New Ways To Design With AI Tools

E Bufar discusses her modern design workflow, which has shifted almost exclusively to Conductor and paper design tools. Rather than typing, she uses Aqua (a Y Combinator company) to speak stream-of-consciousness feature requests directly to her computer via function key activation, which Claude then implements. This voice-first approach addresses her insight that she thinks faster than she types.

The first major project discussed is Paxel, an experiment designed to understand how people code with AI agents. Paxel analyzes coding transcripts from tools like Cursor and returns fun insights—inspired by Spotify Wrapped—about user patterns, favorite models, and coding habits. The landing page explicitly communicates this experimental purpose through interactive cards with micro-interactions and custom shader effects. E built a public modal tool allowing users to fine-tune dithering parameters in real-time. Notably, the site includes a dual-mode toggle: one version for human readers with rich visuals, and another markdown version optimized for AI agents to consume efficiently. The site also features a feature request form that functions as a prompt box; submissions automatically fire off agents that open pull requests for the YC team to review and merge.

For Sodazine (State-of-the-Art Zine), a project celebrating San Francisco in partnership with artists and writers, E deliberately avoided AI involvement in the physical zine's artwork and cover design to maintain intentionality and craft. However, she used AI extensively for the website. Her approach involved recording every project meeting and dumping full transcripts into a comprehensive soul.md file that served as the single source of truth, including a project manifesto. She then created a mood board from Pinterest images and asked Claude to generate 16 different website variations based on the mood board and detailed context. She built a custom glossary tool with bookmarking functionality to navigate these iterations—an example of "disposable design" that can be quickly created and discarded. The iterations revealed unexpected sophistication, such as Claude organically including the launch party date and time, designing a barcode for the physical zine, and creating an interactive San Francisco map. The final website features an anonymous map where users pin locations and share intimate memories of San Francisco moments, with a system to share submissions as downloadable PNG cards with cardinal coordinates.

For Startup School—a major Y Combinator event at Chase Center with 6,000+ attendees—E designed speaker announcement cards and event branding using paper.design shaders. She built automation tools in Claude: one to generate consistent speaker cards with pulled images and customizable text layouts, another to fine-tune shader parameters (graininess, edges, rotation, scale), and a third to create perfectly looping screen recordings by calculating exact start/stop pixels for seamless Instagram and Twitter loops. She also designed personalized digital tickets using the same shader system, rendering attendee names and cities. The consistent use of shader parameters across digital cards, social media, and large Chase Center screens demonstrates the power of AI-assisted design for brand consistency at scale.