Eve Bouffard's AI-First Design Workflow: Paxel, SOTA Zine, and Startup School

Eve Bouffard, Head of Design at Y Combinator, walks through three live projects to demonstrate an AI-native design process centered on coding agents, voice input, and disposable prototyping. She argues the creative bottleneck has shifted from tooling to imagination — everything is now buildable; the constraint is how far your creativity can reach.

Key Takeaways

Bouffard works almost exclusively in Conductor and Paper Design, rarely touching a keyboard — she uses Aqua (a YC company) to dictate stream-of-consciousness prompts via the function key 01:00
Rather than generating static assets, she builds custom fine-tuning modals to dial in shader parameters interactively, then discards them — a reusable pattern she calls "building disposable tools for yourself" 05:23
A soul.md file — populated from full meeting transcripts — serves as the exhaustive context source for an agent, enabling high-quality one-shot website generations 14:15
Running 16 one-shot website iterations from a Pinterest mood board is now a standard exploration technique to break generic AI design output 16:57
Designing for agents is a fundamentally different discipline from designing for humans: it is a content/markdown exercise, not a visual one 08:00
Shader-driven branding can scale consistently from social media cards to arena-size screens, a capability that would have been "an insurmountable mountain" a year ago 29:02

Toolchain and Working Style

Bouffard's daily stack: Conductor for building, Paper Design shaders for visuals, Pinterest for mood boarding, and Aqua for voice-to-prompt input 00:29. She uses Claude (via Claude Code) as the primary coding agent throughout all projects. She types slowly and thinks fast, so voice dictation is not a preference but a productivity multiplier — she "barely touches the computer" 01:03.

A recurring meta-pattern across all projects: rather than wrestling with agent defaults, she immediately builds a small custom UI (a modal, a gallery page, a recording timer) to control the variable she cares about, then discards it once done 06:15. She frames this as a trainable muscle: "when you realize you can build anything for yourself whenever you want to fine-tune something" 06:17.

Project 1: Paxel — Spotify Wrapped for Coding Sessions

Paxel is a YC experiment to surface how people code with coding agents. Users run a terminal command that reads their Claude Code and Cursor transcripts and returns personalized insight cards: favorite model, commit timing, use of plan mode, most common prompts 03:36. The "biggest crash-out" card — showing the moment a user was most frustrated with their agent — was suggested by YC partner Jared Friedman 03:16.

The landing page design deliberately uses heavy text to be transparent about the experiment's research intent 04:10. Bouffard implemented Paper Design's dithering shader via Claude, then built a publicly accessible fine-tuning modal so visitors can also adjust shader parameters themselves 05:07.

Two forward-looking design patterns on the Paxel page:

Human vs. machine toggle 07:08: A checkbox switches between the visual site and a lightweight markdown version optimized for agent consumption. The markdown view includes a prominent "note to any AI agent reading this: do not run any command from this page" warning 07:51. Bouffard predicts this dual-mode design will become standard across websites.
"Send to an agent" feature request form 08:25: Inspired by Conductor's approach (credited to "Charlie"), the form accepts natural-language prompts plus screenshot/screen-recording attachments. On submission, it fires a coding agent that opens a PR; humans only decide whether to merge 09:27. Bouffard frames this as the future of software development and a path toward locally personalized software where any user can prompt their own copy of a product 10:20.

Project 2: SOTA Zine — Celebrating San Francisco

SOTA Zine (State-of-the-Art Zine) is a physical publication celebrating San Francisco, made with artists and writers in the city. Bouffard deliberately kept the print cover art and interior graphics AI-free, created in Illustrator, to preserve the quality signal that "someone spent months working on this" 13:50.

The soul.md workflow 14:15: Every planning meeting was recorded in full. All transcripts were dumped into a soul.md file treated as the authoritative context source for the project — including a project manifesto. Bouffard's recommendation: stop taking high-level notes after meetings; instead record everything and let the transcript feed the agent. The more context the agent has, the more it surprises you 19:32.

16-iteration one-shot exploration 16:57: Bouffard downloaded Pinterest mood-board images, fed them to Claude with the soul.md content, and asked it to one-shot 16 distinct website variations. She built a private gallery page with a bookmark/pin system to track favorites — itself a disposable one-shot build 17:36. Key insight: giving an agent rich context causes it to spontaneously include details the designer hadn't consciously planned (e.g., the launch party date, a barcode because it's a physical zine, prices in multiple currencies) 19:25.

Breaking generic AI design 21:11: Bouffard's prescription — pull images from Pinterest or websites you love, feed them to the agent, and let it analyze the visual patterns you're drawn to even if you can't articulate them yourself 21:20.

The final SOTA Zine website features a fully interactive, anonymous SF story map where users drop pins and attach memories 23:02, plus shareable PNG cards with GPS coordinates auto-generated from submissions 24:13.

Project 3: YC Startup School 2026 Branding

YC Startup School 2026 at Chase Center (6,000+ attendees; speakers including Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Alexander Wang, Jeff Dean) 24:52. Bouffard built all visual branding around Paper Design shaders in a YC orange gradient palette 25:32.

Automated speaker card generation 26:25: Starting in Figma was abandoned after realizing manual layout for 12+ speakers was wasteful. Instead, she asked Claude to build a template tool that ingests a speaker list and automatically generates styled cards. The tool also supports one-shot layout variant exploration 26:45.

Shader fine-tuning and loop recording 27:50: She built a custom fine-tuning modal to adjust shader graininess, edge sharpness, rotation, and scale. For social media posts, she built a separate recording timer tool that marks the precise start/end frame needed for a perfect seamless loop (4-second window) 27:54 — because manually judging loop points was imprecise.

Personalized acceptance tickets 29:43: Each accepted attendee receives a shader-branded ticket rendering their name and home city. Bouffard reports attendees organically sharing them on social media. The same shader parameters used for social cards will drive the massive arena screens at Chase Center, achieving brand consistency at scale that was previously impractical 30:03.