While other tools help with “AI-assisted coding,” we have been quietly focused on “AI-assisted designing.” With Magic Patterns you can visually communicate your idea, get hands on feedback from customers, and test new features.
Teddy and I are best friends and former frontend engineers turned founders. We arrived at Magic Patterns after several pivots—always in the design tooling space, but different products that all struggled to get usage. We started working on Magic Patterns after an internal hackathon. Teddy built a UI library catalog and I messed around with GPT 3.5. We thought it’d be fun to combine the two: an AI component generator. Describe whatever you want, and get back a React component!
That started to take off and we gained users, but it wasn’t developers using the tool. Instead, it was PMs, designers, and leadership who could finally communicate their ideas. They use it to test new ideas quickly, get feedback from customers, and improve communication with internal teams. Also, hobbyists (and programmers who aren’t designers) use us to create designs and UIs that they wouldn’t be able to otherwise.
We use Sonnet 3.5 and 3.7, and leverage a fine-tuned model for fast-applying edits. The most challenging part is determining the most relevant context to feed to the LLM. We attempt to solve this with our click to update feature and by letting users define a brand preset, or default prompt.
Unlike other tools in this space, we’re specifically focused on (1) product teams—we're realtime and collaborative; and (2) frontend only—we don't spin up a database or backend because we aren't solving "idea to fullstack app."
A common workflow is a product manager building an interactive prototype and then passing it off to a designer for more polish or directly to engineers. Many teams are even skipping Figma entirely now, telling us that it feels like an unnecessary middleman. Teams are instead generating clickable prototypes, collaborating directly with stakeholders, and using that as the mockup.
With Magic Patterns, you can: - Collaborate with your team on our infinite canvas; - Match your existing designs by creating reusable components directly; - Brainstorm features and flows. (The latter is what we use it for internally.)
We started as a way to build small, custom components, but now people are one-shotting entire websites and hosting them with us, or building dashboards that they share internally or in customer demos. People have sold $10k/mo contracts with Magic Patterns designs!
Small business owners—everyone from fishermen to driving instructors to hotel managers—are using us to build their websites and then hosting them with us. Example sites built by Magic Patterns include https://getdealflow.ai/ and https://joinringo.com/. It’s amazing how people who couldn’t have done that before are now able to, and super gratifying to us to be empowering people in this way.
You can get started with our docs here: https://www.magicpatterns.com/docs/documentation/get-started..., and you can try the actual product. Simply go to https://www.magicpatterns.com and prompt for any UI you want.
Today no login is required, just click “Coming from Hackernews?” and you’ll get 5 messages free to try. Once you hit the limit, you’ll then be prompted to login. Plans start at $19/mo for another 100 messages a month (https://www.magicpatterns.com/pricing).
We’re stoked to be sharing with HN today and are open to all feedback!
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.
2. Re pricing - that's the most important feedback we'll hear all day! We used to have a "contact us for pricing" tier, but have found self-serve a lot more effective and easier to scale.
We actually still only 2 people, just my co-founder and me. When you say "custom value-based" are you referring to a "contact us for pricing" tier?
Ya. Not saying that it's applicable to everyone (or even most people), but really once a team gets above maybe 20+ people actively using this, they're not going to blink at $1200/month (good for you now, but you'll be leaving a ton of money on the table, and it's hard to adjust expectations later).
Maybe capping the size of a team on the "pro" plan would be an inbetween, but it's something to talk to your customers about.
Happy to chat more directly; my email's in my bio.
Don’t kill your adoption rates in the critical early days of growth.
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.
On the other hand, for product teams with mature engineering workflows, it usually goes like this: 1. Designers/PM brainstorms an idea in Magic Patterns 2. They get feedback in a design crit or from their users by sharing the Magic Patterns URL. 3. They iterate on it further and then either export it to figma or hand it off to engineering directly. But! engineering won't use the code because we output React + Tailwind CSS, and they are very likely using custom components or have their own nuances.
I do think as the foundational models get better the dev/design handoff will get smoother, but I don't think we are there yet, especially for existing code bases. For new projects, it's a different story and our two-way Github sync plays a role.
That's what I think you could attack - in four ways:
- have a way for designers and developers to iterate components in a component library
- have a way for that component library to be used in app designs
- have a way to upload my component library and use its components in app designs
- eventually maybe extend the above to be able to use multiple component libraries (e.g. for companies with multiple brands)
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.
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/
In this case, it looks like the Gemini output that you linked — as you mentioned — doesn't include the requirement for a scrambler/solver/timer, so it's hard for me to comment directly on the comparison.
I ask because we can totally add Gemini 2.5 pro as one of the models we use under the hood!
Well, I was not comparing but it was just an observation.
I understand Magic has more constraints on which libraries it can use and probably is for forms-flow kind of workflows and not for managing complex states of games.
Model providers will be fungible. Applications will capture all the complicated interaction patterns, domain expertise, and distribution.
Apps can route between cheapest/most effective model. And the Chinese and upstart labs will continue dumping open source on the market. To get distribution, to salt the earth, commodify the compliment, etc.
When will an LLM be able to author a directory of GLB files organized into a game, precisely positioned within a world, with a set of user-tweaked PBR textures? Never. And even if it could, could you fathom the pain? The app layer will do that.
2025 is the year of the "App Layer" in AI.
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.
In startup land, I think it's really important you love your customer. Because you cut through the noise by having your existing customers tell their friends about you. 30% of new users hear about us from their friends.
I'll also note: we launched for the first time in October 2023. At the time the space was not flooded. We first got 10 users who loved us — where I define "love" as using us weekly — and since then it's a game of continuous iteration!
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.
I shared this post before below, but to share it again: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stephenwitmer_you-gotta-love-...
I can imagine also uploading a component library that this thing then uses the components from, to add styling for higher-fidelity designs, and allow app designers/builders to just use the components built by an internal team (who might also use magic patterns, I suppose).
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.
Some of the designers are indeed now skipping Figma, a direct quote from one of them (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stephenwitmer_you-gotta-love-...):
> "I spend 80-90% less time drawing boxes in Figma - and more time using my insights, creativity, and words to create working prototypes [...] - to shorten feedback loops & better communicate vision."
Other designers will use us purely for brainstorming and then use the Magic Patterns Figma Plugin to export. The way this works behind the scenes is we convert the HTML to Figma nodes (https://www.magicpatterns.com/docs/documentation/get-started...)
We are rolling out a reusable components feature. If you hit us up in our support chat or email me: alex [at] magicpatterns.com I can add you to the feature flag!
I made a part of this using your tool : https://www.heated.studio/
Congratulations on the launch
In the earliest days of the product, we were hyper-focused on custom component libraries. We connected to Github repos and then fetched the relevant components for every prompt. We no longer do that because the models got a lot better and most customers don't care about the code, they care about the visual output. But this lead to us always caring a lot about consistency. Still iterating on that every day.