dropped brand systems in @efectodotapp create a system once (colors, type, icons, voice, imagery) and it flows everywhere. Then, your AI agent should design on brand by default
it's all tokens under the hood, shadcn, tailwind, skills... code is brand
@kubadesign Exactly. Have you tried efecto? We're big on AI, but what we're really building is a space for designers who understand that tools are just a vehicle.
@Daviowhite AI amplifies skill. It doesn't replace it. At efecto we use AI every day and it makes us faster precisely because we have the Figma foundations underneath. Learn the craft first, then let the robots help.
opens an AI tool, types "make a landing page for my startup," gets an ok looking page in 20 seconds, immediately tweets "designers are cooked!"
my friend, you don't know what kerning is. why certain typefaces feel trustworthy and others feel like a crypto scam. why that button feels dead or why ur page with ten fonts looks like a garage sale
you have no idea how contrast guides attention, why a headline needs to breathe, what optical alignment is
designers spend years training their eye on stuff that's invisible when it works.... typographic scale, color systems that hold up across contexts, spacing that creates rhythm, hierarchy that tells your brain what matters first... the stuff you can't prompt for because you don't know the words to describe what's wrong
the AI gave you a layout. which is cool... but that's maybe 1% of what makes a product feel designed. the other 99% is judgment across hundreds of screens... what happens when a name is 3 characters vs 45, when empty states need to feel intentional, when accessibility breaks, when the design system collapses under its own weight
and the confidence... "yeah it's not pixel perfect but just need to tweak some spacing" ... the spacing IS the design. that's like saying you built a house, just need to adjust the architecture
AI is incredible for exploring ideas. efecto is literally a vibedesign tool. but there's this weird thing where people who've never designed anything used by real humans now think the hard part was drawing the first screen
it never was
opens an AI tool, types "make a landing page for my startup," gets an ok looking page in 20 seconds, immediately tweets "designers are cooked!"
my friend, you don't know what kerning is. why certain typefaces feel trustworthy and others feel like a crypto scam. why that button feels dead or why ur page with ten fonts looks like a garage sale
you have no idea how contrast guides attention, why a headline needs to breathe, what optical alignment is
designers spend years training their eye on stuff that's invisible when it works.... typographic scale, color systems that hold up across contexts, spacing that creates rhythm, hierarchy that tells your brain what matters first... the stuff you can't prompt for because you don't know the words to describe what's wrong
the AI gave you a layout. which is cool... but that's maybe 1% of what makes a product feel designed. the other 99% is judgment across hundreds of screens... what happens when a name is 3 characters vs 45, when empty states need to feel intentional, when accessibility breaks, when the design system collapses under its own weight
and the confidence... "yeah it's not pixel perfect but just need to tweak some spacing" ... the spacing IS the design. that's like saying you built a house, just need to adjust the architecture
AI is incredible for exploring ideas. efecto is literally a vibedesign tool. but there's this weird thing where people who've never designed anything used by real humans now think the hard part was drawing the first screen
it never was
vibecoder asks claude code to build a chat app, gets a working prototype in 20 minutes, immediately tweets "just killed slack and discord"…
brother you don't even know what a distributed system is. you don't know what database replication means. you have no idea how websocket connections behave at scale or what happens when 50k people are online at once and someone's message needs to show up in 200ms across 3 continents
slack has engineers making $300k+ who have spent a decade solving problems you don't even know exist yet. race conditions, eventual consistency, message ordering, presence systems, file storage at scale, search indexing across billions of messages
your app works on localhost with 2 connections. that's not the same thing as "killing slack" that's a college homework assignment
the prototype is maybe 0.5% of what makes these products actually work in production. the remaining 99.5% is infrastructure, reliability, edge cases, and years of iteration on problems that only surface when real humans use your thing at scale
and the worst part is the confidence. "yeah its not perfect but ai one-shotted it, just need to adjust a few things and deploy" - the few things you need to adjust IS the entire product. thats like pouring a foundation and saying you basically built a skyscraper, just need to adjust a few things
ai is genuinely incredible for building tools and prototypes. i use it every day. but there's this weird thing happening where people who have never shipped anything to real users at scale now think the hard part of software is writing the first 200 lines of code
it never was bro