Launch HN: Magic Patterns (YC W23) – AI Design and Prototyping for Product Teams

I don't normally comment on these things, but I gave it a quick shot for a project I'm working on (fairly generic dashboard-style prompt, but that's fine).

I'm actually pretty impressed. A couple things though:

1. It took a _while_ to give me anything. Not sure if that's related to load, but it was ~17 files, and probably took 5+ minutes. It was not clear what was going on in that time, or what would happen if I left it. I literally left my machine to go something else before coming back.

2. I really hate saying this, but your pricing is probably way too low, especially at the "pro" level from your pricing page. When stepping into team-based config management and pre-sets, you're leaving a ton of money on the table without enterprise-style custom value-based pricing. If you were asking me, I would recommend moving the team based features (shared presets, custom access control, etc) into an "enterprise" level above pro).

I'm not going to comment on any sort of "correctness" as far as any complex UX behaviours or workflows; I'm only considering this from a mockup/design/demo-of-new-ideas perspective.

This is super cool—love how you’re flipping the AI-assisted creation story to focus on design-first workflows. The frontend-only scope is such a smart constraint, especially for PMs and non-designers trying to validate ideas fast without diving into fullstack territory.

I’ve seen firsthand how hard it can be for non-designers to clearly communicate product ideas, and Magic Patterns seems to lower that barrier in a really meaningful way.

I noticed the GitHub Sync option—curious how teams are using that today. Is it more of a dev handoff (e.g. PR previews) or a starting point for custom builds? Would love to hear how that fits into engineering workflows—especially for folks skipping Figma entirely.

Also really appreciate the collaborative angle. Real-time team prototyping on a canvas feels like the future of internal product reviews.

Rooting for you both—this is such a focused and thoughtful approach to a real gap in the market.

I used magic patterns for a couple of months and it was one of the first no brainer AI services I've paid for outside of the main LLMs and IDEs. It did such an amazing job on quite an esoteric frontend that's very much not your normal web app. Impressive. Next time I need to design and build some more frontend code I'll be subscribing again.

Edit: to add some meat to that comment what surprised me was just how much better it was than Anthropic and OpenAI tools at that time for coming up with great looking products with minimal prompting. I also fed it other designs for inspiration and it replicated them brilliantly while incorporating my requirements. Good stuff.

Hi, Thank you for sharing.

I tried this prompt.

``` create a Rubik's cube app with all available moves and show the cube and the animations. add a scrambler and a solver. Also add timer to time the moves. ```

I got this.

https://www.magicpatterns.com/c/psesccrmk41jibfhwp7wh1

Which looks like a good starting point but doesn't work at all. After this it is daunting to look at code. I still have to figure out how to tell the chatbox to fix it.

Gemini 2.5 pro did much better in one shot. (the prompt was different and without the scrambler/solver/timer)

https://sumitkumar.github.io/llmgenerated-static/

How did you manage to advertise or generate initial traffic for something like that?

Even if the tool is excellent, it seems like the space is flooded with “Prototype your app with AI” tools, many backed by big players with huge ad budgets. The target audience must be getting bombarded with a dozen similar pitches every day. How did you manage to cut through the noise?

I find myself asking this question often, so there’s probably something fundamental I don’t quite grasp about startups in general.

This is a very good idea. I see a lot of friction (and lack of process) with product -> UX -> dev than with product and dev able to iterate on things like screen flows very quickly, and UX feeding in more from the user research angle.

Currently a lot of UX work is "translate what you said into Figma and wait for comments" which is very automatable, and I think frustrating for UX people as much as anyone.

Interesting. So, if you're targeting the PM and only building a frontend, are you actually competing with Figma? With the many use case of creating/iterating a UX prototype?

In which case - you mention that MagicPatterns creates components, but can it also reuse existing components? E.g. sometimes I'd want to create a UX prototype, but use a pre-existing UI / design language to match how my sites/apps are already implemented.

Yay! I like Magic Patterns. It is more useful and accurate compared other tools. I have successfully been able to get some design ideas implemented in it. It seems to understand consistency more than other tools.

I made a part of this using your tool : https://www.heated.studio/

Congratulations on the launch

Single prompt, "A dating app for dogs"

https://project-dog-dating-app-454.magicpatterns.app/

Love it. Really impressed with how it pulls in meaningfully related stock images by default; v0 and the rest aren't doing that.

There were some comments on pricing that I'd like to comment on: As a one man startup that's fully self-funded I deeply appreciate the prices that aren't straight out of Sillicon Valley. I believe in free market and really don't mind companies doing profit first, but those are often services that simply are out of reach for the more budget conscious of us while adopting new technologies. Let me thus petition for keeping a small enterprise plan in the price range you're now at, maybe limited by nr of employees, company age, and/or even easier, the number of subscription months/years. That'll give us a chance to adopt your service while increasing the value we get from the service.. When the value's there I won't hesitate to pay a higher price for it either.

I gave it a shot to iterate on our current UI. It did try to solve the problem we were focused on, but it also randomly removed other features that we hadn’t touched or even talked about. This makes me believe there will be a lot of back and forth that is low value just correcting small details. In UX/UI details really matter. I'd probably opt to just move pixels around my self in this case.

If this were a brand new project with no existing UI at all and we just needed to spin up a quick prototype, I think it’d be great for that. And honestly, I do think LLMs will end up playing a big role in UX design over time—so this is definitely in the right direction.

But for real-world use cases where the UI already exists and quality or timesaving matter, it doesn’t feel like the right fit yet.

Canvas is an interesting idea - although the implementation feels very clunky and half finished.

rest of the tool doesn't feel that special - eg there's tonnes of code generators out there. would have to play more to understand but it wasn't immediately apparent

i recently used Magic Patterns for a very niche use case and had a great experience:

i wanted to do show new customers examples of how they can use my product, which lives primarily in email.

to do it via Loom I would need to create tons of fake email addresses and juggle a whole complicated set of scenerios. and to do it in after effects would take forever.

so i used magic patterns to make an app that lets me upload JSON scripts of the email threads, and it animates them. if you skip to ~1 min mark on this video you can see the output https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iWC5U2Q3x30I5m1bTuN9c2OnfDo...

So how are you different?

Played around with it, really nice, will definitely use it in the future!

Hey kids, grizzled UI designer and developer at a startup here. You’ve got 2 keys correct right at the start.

1. Permissions/auth for prototypes. Stakeholders go for that. MBA folks don’t want to be sent crazy random obfuscated URLs, they want a nice login page that makes them feel secure. (Because MBA types will get weird about corporate secrets, even just high-level wireframes.)

2. Figma/Miro-esque infinite canvas with comments. Product managers and stakeholders love that flow.

congrats on the launch! I gave it a spin.. found these issues:

1 - after selecting the Body of this page to capture as Design: https://app.visualsitemaps.com/pricing the "Render" tab > result showed be a blank box: https://share.cleanshot.com/jVGlwYND yet there was code in the "Code" tab.

after that it attempted to recreate the design, with some new additions:

- add a row of logos ( failed ) - add testimonials - add case studies - remove a row

Results >> it was 92% there: https://project-tailwind-conversion-with-lucide-icons-756.ma... had some missing images from the OG design.

Overall this is impressive for MVP.. I also like the manual click-to-select-objects for more refinement.

I was unable to find the CSS styling code however ( sorry not a React/Tailwind user ) it just showed me index.css like so: {@import 'tailwindcss/base'; @import 'tailwindcss/components'; @import 'tailwindcss/utilities';}

Appreciate the HN guest login. That's a good idea :)

I'm interested in understanding your desire to do design and prototyping as a single shot?

My expectation was that I'd iterate on a few UX designs with the LLM and then when I'm happy with what the LLM is suggesting, I'd output to figma, and then maybe move to code.

It's great that you're generating code, but isn't that increasing your cost and processing time to write code for each iteration?

I'm CTO at a startup and Magic Patterns is amazing, my current workflow is to ideate using MP then implement straight to my codebase.

The instant feedback-loop of iterating over components is great and perfect for me when I'm designing a feature that's heavy on the client side of things.

For example it took me half a day to go from idea -> design -> implementation

Tried it, it's very impressive. A perfect start prior to a new Windsurf/Cursor project.

This seems like the death knell for theme stores.

This is something I would definitely use, as my company pays for v0 today for these exact purposes (product design/PM).

I've tried some of the same prompts I've done on v0 but didn't notice a lot of difference -- needs a lot of back-and-forth, as with v0. So not sure what would make me switch at this point.

Why would you limit the tool to strictly be for React?

"As per my limitations, I am designed to work specifically with React and TypeScript/JavaScript only. I cannot provide direct conversions to plain HTML/CSS or other frameworks."

I want something which looks like design for engineers. I'm a programmer, code completion is nice, but I already know how to code. What I am terrible at is design.

I uploaded a screenshot twice but it keeps saying "Sorry, I don't see a screenshot!"

frontend only makes so much sense!!

what are the plans to support design systems? no one seems to be able to do this. prototyping doesn't happen in a vacuum, I'll always want to use the design system we spent months building in Figma.

Curious what the advantages are over something like Replit?

just letting you know one of the flying boxes had clipped through the text i was editing, hard to recreate it but happened randomly.

does Magic Patterns support exporting components directly into frameworks like Next.js or Tailwind CSS out of the box?

This service is pretty much what I, a software developer, am scared off. I expect that it will be used in order to quickly cobble something together and then hand it over to a dev for "polishing". And this sounds like a total nightmare to me.

If used like that, this service will effectively turn my job into that of an assistant to a machine.

What does this look so similar to v0 from Vercel?

very cool!