Telling AI to design is hard
Ben's Bites
Ben built Design Words, a tool that turns design choices into prompts for AI agents. It’s meant to help non-designers say what they want instead of guessing the right jargon.
Based on reporting by Ben's Bites — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Ben has put together a new side project called Design Words, and the whole thing comes from a familiar pain point: design talk is weirdly hard if you’re not already fluent in it. He wanted a way to pick from pre-filled styles, tweak them, and get copy he could hand to an agent to make a site look the way he wanted.
That means the product is less about prompt writing than about seeing things. Ben keeps coming back to the same idea: a visual picker first, a copy prompt button second. The site is supposed to help someone spot a style, adjust things like corners, shadows, palettes, fonts, and font weights, then use the generated text to push an agent in the right direction.
The build process was very much Ben’s usual prototype-and-poke-at-it workflow. He started brainstorming in Pi with Fable 5.1, switched to Factory’s Droid.Prototyping for the real build, and generated 11 versions in one round. Version 8 became the front-runner, then got more tweaking through subagents with fresh context. He also used Opus 5 for critique, and later moved the leading prototype into a new style-picker folder and set up a design.md file so agents could work from a cleaner brief.
There was a lot of model juggling. Droid’s open-source models in Droid Core offered more tokens, so Ben used GLM 5.3 for quick fixes and layout shuffling, while Fable handled bigger design decisions and orchestration. He also said he’s been trying out open-source models more seriously, and mentioned using Deepseek v4 Flash as a daily driver alongside GLM 5.3.
Ben says the tool still isn’t quite right, especially around whether there are too many sites and not enough variation, and whether the shuffle-and-preview flow actually surfaces meaningfully different layouts. But it did get him to prototypes he liked, and he’s now asking for feedback while he keeps tweaking Design Words, which is live at bensbites.com/design-words via here.now and a Cloudflare Worker proxy.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the right instinct: stop pretending prompt text is the product and build the visual control panel people actually need. The annoying part is that half the AI tooling world still worships the blank prompt box like it’s a sacred relic. It isn’t. Sometimes the smartest interface is just a better way to say, “make it look less cursed.”
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