Extremely proud of this article I wrote for the legendary @lennysan! This is the culmination of months of research into why most AI designs are slop, and my top techniques for fixing this. LLMs can be super creative, but as we post-train them more and more, we stifle that creativity. We train them to predict tokens that balance everyone’s preferences. But good design does the opposite: it’s risky, bold, and opinionated. You have to put your LLM in a different state of mind to get this kind of design from it. You have to break out of the average slop, into the fringes of the bell curve where unseen ideas live. This post is all about how to do that. Hope it helps, and let me know if I should go deeper on any of this for future posts!