YouSaid · the spoken record

John Maeda

lines on the record: 64
first: 2026-06-24
most recent: 2026-06-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“What I'm just super, super excited to see what will happen once we've raised the floor and what insane, crazy experiences will build afterwards and design afterwards. That's the kind of future that I want as opposed to the bleak future where everything looks same and people feel like they've surrendered themselves. So I really am excited about that new era of craft. That's something I'm working towards.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After picking up GitHub design, I realized how so many people grew up at GitHub design who were computational designers slash engineers. There's Max at Notion, who used to lead design at GitHub. There's all the Brussel people. They're all over the place. And I was asked to somehow bring back the franchise. And so I'm excited because Paul's work represents that kind of seminal design history-infused approach that can really make it easier for more engineers to design reliably and also more designers to be able to reach for the skies.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love that. Well, you know, we'll record this pod again in a year, and we'll see if all of the software that's been created through the new Git product with assistance by Impeccable turns out to be more thoughtful and in that upper 10%. And that would be a fun outcome to see.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's also Another Steve Jobs sort of anecdotal, right? Where he's very well known, or he was very well known for shutting down people just to test him. So the conviction is both on the leader and on employee, interestingly, because they often somebody would walk into the room with Steve and Steve would just test them and say, like, you know, I think that's a stupid idea. Even though he might think that's a really great idea, but just to test him, right? And to see, like, no, dude, religious cave and walk out of the room? Or will they actually double down? Would they like, no, no, no, Steve? I think you're wrong, right? And once he got... And I think that's fascinating. So, I think what John said is really interesting. I think it goes both ways.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, on that topic, I had a, I was having dinner last week. You know, Jay Perrick is my boss, formerly the MEDA. He's used this word that I hadn't heard in a while, which is conviction. And I think it's such a great word because someone, a leader with quote unquote taste has conviction. But it's not just like, you know, designing conviction. It's not just businessy conviction. It's not just engineering conviction. It's that combination in the leader when they have conviction. It is a bet, but it's a bet aimed at the global maximum, not the local maximum. And so I would say leaders that are doing that global maximum conviction make a huge difference. And that's why product leaders, again, to embarrass Paul. I think Paul shot for a global maximum for design automation, and he hasn't given up yet. And that's a beautiful thing.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What you see once they see the type of future that you want to create, then you're on the same page. Now, that's way easier said than done. It's, I think, an art form to start with something that they need. And then subtly shift in that conversation towards something that you both might want in the future. I know that's maybe a bit abstract.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a tough one because certainly I've failed many, many times on this one. And I've developed on strategies, but oftentimes it's about getting a leader into the right mindset to make a decision that I would make. What I mean by that is, and John is right. I mean, if you have a lead who's mostly worked on economic outcomes, for example, during that week, right? Or mostly focus on performance. Ultimately, I think it's your job to present to them in a way that makes them dream the way you're dreaming about the future. And that's something that I learned the hard way over and over and over. You have to bring them along to where you want to go and kind of get them on the same emotional journey. Maybe that's the right way to frame it. And I think once they see”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's absolutely fascinating. Paul, how do you think maybe advice for our design engineers in the room, how have you in the past effectively kind of communicated the value of an instinct versus a deadline or even another instinct which may be less informable?”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my gosh. So the Macintosh quickra had this routine built upon this idea of regions. Everyone had polygons. The Mac had regions based on pixel shapes, which you could like do logical set or and. And so things like flood fill were super duper optimized for speed. So again, great APIs are not just shape, but performance.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's all about the leader, right? You mentioned Steve Job, so unique combination of design, business, technical sense. That's very rare. And I want to go back to Paul Step and not to embarrass him again. So what's interesting about impeccable is the design is very interesting from the API perspective. And Bill Atkinson, the engineer who recently passed away who worked on the Macintosh, specifically people may know this thing called QuickDraw, which was Apple's graphics library. Photoshop happened because of the design of QuickDraw's API. It was impossible for there to be a Windows version of Photoshop because it didn't have the same API shape and direct X. So I would argue that Paul design engineers are able to design the shape of the APIs really well so they can work with agents as well as Cow with humans.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating. Here's a comment from your recent blog, Jhanna, that I think I'll read. So the harp truth is that in rooms where decisions actually happen, taste is a whisper and velocity is a megaphone. It's almost impossible to defend a design nuance or instinct against a looming deadline. Engineering isn't the villain here, incentives are. We build organizations that reward the measurable over the meaningful. Gree, disagree? How do you see that show up in the rooms that you're in?”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the European sense came from royalty and the desire to be distinctive. I've got fur, I've got gold, I've got emerald, I'm important. You're less important because they were working with scarce materials. I think what's interesting about this era is that this idea of taste doesn't fit when all the materials available to everyone.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Taste is always cultural, and different cultures have quote unquote higher taste, specifically because they've usually been around longer. They've had the material around longer, and therefore they've had maturity. For instance, if you go to Denmark and you sit in a furniture, any type of furniture, like chair or sofa or table, you're like, wow, this is nice stuff. We walk around the US. It's like, I mean, I'm sorry, but not that great sometimes because the US, we invented the styrofoam plate, for instance. You go to Japan, you know, centuries evolved approaches to raw materials. And not only that, scarcity of material. When raw material is scarce, we tend to make it more precious and design things well, taste emerges through scarcity. The last point on this is we have to remember that design”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's really interesting. If you sort of substitute the word taste for humanity, it sort of carries the same meaning, perhaps even a powerful, more powerful way. John, do you think taste is innate or is it something that's cultivated?”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recreated or spread to lots of lots of different instances. And so I think can the miles be tasteful? Yeah, they can design tasteful things. But I also still think that something that has a human viewpoint goes far beyond.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think DiAzse is a little bit more complicated in saying yes or no. I think these models have millions of definitions of taste. They are trained on so many different interpretations of taste. But one thing that is very useful to know and think about is that LLMs have been trained on the output of humanity, not on the input. So what led to a design decision is not something that the LLMs know. So it's an approximation of taste, I would say, for a certain type of audience at a certain time. So you can get pretty far if you know what you're asking for. But then the question is whose taste is it? Oftentimes taste is rare and human and I think the way we talk about taste when we talk to humans, it's not something that can be easily”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what is the role of human intent and taste more broadly in these products we're creating? I think it's an interesting question because right now everybody's trying to solve or figure out whether models, whether LLMs have taste, as well as diffusion models.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so now you kind of surrendered yourself to the process. And there was a great conversation with a professor from Harbard and a bunch of others in a recent conference that I was at where they touched on how students are now working differently and how that is becoming a problem. So anyway, I think cognitive delegation is great. I think delegating to the model is great. But preserving that point of view, making sure that you're still the one driving is also really important. And I want you working with Impeccable to be the sort of game that back and forth where you're both active collaborators. So Paul, question for you on taste. Right now, automating things away, goals and loops, multi-agent orchestration, that's what everybody is talking about. But the question that nobody seems to be asking is where does it all lead? Are we sort of, you know, as you said, surrendering human intent?”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what if I let Google Maps decide where I want to go to? Now I kind of like cognitive surrender to the application. And I think that's very true for LMs if you're not careful. Like with LLMs, oftentimes LMs, for instance, plan mode, right? Sounds like a good idea, you prompt something, and then it creates a beautiful plan. And then it's eight pages long. You're not going to read through that plan, right? I mean, you're going to scroll through that plan and skim it. It's like, I guess the model knows what it's doing. And then you just click OK.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prompted that way, to be honest. I always wanted to get more out of models by having it test me and challenge me and sort of teach me new concepts. And there's some cool skills out there like Matt's grill with Doc Skill, for instance. But impeccable does that in some ways too. So I do think there's a lot of opportunity in that there, and that excites me. I think that really touches on a topic that is dear to my heart and was part of a lot of discussions that I was in recently and that's cognitive surrender versus cognitive delegation. I don't know if you heard those terms, but really cognitive delegation is, you know, I'm using Google Maps, right? And Google Maps tells me where I can go as quickly as possible, right? I mean, I'm going to route my way to something.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paul, do you think there's an opportunity to start to shape the design mind through something like impeccable? Because it feels like it touches on a part of the solution that no other design tool does That's a great question. I think for sure it can. And I think it can shape, ironically or interestingly, both the design and the engineering mind. So I've had people walk up to me and say, like, well, we're now using impeccable as a default thing that we installed on all of our engineers and designers' computers. So why? Interesting. And because they now communicate much better after using it. And I thought I was really interesting, like engineers are using design language more. Designers use engineering language more because the tools by using this careful vocabulary and approach actually teach you what works, what doesn't give you the language to express what you want and what you don't want. And so I do think there's a teaching moment here. And I learned something by working with models all the time.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lives in that community, and I felt it would have to surface through in the software industry. But as a long time proponent of a computer programming for artists and designers, whether through processing or scratch, it was too hard for those people to engage. But now that floor of getting in has been lowered, everyone's coming in. It's a really great time right now. It's also very confusing. So that's why Paul's Paul's approach is unique in that it's high quality and high thought-based, which gives hope for more people to not choose the wrong solution.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a hell of a prediction. But no, I mean, that's something I learned by working with non-computer-based designers and artists when I led Redown School Design. That was after a career at MIT, where was all engineering, and then back to the handmade. And I was struck by how much human emotion, human pride,”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I love that. Actually, John, this is a good moment too. I want to read a quote This is you, Forbes 2010, which is the software industry is poised to embrace its craft heritage. By 2020, software will return to a cottage industry with bespoke apps made by many. We will discover the value of authorship. I mean, it seems like you might have been a few years early in your prediction, but it seems like we're getting there now. I mean, is that how you see the world playing out many more small apps that are all sort of more unique and opinionated?”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I may add to that, the thing that I feel over and over is that the reason why someone's willing to pay that much more for that bespoke better thing is they're paying for human trust and accountability. So for brands and products where people demand that level of like, can I trust this, that human ability, that human smell can become even more valuable than ever before?”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's really, really interesting. I mean, one of the things I believe Paul and I have spoken about this, John, is that we're going to have a lot more products with small but still compelling markets. You know, the million dollar TAM products, the $100,000 TAM products, because they were economically infeasible before. So we can sort of imagine a world where it's more of a digital mainstream that Can or a digital homesteading that can support a product and they have smaller scale but be more opinionated and be that last 10%”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like right now we're just making it easier for more people to produce average and above average work, which is the lesson of task-based automation. But those people who are dying for the creativity last, it'll always remain there. Only problem, the customer base will be smaller for people who are in that. It's like, do we know letterpress, letterpress printing? Oh my gosh, I love it. So it's that market mechanics.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really interesting. John, do you view instinct versus tooling? Well, as Paul was saying, and thanks for all these questions, I don't think about these meta questions a lot in my job. Well, first off, the vision models don't really see the way we see. And there's not enough training data to help a vision model think like a designer can see because there's so many dimensions in the latent space of a visual mind still, create a visual mind versus looking for license plates and more punctual things. I think that also the people, number of people who will raise the ceiling will not be a high number. And it won't be that valuable in the mass market. So I think it'll never be automated. And that's good news for people who want to stay in the craft of this kind of work.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To just one shot a quick song, but now it expanded very much into real music production. There are producers using it for all sorts of things now. They've built a whole studio around it, and they are really trying to push sort of the last 20% now, which is interesting. So they went through a big shift there. So I think that will happen more and more. I think right now it's still quite manual.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gemini does a little bit more than that, it samples frames on a video with sort of like one frame per second. But even that doesn't really give you the full picture. So it's still really, really limited. So there are areas of design like motion that are still super limited to what we can do today. But I also think the bigger problem is that it's not that we can't build tools to accelerate those things. I think we totally can. It's just that we haven't yet. I think there's a lot of tools that can be built, can be explored here in the space that really target craftsmen that want to go beyond, that really want to raise the ceiling. So I think right now it's a pretty barren landscape for tools that really push the envelope. I would say Suno is actually a great example of something that started for beginners and sort of vibe sound designers.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say it's probably a combination of the two. I think there's definitely a lot you can do with manual labor and manual craft that you still can't do with AI today or with current tooling, I would say. I think some CSS that I still manually write because the agents aren't good enough for edit yet. But that's usually things like motion. Right now there's no good feedback loop for motion. I've built the shader library in the past. And I had this one shader that was animating rain upwards after working with the model for a bit. And it's not the model's fault. The model just take screenshots and it's like, well, I guess that looks like Rain. But it doesn't understand temporal resolution.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paul, the design of impeccable is example to me of great sort of computational craft for people who understand how to use manipulations of agents and code. So that's why another thing I admired about your work. It's very computational. Really interesting, but is it an instinct problem then in terms of raising the ceiling, or is it a tooling problem, or is it both? Because if you said, you know, John, you said the brain isn't quite shaped the right way, you know, but we also have a tooling gap. So how much of it is instinct? How much of it is tools?”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's actually a good point, if I can respond to that out real quick. I think a great example would be API design and also like CLI design to your point, right? Do you mention dash dash help? But I'm hearing this over and over and I agree with it. Agents themselves are not really good at designing those interfaces yet. So they're not really good at designing API interfaces, designing CLIs. And that's kind of ironic because they're the user for them now. I do think that's right. I do think information architecture is another great example, right? It's a certain type of designer that's very good at crafting a good navigation. And they have to think differently. Yeah, absolutely.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“1800s when machines took over, humans developed this next level of craft. And so that will occur. And I think tools like how Paul is thinking of can enable that. At the same time, from a functional perspective, there's so much runway on the AX side that I believe that primarily visual design thinkers will be able to crack that faster because there's so many gnarly problems in it that an average engineering mind will not be the right shaped mind, I believe.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're both interesting. On the agentic topic where my mind goes is Will agents value aesthetics? Will they have their own definition? Because you could argue that something that is aesthetic or appears to be high quality, there's information in that that we as humans value. We make decisions, at least in part accordingly. What will be the analog for agents, if anything, at all? I don't know. John, what do you think? Speed, clarity, things that and verbosity and all the edge cases. So the best example I like is the one of you have to have a really good dash dash help. You have to have great error messages. But Paul is correct in that the ceiling raising can occur once we can wick away all the generic good quality design. And that's going to be extremely exciting. It echoes the era of the arts and crafts movement of the late.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's the moment for these people right now to shine that's one of my theories. I think the craftsman can Of grasp the last 10%, 20%, and really put a unique spin on something, I think that's also really interesting. So I do subscribe to AX, but I think there's also that next level human experience that I'm very excited about.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tools at all also cater to that. So, kind of like both ends of the spectrum. But I do think that the world is shifting towards higher-end experiences. The audience is demanding more too. That's the interesting, right? Like if everything looks relatively polished and clean, if we're raising the floor and you have a claw design website that looks claw design, but it's a legit website, right? It's a good enough website to get the job done, then the only differentiator would be whatever we craft on top of that. And I always thought that was very interesting. I spent a lot of time, like many of my design engineer friends. We spent a lot of time crafting something really unique and particular and sort of like, I don't know, like a slider that is beautifully animated, right? But oftentimes that work would drown. That work would not be seen by higher ups who have completely different business.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is shifting towards higher level work, right? So, of the last 20% of what makes something unique. And it's interesting. I mean, we've seen so many AI startups that are trying to enable creative work, whether it's music or video or whatever. But we haven't really seen the next Hayaw Miyazaki from runway or some other video startup. We haven't really seen, I think it's for fair to say. I don't think we have seen a music AI startups next, I don't know, Billy Eilish or copplayer. And why is that? I think a lot of focus right now is raising the floor. And going back to that, I think that raising the ceiling, I think there's too little time spent on that specifically. And I'm really excited about it. So I want to build.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's true. I think there is a whole area of design here. I also think you're probably right with the evalz. And the interesting thing with AX is that oftentimes here you're designing for a different audience and that's the agent, right? As opposed to the human. I think there's, I guess my viewpoint is that that area of design will be increasingly important. I also think there's still the area of human-centric design as well. And I think, I mean, to the point that we made at the very beginning,”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time one of the top design firms in the world. Metadesign speaks to the fact that design can either be the application of craft or the abstraction of craft. And so I think of the abstraction of craft is at the moment, what is the best way to design things? There was a time where being a design craftsman meant you could take a picture of Helvetica, cut it with Xacto knife, put rubber cement on the back, and you were amazing. We moved to different higher level primitives of the page, etc. with desktop publishing. Now, I think we're going to move even more meta. And so it means that designers are closer to programmers, but programmers of interaction. And I think Paul probably, he subconsciously is working in this way when we talk about Ebals, Paul. Evals live in latent space construction as literal metadesign.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, the thing that every designer knows eventually is that, and actually there was a famous typographer Eric Speakerman, who designed a very popular sans serif typius called Meta. This is before Meta became a company name. And his company in San Francisco was called Meta Design.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is the world of robots.text. It's loms.text. It's command line-help. It's a world where we're designing for authentic affordances instead of just visual affordances. That forced multiplication will occur once we can retire more of UX, I believe. But it'll require this sort of surge of automated design solutions that cover 80% of those cases. So 20% can be spent by real humans, but the humans will move on to AX, I believe.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, as Paul was describing, I think we're in this era because you can see all the new model companies that are building designer models or visual design models, whatever. We're at this era where design will be further commoditized and automated so that a new kind of design emerges. I think that's what is the next wave that'll happen because of this. And the design and tech report I give every year for Southwest Southwest. I've been pushing moving from UX to AX, a Gentic experience. And Agentic experience is non-visual.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've created a theme framework, a theme roller kind of thing, and the default theme was orange. I don't know why orange. I'm not sure why you picked orange at the time, but I colored the whole web orange overnight and I learned my lesson.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Randomness to actually steer it into completely different space of the latent space. I do it with colors. I do it with fonts. I do have a bunch of different things to create some sort of uniqueness. And there'll be more there that I'm going to do, but I really do want to make sure that not everything ends up looking the same. I ended up doing that before, by the way. The reason why purple gradients, do you know the reason why purple gradients are purple gradients? Tailwind. So tailwind's default theme Has pur Because of the default theme, the perplex gradients were introduced everywhere. That's at least the common saying right now, the common theory. And ironically, I was at fault of coloring the web orange before. And the reason why is because when I started jQuery UI,”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just picks the next best thing. And so ultimately, slop is a moving target, and every time you move to another part of the latent space and everybody adopts it, you guys are kind of like algorithmic Uniclo or Ikea or something, right? And now that's not necessarily bad. It doesn't mean the design is bad. It just means the design is not unique. And you want uniqueness if you're building something like a landing page that attracts people's attention. What I've tried to do with Impeccable, and I'm constantly updating those rules, but what I try to do with Impeccable is to build these types of anti-attractors. For example, instead of just going to a different font to the overused fonts, it actually tries to create a random seed that picks something based on a small user interview with you and maybe even some scripts that run that create.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. You know, that's already happening. That's the really interesting thing. So in 2022, 2023, everybody thought AI slop was purple gradients. And to be honest, the models aren't really doing that anymore. The models aren't producing purple gradients anymore. I mean, maybe like, you know, cheap models. But overall, they don't. I think the world has moved on to beige backgrounds, tinted backgrounds, instruments, serif eyebrow text. You know, there are the typical AI tells that you look for now if you use cloth design. Oftentimes you run into a design like that. For example, but it's not unique to clot design. So how did this happen, right? We basically said, okay, no purple gradients. And then the model steers into different part of the latent space.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As those designs become in distribution for the next gen of models, do we then have to sort of, does the next version of impeccable have to steer in a different direction altogether? Or are these sort of evergreen best practices that live regardless of what's in or out of distribution?”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First party harness integrations like the collaboration that I'm doing with GitHub, we can actually improve that significantly and make it so that it's a lot smoother. There's nothing there to be announced yet just now, but I'm super eager to work with John. And Mario on actually improving the impeccable and GitHub integration. Okay, so follow up question, Paul. So obviously Git is one of the most important platforms in the world, especially at this moment in time. So let's wind the clock forward in imagine a world in which many people are using the new GitHub product and impeccable to have these.”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Paul, how do you sort of see the product showing up within the new Git impactable showing up within the new Git product? First of all, I'm super excited to get Impactable into the hands of more builders and entrepreneurs and individual enterprises. And I think GitHub is obviously a great place to do that. Everybody's using GitHub today, and it's a great way to roll out impeccable to more. I think building in the skill as a built-in tool is one thing. I think there's a lot more different directions that we can take from there. And that's what I'm really excited about. The GitHub co-pilot app has a pick and polish mode that allows you to pick and change something and quickly edit something. And of course, Impeccable has its own implementation of that. And right now, you need to opt in and it's a bit clunky. And I think through...”
2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source