New Ways To Design With AI Tools
In a Nutshell
E Bufar designs end-to-end using voice input to Conductor and Paper Design, rapidly building custom tools, shaders, and modals to iterate until the output matches her vision. She demonstrates this with two projects: Paxel, which analyzes coding transcripts to surface personal patterns, and Sodazine and Startup School, where detailed context files and one-shot generation enable interactive sites, maps, and consistent branding. The key takeaway is that AI coding agents turn software into editable material, removing technical friction so creativity becomes the only limit.
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E Bufar, head of design at YC, now works almost exclusively in Conductor and Paper Design to complete projects end to end. For visual inspiration, she creates mood boards on Pinterest. She no longer types commands and instead uses voice input via Aqua, a YC company, which captures her stream of consciousness when she presses the function key to describe features she wants to build.
Paxel is an experiment designed to understand how people code with coding agents. The goal is to surface patterns, tricks, and insights from coding transcripts that would otherwise remain hidden in local machines. The product provides feedback through fun facts presented as cards, inspired by Spotify Wrapped, showing patterns such as preferred models, commit timing, use of plan mode, and most common prompts.
One card shows a user's biggest crash out, the moment of highest frustration with their agent, based on an idea from Jared Friedman. The first version operates in single-player mode until more transcripts are collected, at which point comparisons to other builders will become available.
Users run a terminal command that pulls transcripts from Claude and Cursor. The system analyzes the data and emails a report containing fun facts and detailed views of coding patterns, decision-making, strengths, and growth areas. The long-term vision is to make hidden coding transcripts visible and analyzable so developers can learn from their own and others' processes.
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