OpenAI Codex Lead Explains Why AI Struggles With Design

@embirico @ajambrosino oh noooooooooo.

/Off to go yell at someone.

@lennysan @ajambrosino This is why creative use cases really aren’t going anywhere soon. LLMs are trained by giving them examples and defining a preferred one to optimize towards. You can’t optimize a LLM if there’s no deterministic definition of preferred

@lennysan @ajambrosino The design grading point is the one I keep running into.

A code test can turn green. A screen can look expensive and still feel wrong. The model needs examples of what the team deleted, not only what shipped.

Design is significantly more subjective that code. The same design will perform differently for different audience and framing the task precisely plus training the models for something subjective could be more challenging. It will be solved just because we have data for all of it already, but it may be lagging behind by a few years.

@lennysan @ajambrosino Claude: This task is going to take a week. (Takes a minute)💀

@lennysan @ajambrosino Design’s soul is human AI borrows style, not vision.

@lennysan @ajambrosino Novelty and culture are tough to codify, but what if we're asking AI to design for the wrong goals – instead of aesthetics, what if we optimized for conversion or reply rate, like we do in cold outreach?

@lennysan @ajambrosino Why do we want AI to do everything?

@lennysan @ajambrosino AI is bad at design because security (like great UX) needs novelty and real judgment, not just copying known patterns.

@lennysan @ajambrosino Beyond layout and design systems, sometimes AI doesn't ask "who is this user and what do they need to do on this screen?" It just shows everything. Information hierarchy requires intent, not just aesthetics.

@lennysan @ajambrosino AI copies patterns. Great design breaks them with taste and intent.

@lennysan @ajambrosino 设计这块太吃语境和审美惯性了，真不好量化

@lennysan @ajambrosino yes. code has tests, design has taste and timing. AI can copy the pattern, but knowing when to break it is the hard part.

@lennysan @ajambrosino makes sense. you can unit test code. you can't unit test taste.

@lennysan @ajambrosino 也對哦設計難在要藏一個閃光點