Designer & Designer

Prompts vs Pixels

Episode Summary

Part practical deep dive, part existential crisis, Joe and Brian provide Part 2 of our season opener "AI-ay-ay" and get tactical about the tools reshaping their workflows while wrestling with the bigger picture of our AI-obsessed industry. They dissect why every AI interface looks like the same damn chat box and explore how AI is simultaneously empowering designers while making parts of their craft obsolete. And it just wouldn't be Designer&Designer without grappling some sort of unsettling question. This time we ask, if AI makes everything faster, cheaper, and more efficient... what exactly are we rushing toward?

Episode Notes

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 in 2025

Connect with Joe & Brian

• Website: designer.fm
• Email: designer@designer.fm
• Please like, subscribe, and give us any feedback!

Outro music: In the Year 2525 by Zager & Evans