Imagination Engineering — Eve Bouffard, Head of Design, Y Combinator

Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for coming. I'm actually really surprised that the room is so full, because Imagination Engineering is like a really weird term, and I'm really surprised that you showed up to learn more about it. Um, the reason I called this talk Imagination Engineering is because I've been thinking about

how incredibly capable the recent models are, especially today with Fable 5 coming back, and I think that the new bottleneck will be to come up with, like, crazy ideas, because it's going to be really easy to one-shot absolutely everything and anything very soon.

And so I think that the thing that we can reflect on that will be the most valuable for the worldright now is how to stretch our mind, and how to invent things that don't think are possibleright now. And the reason I took this, um, that I created with ChatGPT, this image, it's the library of Alexandria, which was like the center of knowledge many thousand years ago, and I feel like we're in a very similar period in our in the human historyright now, where we should be thinking about how to consolidate all the knowledge and how to create more knowledge for our species.

Um, and so I thought I thought today I could share with you a really weird experiment that I started, uh, a week ago. And I was one of the or, if you don't know, I work at YC. I lead design at YC, and I have the privilege to work with wonderful, wonderful minds.

The partners there are incredible. The engineers that I get to work with are phenomenal. And, um, there's a wonderful person that I used to work with at YC, and he is now at Conductor. Um, his name is Lewis, and he created a Slack channel in the Conductor Slack called Lewis Thoughts.

And ever since then, he's been sharing his stream of consciousness of everything that hits his mind. And it is a way for everyone on the Conductor team to see what's going on in his mind as he's thinking about features and how to make the product better.

And I was heavily inspired by his approach, and I did the same for the YC Slack, and I created Eve Thoughts. And for a week, I've been brain dumping everything that has crossed my mind. And two days ago, I asked Opus 4.8 I wish it was Fable, but it was Opus 4.8 on Saturday to make a website that encapsulates all the thoughts that I had in the last week.

And it came up with something that is quite magical and phenomenal, and I kind of felt like, um, it was AGI. And I'm excited to share with you the result and to share the wonder and the awe that I feel towards technology currently.

Um, maybe just take a take a step back before I show you the website. I work at YC, and one of the big reasons why I work at YC is, many probably know about this wonderful mind, Paul Graham, is arguably one of the most intricate minds in our generation, and it's one of the reasons why I work at YC.

And, um, what I think is truly phenomenal about PG is that not only he's a phenomenal thinker and phenomenal brain, but he also shares his brain and how his mind works with the world. And one of the main reasons why YC has been so successful is because his essays are still echoing to this day, and people are applying to YC because of his essays.

And, um, I've been thinking, you know, we hear very often about, like, building in public, you know, building open source or, like, sharing how you build things. But what about thinking in public? And it's basically what PG is doing, thinking in public.

And this is the experiment that I wanted to run with Eve Thoughts, the Slack channel on the YC channel, the YC Slack. It was, what if I thought in public and I allowed a few people that I highly trust at YC to have access to my stream of consciousness?

And it does feel a little bit sci-fi, um, but at the same time, it's sort of an experiment that I really wanted to see the light of, um, and see where it goes. So I can show you an experiment.

I can show you actually what it looks like. Uh, EveBouffard.com. And so this was an iteration uh, no, it was actually like an aggregation of all the thoughts that I've been dumping in this Eve Slack channel for a week.

And it picked up on the fact that I love art, and so it allows me to customize the background here. Um, it picked up on some of the quotes that I truly admire. It picked up on the projects that I've been working on at YC, picked up on some of the media that I've been doing.

It picked up on the tools that I use on a daily basis. It picked up on all the books that have changed my life. Some of them are in French because I grew up speaking French up until I was 21.

Um, the books that I want to read, some quotes when when my favorite quote of all time is PG quote that says, "Live in the future and then build what's missing." And I feel like it's a great prompt for everyone here.

How can we live in the future and build and then build what's missing? Um, oh, another so there's this famous quote by Steve Job, like, "Computers are the bicycle of their minds." And Gary always says that with Fable and these, um, insanely capable models, it's like a rocket mind, like a rocket ship for the minds.

It's no longer a bicycle. Um, which I loved. He made me laugh, like, on Sunday when he said that. Um, and it also picked up on, like, a train of thought, um, and, like, many, many thoughts, because my brain has many, many thoughts.

It's actually, like, sometimes overflowing with thoughts. So I was able to capture everything as I was brain dumping in the Slack channel. Um, I can also share a little bit more about the fun things that it came up with.

Like, for example, um, it loves it knows that I love paper shaders. Paper, if you know, it's a new design tool. Um, I can show you the website if you want. I love their product, and I specifically love their shaders.

I think I can do it here. Specifically love their shaders. They're all plot code compatible, and you can use them for all your creative projects. And so, uh, whoops, it picked up on this, and it allows me to apply shaders to my background.

I can hide this, and you can you get to see the most beautiful pieces of art in human history with some very fun shaders, which is kind of fun. You can do this here, and then you can even, like, customize all these things.

And I think the future of design will be just a lot of sliders.

Um, and I can revert. And it also allowed me to, uh I can, like, do dark mode for the reader. Um, it allows me to customize absolutely everything about the font and typeface and the width, everything. Oh, if you speak foreign languages, it also converted or translated everything that is on the website depending on whatever language you want.

But I think going back to the how to think in public and how to build in public, I wanted to experiment with, okay, what if I made sort of a dashboard of what this website consists of? And so what is the stack of this website?

And also some of the an early version of a design system to keep everything consistent. Um, I also experimented with Toolkit to allow to hold myself accountable to make sure that everything about this, um, this project as a web page is, uh, complete.

And so Claude made this really lovely list of all the things that I should be that I should hit, including, like, an open graph picture and things like that. Um, but yeah, there's so many things that I want to show here.

So I asked it to create a voice R&D, which, um, it picked up on all the writings that it could find on the internet that was written by me, including my tweets and everything. And then it made it distilled it into an MD file that is my tone and what makes me unique as a person.

And it's kind of crazy to read it. And I asked it to do the same for my for the design language of this website. And whenever I make a, uh, a change to the design of this website or I create a new, uh, component, it automatically updates it.

Um, and I can also show I created a few skills for myself that I can invoke at any given point. Um, but the real, real fun project that I wanted to show today was we're in Imagination Engineering, and so thinking about how the most beautiful, fertile minds in history were thinking and what is the commonality between all of these beautiful minds.

And so this morning, started at 10:00 a.m. at my favorite coffee shop in the marina, uh, with Opus 4.8 because Fable was not out at this point, I created this really fun tool. I call it Shape of Minds, and it's a way for us to find commonality across different dimensions of the most beautiful brains in the history of humanity.

Um, and I can show you a little bit. It is, uh, highly responsive. You can just hover over all of these beautiful minds, and it tells you what makes this person unique or in the dimension of thinking, for example, how was Bach, um, unique?

And it's all, like, you can see the sparkiest minds, uh, based on these different dimensions. So I wanted to explore their thinking, their obsessions, their quirks, their origins. You know, it's interesting because here, example, there are a lot of Germans in these, uh, in these great minds.

Um, their routine, prolific output, workaholic, unsurprisingly, I guess, for love, interests, worldview, religion, habits, knowledge. And because I didn't want to bore you too much with all of this overload of information, I asked Fable to come up with the highlights, the most interesting things that it picked up on, uh, when it came to the commonality or spikiness of some of these minds across the different dimensions.

And there are really interesting things, and I'm going to discover them with you because I haven't had time to read them before, uh, presenting here, because this was generated about 20 minutes ago,right before. Um, so let's see. I guess people these people like to argue.

Um, a lot of them were childless. Uh, not sure what this means. Um, oh, yeah, Naps. Naps were very popular among the best minds. Um, they barely ate. This is an interesting one. Um, and yeah, anyway, all of this is public, so if you want to, uh, look at the highlights, it's, um, it's quite soul-nourishing and mind-nourishing to look at this.

Um, and I also created a design. So if you had not, um, picked up on this, the entire design language of this tool that I built this morning was in celebration of the Fable 5 campaign that came back.

Um, and so I asked, uh, Fable to extract all the butterflies from this and then turn them into individual components that I can use for the design language of this project.

Um, what else can I share? Um, oh, this is a MD of it's a glossary of all the information that is displayed on this project, super easily readable by the agents, and it's a lot more efficient than having the agent look at this page, obviously.

And funny enough, I made this page this morning when I started working on this project, and I knew that I had, um, a deadline to hit. And so I made a timer for myself, uh, when I started at 10:00 a.m.

so that I knew exactly how much time I had to work on this project to accomplish the task that I needed to accomplish. Um, and yeah, it's all, like, software on demand. Whatever, like, whenever stream of consciousness you have, you should just ask an agent to do it for you.

Um, like, all of this is AI. I generated this picture, which I kind of thought was cool. You can probably recognize some of these cool faces, like Da Vinci, Salvador, uh, Dalí, Marie Curie, Nikola Tesla, Einstein.

Um, and yeah, there are only I have five minutes left. What can I share? Um, I can share

I can share so I love to make people smile. I love to make people smile when I can. And, um, a great way for me to make people smile is to use a lot of emojis, um, especially in the company Slack.

And, um, it was always a pain to find the emoji that I wanted to use to make people smile in the Slack. It was, like, very inefficient for me to find that. So I created this tool for myself where I can just, like, search for a random fun stupid Slack emoji as a reaction, um, for my Slack.

And same thing for these here. They're kind of fun, specifically like this one. Um, and this is, like, the regular iOS emoji picker, which I kind of always struggle with. I never find the thing that I'm looking for, and so I just build it for myself.

And you can, like, by click, just copy. Um, another fun thing that I built is I always, you know, we're all students of life, and we're all trying to learn as much as possible. And with these, these new models, we can learn at a pace that was never possible before.

And so whenever you have a stream of consciousness about something that you'd like to work on, um, you should just ask it. You should you should just ask a model to prepare, like, a little ro like, report for you on this topic.

And that's what I started doing a few, few days ago. All these things are things that I would have that I love to would love to deepen my understanding of and but still make it very efficient. And so I just explored a few concepts, like the 10 principles of good design and, um, like, Renaissance patronage is also something that I'm fascinated by, uh,right now.

And so it just cooked up, like, a short, very short report, uh, for me that I can digest as I'm on my way to work or I'm coming back from an event or something like that. Um, that's why I'm so excited about Cloud workspaces as well, is because it's going to be very possible very soon with Conductor Cloud to be able to spin off a bunch of agents on the go, um, as I'm, like, traveling from one place to another.

Um, but yeah, I feel like I can, uh, I can stop there. I don't want to overload you with a lot of things, but there's another interesting thing that I created. It's, like, the backlog of all the changes on this website as I was making, uh, the final tweaks to the Shape of Mind, uh, a few minutes ago, 25 minutes ago.

And you can see, like, the evolution of that repo over time. Um, but yeah, I guess I can I can end early, and if you have questions, I am happy to take it, uh, to take questions. All of this is an experiment, and I would love to learn from you guys on how you're experimenting with models.

Um, yeah.