Designer & Designer

Prompts vs Pixels


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Mentioned

  • V0 by Vercel that generates front-end code
  • Builder.io for creating UI flows from language prompts
  • UXPilot for generating UI from specs
  • Lovable for different design styles
  • Perplexity as a tool that bypasses SEO spam
  • Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?
  • Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience
  • 23:48 Brian says he didn’t do a great job unpacking the confusion and buzz around “agentic AI” and that many people conflate multi-shot prompts, agentic AI and AI agents. Most real world “agentic AI” today doesn’t exactly match the definition used in research papers around AI agents.
  • 38:00 Great story of a UX designer using Figma’s MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server and Cursor to create functional code.
  • 41:00 The Shape of AI | UX Patterns for Artificial Intelligence Design

Topics Discussed

  • Large Language Models (LLMs) vs other AI technologies
  • The rapid standardization of AI interface patterns
  • AI tools in designers' current workflows
  • Multi-shot prompts and agentic systems
  • The tension between "prompts vs pixels" in product development
  • How AI is changing the designer's role
  • The new "industrial revolution" we're experiencing with AI

Pull Quotes

  • "Most AI researchers believe that the AI models have already reached 100% scouring of the web, right? So anything that's public is probably in those foundational models, which means they're not really going to grow much in the next five years." –Brian
  • "It will make the most basic patterns. It will pull the most basic stuff... But what it won't do is it won't make it interesting." –Joe
  • "I was a little bit stunned by how quickly that locked into amber... that they're all chat-based interfaces. They all use magic wands or sparkles or something." –Joe
  • "A society that prioritizes productivity is a society without imagination... if the goal is to just get the data as fast as possible to do things better and faster, you are saving time for what?" –Joe
  • "This is a new enlightenment. This is a new industrial revolution... Everything is changing." –Joe

Other Resources on AI & Design

  • The case against conversational interfaces
  • Emerging UI/UX Patterns in Generative AI: A Visual Guide
  • UX patterns for AI-powered experiences
  • Emerging UX patterns in Generative AI experiences
  • What I’ve learned from 18 mths of AI conversational UI design
  • Generative AI UX Design Patterns
  • Scarcity and Abundance in 2025

Connect with Joe & Brian

  • Website: designer.fm
  • Email: [email protected]
  • Please like, subscribe, and give us any feedback!

Outro music: In the Year 2525 by Zager & Evans

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Designer & DesignerBy Brian Fling, Joe Alterio

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