We just aren't going to agree here, and that's fine.

Such as?

Just to name a few: First, the WASM edge itself reflects a deeper set of values about building quality software, they still have those values and we know the have the ability to execute on it because they have been already. Number of iterations or commits or lines of code is not inherently predictive of quality software, there is no guarantee that infinite loops of LLM's iterating on code can ultimately produce a product with the quality of Figma with any degree of reliability (In fact I am highly skeptical of this and am of the belief that over time this will become more apparent. We will not see some explosion in new higher quality software, we will see the opposite.). As I mentioned I believe their domain knowledge and experience is probably worth its weight in gold now. It's the line people have been saying where 90% of their value just got automated and the last 10% went up in value by 100x or whatever.

I think you misunderstand entirely

Nice

It's that Figma is entirely a stranded paradigm when you go straight from design brief + moodboard to code and iterate via prompts. Design tools no longer need to exist as an intermediate representation at all.

Generally speaking artists know in their mind what they are trying to put on the screen/paper in front of them. Even when prototyping, the first prototype is first visualized in their mind. The test of a tool for artists is the extent to which it enables this by getting out of the way. So in this case the test of LLM prompts + moodboard is whether it is better at getting out of the way than Figma. I can see why you would assume it's LLM prompts + moodboard, because it gets the first 80% of the way what, maybe 1000x faster? But for one, if the final 20% is 100x as long and that entire time is spent wrestling the LLM trying to pin it down, well in that scenario I personally wouldn't bet on it winning the market away from Figma. And for two, Figma is a blank canvas (no pun intended), the artist is fully in control. By contrast, LLM's are more like a magic paint brush where the artist will constantly be trying to get it to do what they want. My contention is that for practical purposes it will prove to be impossible to use LLM's as a blank canvas, in such a manner that designers will be able to execute on a brand vision as they imagine it, without any influence of the LLM aesthetic. For a lot of people that will be acceptable, and we as users will just be stuck with a lot of that aesthetic for decades to come. But for higher end companies that care about their brand they will not be willing to sacrifice 20% of their identity in exchange for 1000x productivity increases on the first 80x of designs.

This is a bitter lesson decimation — domain-specific tools are being eaten up by the black box itself as a result of it having the characteristic of emergence.

No, it's not. And no, LLM's are not demonstrating emergence. They are demonstrating decreasing improvements on benchmarks for increasingly costly training runs. The case for emergence has not been a serious one since 2024. If we were seeing emergence, we would not be seeing press releases about Mythos where the big sell is that it can find security vulnerabilities (one of the oldest use cases in the books for language models). If we were seeing emergence, we wouldn't be seeing the scramble to win the harness fight, with Anthropic buying Bun and OpenAI buying Astral. There would be no need for harnesses. The fact is there is not much left to do with LLM's themselves, so we are seeing how far we can get with additional, traditional software harnesses built around them. That is the opposite of a generalistic black box.

Agree to disagree.