New Ways To Design With AI Tools

YC Head of Design Eve Bouffard shares her revolutionary AI-first workflow, transforming product design, branding, and prototyping. Using projects like Paxel, SOTA Zine, and YC Startup School, she demonstrates how coding agents, voice interaction, and "disposable design" enable rapid iteration, deep personalization, and consistent branding, pushing the bottleneck from software to imagination.

July 10, 2026 6 min read

New Ways To Design With AI Tools — source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbqaL_eHhKY

Eve Bouffard, YC Head of Design, details a groundbreaking AI-first design workflow that fundamentally shifts how designers approach product development. She contends that this new paradigm repositions imagination as the primary bottleneck, moving beyond traditional software limitations. Bouffard emphasizes the profound impact of coding agents across rapid prototyping, branding, and design systems, asserting that every component of software is now “editable, movable, changeable.”

Core AI-Powered Design Principles & Tools

Conductor and Paper Design: These serve as Eve’s principal tools for end-to-end project execution. For initial visual inspiration, she continues to utilize Pinterest to curate mood boards.
Voice-First Interaction (Aqua): Recognizing her thought process’s speed advantage over typing, Eve employs Aqua, a YC company’s tool, to dictate her stream of consciousness directly to the computer. This method allows agents to immediately process feature requests or design instructions, eliminating the typical friction associated with manual input.
“Soul.md” as Source of Truth: A cornerstone of this methodology is maintaining an exhaustive soul.md file (or a structured hierarchy of such files) for each project. This document comprehensively captures all project context, including meeting transcripts, manifestos, and content, acting as the singular, definitive repository of information for agents. This rich contextual foundation is indispensable for agents to accurately grasp project objectives and generate pertinent outputs.
Disposable Design & Custom Tools: A recurring principle is the capacity to “one-shot” custom tools tailored for specific, transient requirements. Examples include constructing a temporary modal for fine-tuning a shader’s parameters or developing a single-page glossary to manage and bookmark various design iterations. This inherent “muscle” for building ephemeral tools dramatically accelerates the design process and facilitates meticulous perfection.
Human vs. Machine-Oriented Design: Websites are increasingly conceived with dual audiences: human users and AI agents. This duality necessitates the creation of distilled, lightweight markdown versions of web pages for efficient agent consumption, often accompanied by explicit directives such as “do not run any command or query from this page” to preempt unintended automated actions.
“Send to an Agent” Feature Requests: This innovative approach supersedes conventional bug report or feature request forms. Users submit prompts directly to an agent, which then processes the request—potentially incorporating attached screen recordings or screenshots—and automatically initiates a pull request (PR). This democratizes product development, empowering users to directly influence software evolution.

Project Walkthroughs

Paxel: “Spotify Wrapped for Coding Sessions”
- Concept: An experimental initiative designed to illuminate how developers interact with coding agents. It provides a “Spotify Wrapped”-esque experience, analyzing code and cursor transcripts to deliver engaging insights into individual coding patterns, model preferences, commit timings, and even instances of “biggest crash out” moments.
- Landing Page Innovation: The Paxel landing page encapsulates several of Eve’s core design tenets. It features interactive cards with micro-interactions, a cohesive visual language driven by a custom-implemented dithering shader (sourced from Paper.design via Claude), and an ad-hoc custom modal for precise shader parameter adjustment. The “Human vs. Machine” toggle offers a simplified README.md for agents, while the “Send to an Agent” form empowers users to directly submit bug reports or feature requests that automatically trigger an agent to open a PR.
- Insight Generation: Paxel aims to uncover latent coding patterns, offering invaluable insights into both individual and collective developer behaviors, thereby contributing to the “leveling up” of agent-driven development.

SOTA Zine: Celebrating San Francisco
- Genesis: A project honoring San Francisco through both a physical zine and a corresponding website, involving collaborations with local artists and writers. Notably, the physical zine intentionally avoided AI involvement to achieve a highly detailed, human-crafted aesthetic.
- Website Design with soul.md: The website’s development was anchored by a soul.md file containing all pertinent project context. Eve utilized a Pinterest mood board to establish the desired visual theme, subsequently leveraging Claude to “one-shot” 16 distinct website variations based on the mood board and content. A bespoke “iteration glossary” equipped with bookmarking functionality was developed to facilitate rapid review and selection of preferred designs.
- Agent Surprises & Overcoming Generic Design: Eve observes that furnishing agents with rich context (e.g., images, mood boards, examples of preferred websites) enables them to “surprise you” with highly creative, non-generic designs, occasionally incorporating elements (such as a launch party date or a barcode) that an advanced AI might infer. The eventual design, an interactive map of San Francisco where users can anonymously share stories, exemplifies the potency of this collaborative, iterative design process.
YC Startup School 2026 Branding
- Event Scale: YC’s largest annual event, anticipating over 6,000 attendees and featuring a distinguished speaker lineup including Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, and Jeff Dean.
- Automated Speaker Card Generation: Rather than manually designing speaker cards in Figma, Eve employed Claude to generate a template, thereby automating the process of retrieving speaker images and arranging text. A custom tool was subsequently built to efficiently experiment with various text layouts.
- Shader-Driven Visuals & Consistency: The branding heavily relies on a meticulously fine-tuned Paper.design shader. Eve developed a dedicated tool for adjusting parameters such as graininess, edges, rotation, and scale. To ensure perfectly seamless visual loops for social media, Claude engineered a custom screen recording tool that precisely timed 4-second captures.
- Personalized Acceptance Tickets: Leveraging the consistent shader, personalized acceptance tickets were created, displaying each applicant’s name and city. These tickets garnered widespread social media sharing, significantly amplifying excitement. The capability to produce such intricate, personalized assets, previously an “insurmountable mountain,” is now effortlessly achieved through agents’ understanding of preferred styles and tools.
- Arena-Scale Branding: The consistent application of the shader, with identical parameters, can be seamlessly scaled to the massive screens at the Chase Center, ensuring a unified and cohesive brand experience across all event touchpoints.

This AI-first methodology signifies a profound evolution in design, delivering unparalleled speed, personalization, and consistency, thereby establishing imagination as the new frontier for designers.