Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams

Summary

Alex and Teddy here. We’re launching Magic Patterns (https://www.magicpatterns.com), an AI prototyping tool that helps PMs and designers create functional, interactive designs and websites. There’s a demo video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK8C_tQBwIU, as well as video walkthroughs of specific examples at https://www.magicpatterns.com/docs/documentation/tutorials/v...While other tools help with “AI-assisted coding,” we have been quietly focused on “AI-assisted designing.” With Magic Patterns you can visually communicate your idea, get hands on feedback from customers, and test new features.Teddy and I are best friends and former frontend engineers turned founders. We arrived at Magic Patterns after several pivots—always in the design tooling space, but different products that all struggled to get usage. We started working on Magic Patterns after an internal hackathon. Teddy built a UI library catalog and I messed around with GPT 3.5. We thought it’d be fun to combine the two: an AI component generator. Describe whatever you want, and get back a React component!That started to take off and we gained users, but it wasn’t developers using the tool. Instead, it was PMs, designers, and leadership who could finally communicate their ideas. They use it to test new ideas quickly, get feedback from customers, and improve communication with internal teams. Also, hobbyists (and programmers who aren’t designers) use us to create designs and UIs that they wouldn’t be able to otherwise.We use Sonnet 3.5 and 3.7, and leverage a fine-tuned model for fast-applying edits. The most challenging part is determining the most relevant context to feed to the LLM. We attempt to solve this with our click to update feature and by letting users define a brand preset, or default prompt.Unlike other tools in this space, we’re specifically focused on (1) product teams—we're realtime and collaborative; and (2) frontend only—we don't spin up a database or backend because we aren't solving "id...