Paul Bakaus (jQuery UI creator, a16z-backed) on why AI-built products still aren’t good
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Paul Bakaus created jQuery UI — code that's reportedly still running on about 6% of the internet. He sold a game-engine startup to Zynga, spent close to a decade at Google, and is now a solo founder backed by a16z building Impeccable, an open-source design skill meant to stop AI coding agents from producing "slop." His actual point in this clip isn't about AI capability. It's about output density. Most AI-agent code is too much code. Most AI-written articles run too long. Most AI-generated design is too cluttered or too verbose. He says the scarce human skill right now isn't generating anything — it's judgment: knowing exactly what to remove. He even admits he had to rewrite his own product-announcement draft from scratch after an AI first pass. His closing line: design is an iterative process, and it has to carry a human point of view. No tool — not code, not design, not writing — one-shots that yet. If you're shipping with AI agents and everything reads "technically fine" but somehow generic, this is the actual diagnosis. It's not a tooling gap. It's an editing gap. Clip credit: Solo Founders — DM for credit or removal requests. submitted by /u/cen6wkf |
