YouSaid · the spoken record

John Maeda

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2026-06-24
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2026-06-24
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  1. “Oh, well, I'm super excited because I recently picked up all of GitHub design and great timing because we were launching this GitHub co-pilot app that's already in GA. And it is different than things we built in the past in that the, as you know, the craft bar is very high now for applications. So we wanted to set the bar with this app.”

    2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So, when I saw impeccable, not to embarrass Paul, I was like, whoa, this is like the Postscript moment. Someone actually gets that it's not just filters. It's also about subtraction. And it was all the different dimensions a designer might take. And so then I saw a really skilled engineer designer, and that got me excited.”

    2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Out. Most people don't realize that PostScript was a miracle because the Adobe guys, the Warnock, the manual for PostScript is beautiful. It's incredibly well designed. Those engineers understood graphic design better than most graphic designers. So PostScript properly encoded the perfect set of primitives to implement visual graphic design of the day. And so it required people who were technical and also design-minded. Same with Donald Knutz before that with Tech. It was an incredible typographer, mathematician. So tech was a miracle in the combination of function and form”

    2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Well, in the 1980s, late 1980s, there was this application that was called Photoshop that was amazing because it suddenly lets you draw pictures and play with photographs instead of whatever. It was popular among photographers and people like that. But when something called Kai's power tools came out, it blew up the TAM for Photoshop because people could do weird algorithmic things with their faces or all kinds of filters because Adobe Photoshop opened up this plug-in architecture so people could write code, could put things in that plugin format. So when I saw Paul's work, it reminded me of Kai's power tools, but for design and less weird, but very focused, very functional. When I saw impeccable, it reminded me of just giving away my era of when Postcript came.”

    2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Half designers, a whole bunch of PMs as well, founders, solopreneurs. But that's how impeccable came together. It is an agent skill that's completely open source. It has lots of subcommands to steer. And then I kind of built a visual iteration mode on top of it, and a quality layer that removes slop. And of course, we can talk about that too. But it does stop the overfitting of the models. So not everything is Claude Beige, as I call it, or instruments arriv, italics, or purple gradients But yeah, it's ultimately these pieces of vocabulary. It's a quality layer and it's a visual iteration mode that runs in your own codebase.”

    2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Things like vertical rhythm or negative space or make this bolder quieter. They don't have the same vocabulary as a designer who's been in the game for a long time. So the first instinct that I had was to bring that vocabulary to the actual harness, to the agent harness. And that was the first iteration of impeccable. And that already made a huge difference. And interestingly, I thought that it would alienate designers and it would mainly appeal to engineers. But that was not the case. I think a lot of designers are being asked right now to move closer to code, and I think that makes a lot of sense. And maybe they're waking up themselves to that idea because everybody's moving closer to code. Code is a substrate that the agents use, of course. And impeccable feels like a way to get there much more quickly. And with the language that they use. So I would say it's actually like, you know, if I look at the target audience right now, it's half engineers.”

    2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Contract for a couple of my friends in the last year to figure out how far can I push AI engineering and how much can I 10x or 5x or whatever myself? And I know many are going through a journey right now. In the process, I had to build a whole lot of tooling for myself. And one of those tools was impeccable. And ultimately, I noticed that whenever I would tell Claude or Codex make this better, it would do a really terrible job. Because he didn't know what angle of better, what does better mean in the design context? And I also noticed that designers, when using Claude, as opposed to engineers using Claude, would consistently get better results. So why is that? The model is literally the same. The website is the same. The design system might be the same, but the designers still get better output, even though they're prompting a machine. And it's because of the language that they use. It's because oftentimes engineers don't use the words.”

    2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Designers always think like architects of the human experience. Now with the harness and the models coming together we have a nice combo platter plus the evals we have the feedback loop, that's actually a really brand new and that's why I'm so excited we've been experimenting with Paul. We have this thing called the GitHub co-pilot app. It's a new app. And the challenge with that has been to keep the human taste and craft and all the high-tech goodies and to Paul's point about raising the floor humans should be able to raise the ceiling of what they can do. So we have human animators making the craft and the final decisions around some of the super duper highs extreme polish, but we want to have the coding agency the part that have the drudgery.”

    2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Oh, wow. Well, I mean, everyone's saying it's limitless and it's that, not the whatever, the Cambrian period, blah, blah, blah. There's so many adjectives that are like, oh my gosh, amazing. I think the reality is that this has been a long time coming. In the same way we saw writing being automated before LLMs, and we saw marketing assets being automated as well. So we just spread that to the kind of, we went upstream on this idea of designing things, which to Paul's point, it requires restraint, it requires all kind of things, which is the opposite of engineering. Speaking as an engineer as well, if I can make it, I'm a builder. Oh, I'll do this. I'll keep doing this and this and this and this. And so restraint isn't part of the equation unless you're an architect.”

    2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, I think so. I think there's ultimately everybody has to think for themselves how much they want to automate away. There is definitely still the intent and the judgment that is needed from a human side, I would say, on figuring out the what and what not to do. I actually really greatly respect people like Steve Jobs because Steve was one of the greatest editors in the world, right? He said no to so many things as opposed to saying yes to so many things. And I think having a viewpoint is still important. So I think ultimately the machine can work for you. But the same way you take a photo on a good camera, ultimately you figure out what you want to take a photo of. There's a lot of post-processing in the camera, right? There's so much. I mean, if you look at an iPhone camera today, there's so much happening on device.”

    2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think we're still working that out, to be honest. But I do see a lot of it converging in interesting ways. I remember seeing one of John's talks about algorithmic design a long time ago at some conference. And I always thought that I was always this oddball that was both designer and engineer. And I never wanted to be boxed in into any of those areas. But I think the reality is that it's now much easier to build yourself tools that help you with that, right? That help you algorithmically create design and supercharge your design with technology. And I think that's really exciting. So to me, they're one and the same. They've always have been. I mean, John calls it auto design. I think we're basically, to use John's words as well, we're kind of like raising the floor in areas that can be mechanical. And I think that's really exciting because so much of design is spent with the things that we can automate.”

    2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Well, I mean, if you go back to the 1980s, there was a woman named Muriel Cooper who was unusual because she was a trained print graphic designer. She designed those book fans known MIT Press. There's a beautiful logo at MIT Press. She designed that among other pretty major things at MIT's history publication. She was one who imagined a world where people wouldn't want to use the terminal and might want to use this thing called Helvetica to look at things on the screen. So she predicted the whole desktop publishing revolution, electronic publishing revolution. And at the time, she also had a bunch of people from MIT's AI lab. And MIT AI lab was asking, how do we create things by machines that humans are good at? And so her lab focused on how to automatically design things with quote unquote AI of the time.”

    2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Well, first of all, glad to be here. I used to think about this a lot when I was at Kleiner Perkins and thinking like, why is it that design is important in 2014-15? Like, why was it important? It was because this weird company called Airbnb was unusually successful. And if you connect to why design became important, it was because of mobile. Before mobile, desktop experiences could be crappy and it was okay because he didn't use them very often. But mobile had high usage and therefore it was bad all the time. It would be painful. So that's when it sort of started to happen. In terms of the relationship now, however, I'm so excited to be on this with Paul because I've been a fan of this moment when we'd be able to auto design. And that's since the 90s when I was at MIT, we thought it was going to be possible one day and now it's very possible. And Paul, I think as someone who's really at the cutting edge of all that.”

    2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Right now, everybody's trying to solve whether LLMs have taste. These models have millions of definitions of taste. LLMs have been trained on the output of humanity, not on the input. So what led to design decision is not something that the LLMs know.”

    2026-06-24 · a16z Podcast · What Happens to Design After AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source