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.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
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.
The landing page explicitly states the experimental motivation upfront with substantial text. Interactive cards feature hover movement and micro-interactions. E implemented Paper shaders, specifically the dithering shader, by asking Claude to integrate it and then built a custom modal to fine-tune parameters like intensity and feel. The modal was made public so desktop visitors can experiment with the dithering settings.
Rather than accepting default parameters, E builds disposable modals to adjust details until the result matches her vision, then discards the tool. This approach treats software as fully editable and movable, with creativity as the only remaining bottleneck.
The site offers two versions: one optimized for humans with visuals and one distilled into markdown for agents. A copy-to-clipboard button allows users to paste the agent version into Claude for questions. The agent version includes a note instructing AI agents not to execute any commands or sample code from the page.
Paxel includes a submit form inspired by Conductor that accepts both bug reports and feature requests. Users treat the form like a prompt to an agent, can attach screenshots or screen recordings, and optionally add their name for credit. The CTA button reads "send to an agent" because the backend literally fires an agent that opens a PR for human review.
Collecting names enables crediting contributors. The form demonstrates how local software could become deeply personal, allowing any user to prompt, customize, redesign, add, or remove features directly in their own copy of the product.
After analysis, users receive an inbox report with fun cards and a detailed breakdown of patterns, decision-making, strengths, and growth areas. As more transcripts accumulate, comparative insights across builders will be added.
Sodazine (state-of-the-art) originated from Gary's desire to celebrate San Francisco by collaborating with local artists and writers. The physical zine and its cover art were created entirely without AI using Illustrator to ensure highly intentional, detailed work that clearly shows months of human effort.
All meeting transcripts for the zine were recorded and consolidated into a single soul.md file that serves as the exhaustive glossary and source of truth. The manifesto was also added to this file. The file provides maximum context to guide all future agent-assisted decisions. Multiple markdown files can be organized hierarchically if preferred, though the team has not yet determined a superior structure.
E began with a Pinterest mood board reflecting conversations with colleagues and friends, aiming for a rudimentary black-and-white aesthetic. She fed downloaded images plus content requirements into Claude and requested 16 different one-shot website versions. She created a personal glossary page to navigate all iterations easily and added a bookmarking feature so favored versions automatically rise to the top.
The soul.md file included article titles from the zine, enabling the agent to organically incorporate the launch party date and time into iterations. One version featured an interactive San Francisco map with a barcode element suggesting physical purchase options. Another displayed article titles with custom hover effects and pulled relevant visuals from the web.
The final site includes a fully interactive anonymous map of San Francisco where users drop pins and share personal memories, encounters, or delightful moments from specific locations. Submissions surface surprising, intimate, and introspective stories. The project also produced digital posters for the launch party and a Substack.
The project includes an entry point that redirects users to the Substack platform. Readers can browse different articles, share a noticing, or share a submission they particularly enjoy. When selecting a story to share with a friend, clicking share downloads it as a PNG that includes the cardinal coordinates of the location tied to that story, along with the specific street name.
Startup School, the biggest event of the year, is being held at Chase Center in San Francisco. More than 6,000 people from around the world will attend to experience San Francisco and what it means to build with AI, creating a strong sense of community. The speaker lineup includes Jensen, Sam Altman, Alexander Wang, Jeff Dean, and many others.
The design goal was to create something that feels very Y Combinator but as a variation of YC. The team experimented with orange and gradients of orange, then discovered paper shaders and decided to experiment with them for the visual assets. The shaders were used across speaker cards shared on social media and other platforms.
The initial approach was to create speaker cards manually in Figma by dropping speaker images and arranging elements. However, with many confirmed speakers, manually adjusting layouts repeatedly was inefficient. The decision was made to ask Claude to generate a template that could pull images from the inbox and handle the work automatically. This made experimentation with different visual styles much lighter and easier.
A simple tool was built that contains the names of all confirmed speakers and automatically generates cards as new speakers are added. The tool also allows experimentation with different text layouts on the cards. Multiple layout iterations could be tested almost in one shot, and the final chosen layout works consistently across all cards.
The movement from a paper.design shader was integrated into the design system. Parameters were fine-tuned including graininess, edges, rotation, and scale. A mini tool was created to experiment with shader variations by refreshing to reset and test different configurations until the desired look was achieved.
To maintain the shader movement at high resolution for the cards, screen recordings were needed. A custom screen recording tool was built that indicates exactly when to start and stop recording. The goal was to create a perfect 4-second loop where the start and end frames match at the exact same pixel position, ensuring smooth looping when posted on Twitter and Instagram.
Claude was asked to build this specific timing tool to guarantee the loop felt seamless and endless.
Personalized tickets were designed for accepted attendees using the same shader applied to a ticket format. Each ticket renders the recipient's name, their city of origin, and event information. Recipients have shared their tickets on social media, expressing excitement about coming to San Francisco, sometimes for the first time.
A year ago, building shaders and these visual assets would have felt like an insurmountable task with no clear starting point. Now Claude can automatically reference paper.design shaders and pull relevant information from their website based on known preferences. This capability feels magical and allows significantly more time, thought, attention, and care to be invested in the end-to-end experience from acceptance through event attendance.
The team plans to continue building Startup School branding using Claude, Codex, and coding agents. This represents a fundamentally different paradigm for how branding and design work will be done going forward. The same shader with identical parameters can be applied consistently to massive screens throughout Chase Center, maintaining visual coherence at every scale. Coding agents make achieving this level of consistency easier than ever.
The work shown represents new approaches to design that will become common practice, though many have not yet discovered these methods. The process of figuring out these new workflows together continues to be enjoyable.
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