Dion Almaer

Software, Development, Products

Google

Stitch Design Variants: A Picture Really Is Worth a Thousand Words?

My head has been in the world of code generation for the last few years. Now that I’m also thinking about design generation, I’m seeing a lot of similarities but also some fascinating differences.

For example, it is cheap to ask AI for things. I will ask it to start from scratch and do a lot of extra work that I would never ask of my team mates.

What isn’t cheap though is the human side of reviewing all of the code that AI creates. Reading through them, parsing the differences, holding them in working memory—it’s real cognitive load. It takes time, and time is expensive.

With designs though, the calculus is a bit different. It is still cheap for AI to spin up variations, but human review? Our visual brain is ridiculously efficient. You can glance at six screens side-by-side and instantly know which one sparks “ugh” and which one sparks “oh yes!”. That “emergence” moment—that’s the magic.

Which brings me to a new Stitch feature: Design Variants. It does exactly this. When looking at one of your app UI screens, simply click on “Create variants” and you get a spread of designs.

Here you see the entropy, the unexpected angles, the one idea you wouldn’t have thought of yourself. You select, delete, iterate. Fast. Natural. Fun.

This is just the first version. We’ll be adding a lot more ways to let the AI flood the canvas with possibilities while keeping the cost of selection close to zero.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Design Variants is here to give you … ten thousand?

NOTE: The example image above is a shared public project … another feature the team shipped this week! I would love to see any of your Stitch projects!

Stitch Prompt: A CLI for Design Variety

I love how you can have an idea and often make it real in short order. I have been exploring how to make sure that when I design my frontend I get as much variety as possible as, after all, it’s all about taste!

When seeing folks prompt for app UI, 99% of the time I see them ignoring prompting for the style they want. They rush to say what they want the app to do, which is obviously important, but giving the models more information on the style can bring you gold.

I have been collecting styles, and making it easy to pick one to explore… where the tool will fill out the right information to pass in to the models.

I wrapped this in a simple CLI, stitch-prompt, which simply takes:

I have noticed that once I get into the habit… I start to ask for a variety of styles and look at them to get a feel for what I fancy with the particular app. Sometimes my mood and the app itself has me in a minimalistic style, at other times I go for more “fun”. With the flick of a --all you get prompts for all styles to grab. It’s been delightful to put these into Stitch and see what comes out the other side:

It’s been delightful to take a series of Stitch screens and put them side by side with different styles:

And, since these are just prompts, you can fire them up with any LLM that can speak image and put them together:

We are in a world where generation is cheap, so make sure to use that fact and do a lot more curation!

We are embracing this in Stitch and hope you give it a try! We have a lot coming.

Stitch: A Tasteful Idea

Bringing Taste to Intelligence

My oldest son has been a Star Wars fan where I am more into Star Trek… with The Next Generation being the GOAT. Like many, Commander Data holds a particular spot in my heart… the age old story of Pinocchio where the non-human teaches the most about humanity.As I rewatch the episodes of ST:TNG, and see Data grow, it’s hard not to make the obvious parallels to our newest incarnation of AI. We have new LLMs from various frontier labs, and every time we fire them up it’s like booting up Data for the first time. Great intelligence sits within the weights. Mapped experience lies within. Yet it is hard to know what experience is lacking, and it’s obvious to see the importance of onboarding.

Rise of the Taste Makers

Great designers are valuable indeed. They not only have great skill, but they have taste. If we do this right, we will be able to amplify their taste.

I hire an interior designer with taste, and I enjoy the process of working with them to curate an experience that I will love in my home. I may not be able to come up with the design, but I have opinions on what I want, and I know what I like when I see it.

Every home you enter has a personal feel, something unique. I love this and want the same for many of my computing experiences. There are familiar building blocks, great for usability, but I don’t want a world where every UI looks the same. That’s boring and soulless.

I loved the early Web for its character, as strange as some of it is. The fashion evolved quickly, as we worked out what worked… and explored a new space. There is still so much to explore, and I want new AI design tools to help me, through their own skill… and through connecting me to taste makers.

Enter Stitch

One such tool caught my attention: Stitch, a product from Google Labs. The results seemed different… more diverse. I got to meet the team behind it, one that works in a group focused on the future of software development, which has some friends from the past who I found thriving. I found myself so excited about the mission that I worked to join them… and they have kindly given me that opportunity.

To pull this off we need to weave models deeply trained on great design, with a user experience that lets users wield that power. We have the seeds, with so many ideas and experiments to run and learn from.

This week we shipped a new version of Stitch that contains many performance and reliability updates, and an overhaul to the main window that gives you the freedom of an infinite canvas to play in. It’s a pleasure to use, and is a foundation we are building on.

You can see it in action with Kath’s demo that weaves together the latest Stitch with Jules, a sister project to Stitch in labs, which just had an epic week of launches as it came out of beta. Jules is an asynchronous coding agent that you can work with to massively scale your development efforts.

Taste Goes Beyond Design

There are so many areas of taste. Stitch cares about design and frontend, and Jules also cares about the taste in building great software.

We all have our own taste. A developer who picks Vue.js, does so in part because of the taste of Evan You and team. A die hard Clojure fan, follows the taste of Rich Hickey. Open Source has long been a spot for taste makers to share, and for the community to gather.

There is taste in all things code and software projects, and we can create layers that allow those who excel in accessibility to shine through more of us, as with performance, composition, and security, and on and on.

Manifesting Ideas

One of the reasons I am so very excited about the revolution we are all currently a part of, is in its potential to take away friction so that ideas can become real. What was once expensive is on the path to become so very cheap. And marrying taste with intelligence to get a sea of experiences that are delightful to use.

If you want to fight for a more utopian future vs. dystopian, we are hiring across the board. If you love building the future of computing with like minded folk, please reach out!

/fin

The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.