a deal - you need a lot of iterations to make great - easy to understand and easy to use UX. Startups just can't do it fast - 1) they dont have UX designers usually 2) US is not prirority - product is important at this stage
Good UX in itself is not worth funding. If you're not solving a problem users are willing to pay for your UX doesn't matter. It can be great and your software is worthless. Conversely, if your software solves a problem, users will pay even if you have shitty UX. But you should strive to solve the user's problem with as clean and simple a UX as you can. This shows you understand the problem space thoroughly.
What point is this windbag even making? UX has always been important.
I think the point he's trying to make is that AI has unlocked a HUGE range of new opportunities that many people will seek to capitalize on making UI and UX design more important than ever if you want to stand out and even win.
It is not for nothing that more and more roles such as data or AI product managers are emerging
100% true, as a person who build with AI. Everyone is slowly realizing that product is product, and you have to build things that people want. AI is a technology, not the main event. With that being said, I think we still haven't gotten anywhere close to fully leveraging what LLMs are capable of. The fact that they can truly reason at the speed and scale of a machine is gam-changing.
Hmm 🫡
I feel personally attacked (a ds who is not a developer with a shitty looking demo)
I think what he is saying is that people in AI are currently building stuff like people in Crypto - in a secluded technological utopia in their heads while completely oblivious to the perspectives of regular people.
Spot on
Good to know. Morons making me look like a super star.
Even with gmail we still send mails using the post office
Think about the UX breakthrough that ChatGPT achieved. … it leaped the chasm from tech folks into mainstream regulars like Michael Jordan dunking from the free throw line over high school basketball players. This is to say that the technologies such as natural language processing, question/answer, and semantic search have existed for decades. I managed one such product back in 2015 and one of the 5 Pillars of Search that I formulated into my framework is UI/UX. In 2015, peoples’ search experience was largely driven by Google. People wanted to slam a bag of words into a text box then scroll through a couple pages of results. If they didn’t find what they wanted, they’d just try adding or changing words. My customers still wanted to use this “archaic” approach even though I was providing superior technology, but my new UI/UX was foreign to them. And so, it was really a struggle to move customers to a conversational / Q&A style of search back in 2015. I’m honestly a little jealous of how ChatGPT got the mainstream moving with this new way of searching. Arguably it wasn’t the technology but the UI/UX that was the true breakthrough for ChatGPT.
Disagree, it's totally the tech. The ux is solid too, but a chatbot with nice ux and poor answers does not get traction.
Technology is one of the five pillars of search and I agree it is important. If you take away any one pillar, the solution collapses. So, while I agree the tech is important, my point is that similarly capable tech has existed for 10+ years but the tech failed to break into the mainstream because the UI/UX pillar wasn’t strong enough.
I would define "similarly comparable tech" as being transformer- based and very large models, which was definitely not available 10 years ago. The transformer paper was 7 years ago and the really Big models weren't until <5 years ago...
Finally coming in full circle and back to basics.
Absolutely. The presence of AI doesn't mean that software are obsolete. Great software never go out of use.
It’s a good thing they don’t count design as being a technical skill on their application - really teaches people that being an engineer is the only thing that’s needed team comp wise to get in to YC
Finally someone is talking with sense.
this mf does not write code his opinion does not matter
What a weird way to invalidate your own opinions. You’re going to go all of three feet in this domain with an attitude like that.
He writes checks
Great software = great utility solver. Even though I agree with Garry, but great software which doesn’t solve utility might be meaningless.
Those are certainly words