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

Bufar says she works mainly in Conductor and Paper Design, using Pinterest to gather visual references. She prefers speaking to her computer through Aqua because she thinks faster than she types, describing features aloud as a stream of consciousness.

Paxel is an experiment to learn how people work with coding agents and share useful patterns. A terminal command reads Claude Code and Cursor transcripts and returns findings such as frequently used models, late-night commits, plan-mode habits, and moments of frustration. The team made the results playful with cards inspired by Spotify Wrapped, and built the landing page to explain the experiment and let visitors explore its visuals.

The Paxel site offers an agent-friendly Markdown version of its content, with a copy button and a warning not to run commands from the page. Its feature request form accepts prompts, screenshots, and recordings, then sends them to an agent that opens a pull request for the team to review. For the Sodazine site, Bufar treated meeting transcripts and a project manifesto in a soul.md file as source material, then used a Pinterest mood board to generate 16 website concepts and a private gallery to bookmark promising ideas.

Bufar says detailed project context and visual references helped agents produce unexpected ideas, including an interactive San Francisco map. The finished map lets people anonymously pin short memories of the city, while the site also links to the zine's Substack and lets visitors share submissions as images.

For Startup School at Chase Center, Bufar created tools to generate speaker cards, adjust Paper shader effects, and record a four-second loop that begins and ends on the same pixel. Accepted applicants receive personalized tickets showing their name and city. She says coding agents made these custom assets and consistent branding practical to produce.