Design at the Speed of Adjectives
Paul Bakaus
- When
- Wednesday, July 11:30 PM – 1:50 PM · 20 min
- Where
- Track 6San Francisco, CA · imported from ai.engineer's public schedule feed
About this session
Every design tool today operates at the wrong level of abstraction for AI-assisted engineering. Traditional tools give you padding sliders and color pickers, built for a world where designer and engineer are separate roles moving at separate speeds. Prompt-to-design tools one-shot a pretty landing page from a sentence, which is more dangerous because it looks like it's working. No serious design director hears a prompt and starts pushing pixels. The brief comes first. What's the emotional territory? What should this not feel like? Today's AI tools skip that discovery entirely. The result is output without intent. Technically competent, strategically empty. The right abstraction for a world where the designer is also the engineer lives between these extremes. Not pixels. Not prompts. Adjectives. "Make it feel warmer." "Strip it to its essence." "Add tension." These are the controls a creative director actually thinks in. Drawing on lessons from building Impeccable, an open source design tool with 24 adjective-level commands like /bolder, /quieter, and /distill, I'll share what worked, what didn't, and how to apply this thinking to any AI interface where creative intent matters more than parameter control.
Speaker
Founder, Renaissance Geek, Inc.
Paul Bakaus is a product engineer, two-time founder, and creative technologist. He's the CEO and founder of Renaissance Geek, Inc., an AI startup emerging from stealth. Its first project, Impeccable, is an open-source design skill, cli and extension that de-slops the design models produce out-of-the-box, and allows live visual iteration with a rich command palette in your production code base. Before Renaissance Geek, Paul spent 20+ years building at the intersection of code, design, and culture. He created jQuery UI in 2007, still running on millions of sites. At Google, he shipped Chrome DevTools features, helped speed up the web with AMP, made it visual with Web Stories, and became Google's first Head of Creator Relations. Most recently, at Spotter, he built Spotter Studio, giving YouTubers back their most precious resource: time. His mission: move the human-AI interface past the chat box, and build AI tools for everyone, not just engineers.
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For developers: this programme is open data — JSON, iCal, schedule XML and an MCP endpoint.Show endpointsHide
- JSONEvery published session and speaker, in one request./aie-worldsfair-2026-import/feed.json
- iCalSubscribe in Google, Apple or Outlook Calendar./aie-worldsfair-2026-import/feed.ics
- Schedule XMLfrab / pentabarf — the format conference apps import./aie-worldsfair-2026-import/feed.xml
- MCP + RESTPoint Claude at the programme. OpenAPI 3.1 included./agents
No key, no signup, CORS open. Everything here is generated from the same data the organisers edit.