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Y CombinatorY Combinator

YC's Head of Design Shows You How To Design With AI

AI isn't just changing the tools designers use. It's changing the way they think, prototype, and build.

Aaron EpsteinhostEve Bouffardguest
Jul 10, 202630mWatch on YouTube

Summaries, chapters, transcripts, and FAQs on this page are made by uListen, not YouTube.

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

YC design lead demos shipping brands and sites with AI agents

  1. Eve Bouffard walks through how she designs and ships projects using a workflow centered on Conductor, Paper Design, Pinterest mood boards, and voice prompting via Aqua.
  2. Paxel is presented as a YC experiment to understand how people code with coding agents by analyzing local transcripts and returning playful, Spotify Wrapped–style “fun facts” and patterns.
  3. The Paxel landing page highlights interactive cards, shader-based visuals, a human vs. machine markdown view, and a “Send to an agent” form that triggers an agent to open PRs from user prompts.
  4. For SOTA Zine, Eve describes keeping AI out of the physical zine’s graphic design while using a Soul.md “source of truth” plus mood boards to rapidly one-shot and curate many website directions.
  5. For Startup School branding, she shows how she built internal tools to auto-generate speaker cards, fine-tune Paper.Design shaders, and record perfectly looping motion assets, extending the same shader system to personalized acceptance tickets and event-scale screens.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Her design stack has collapsed into a small, AI-forward toolkit plus mood boards.

Eve Bouffard says she now works “almost exclusively” in Conductor and Paper Design for end-to-end projects, and she still uses Pinterest mood boards to quickly set visual direction before building.

Voice-driven prompting is central to her workflow, not a novelty.

Eve says she avoids typing because she thinks faster than she types, and instead uses Aqua to speak a stream-of-consciousness spec into her computer so the system can capture what she wants to build.

She uses “disposable tools” to fine-tune details rather than accepting default AI outputs.

For Paxel, she describes creating interactive landing-page cards and using Paper.Design shaders (notably a dithering shader), then building a small, throwaway internal “model” tool to tune shader parameters until the effect feels right.

Websites may increasingly ship a parallel, agent-readable interface alongside the human one.

Eve and Aaron describe adding a human vs. machine version of a webpage, where the machine version is a distilled markdown format with copy-to-clipboard and an explicit warning to agents not to run commands embedded on the page.

User feedback can be converted directly into agent-generated code changes via prompts.

Eve explains Paxel’s “Send to an agent” form: users submit bug reports or feature requests like prompts (with screenshots/recordings), which automatically trigger an agent that opens a PR for the team to merge or reject.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

I realize that I think a lot faster than I type. I type very slowly, and so I'd rather talk to my computer instead of... I barely touch my computer at this point. I just press the function key, and I give a stream of consciousness of the feature that I want to build, and it just does it, and it feels really magical.

— Eve Bouffard

We realized that it's almost like a muscle that you need to build and train when you realize that you can build anything for yourself- ... whenever you wanna fine-tune something.

— Eve Bouffard

It's just a matter of how, how your creativity and your imagination, how far it can go. That's really the bottleneck now.

— Eve Bouffard

I think this is a, a pattern that we might start seeing more and more moving forward on websites, is there's gonna be the, the version of the website that is for humans, and there's gonna be the w- the version of the website that will be for machines and agents.

— Eve Bouffard

I wanted to treat that Soul.md file as the source of truth and exhaustive glossary of this project. I wanted this file to have as much context as poss- humanly possible so that it can feed all the future decisions that we need to make regarding this project.

— Eve Bouffard

Read the available transcript
Conductor and Paper Design workflowVoice prompting with AquaPaxel: coding-transcript analysis and playful cardsPaper.Design shaders and dithering fine-tuning toolsHuman vs. machine-readable website versions“Send to an agent” feature-request/bug-report pipelineSoul.md as project source of truth and iteration driver

SPEAKERS

  • Aaron Epstein

    host

    Host at Y Combinator who interviews YC builders and leaders on design and product.

  • Eve Bouffard

    guest

    Head of Design at Y Combinator, leading design work across YC programs and internal projects.

High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.

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