Descriptions:
Y Combinator’s head of design, E Bufar, walks through her fully AI-augmented design workflow in a candid, project-grounded interview. She now works almost exclusively in Conductor — an AI-native design tool — and has eliminated typing from her process entirely by using Aqua, a YC-backed voice-input tool that captures stream-of-consciousness instructions and translates them into design actions. The result is a hands-free, rapid iteration approach that lets her build complete product designs end-to-end without touching a keyboard.
The interview grounds this workflow in three recent YC projects. Paxel is a terminal-based tool that ingests Claude Code and Cursor session transcripts and surfaces behavioral analytics — favorite models, peak frustration moments, commit timing patterns — framed as a “Spotify Wrapped for your coding sessions.” The project was designed to help demystify how developers actually work with coding agents at a time when those practices are still highly individual and opaque. Sodazine (SODA = state-of-the-art) is a San Francisco arts zine notable partly because its cover art was made entirely without AI, a deliberate choice to highlight what human intentionality looks like in contrast to AI-generated work.
A particularly reusable technique Bufar describes is the `soul.md` file: a running project document fed with full meeting transcripts that serves as a single source of truth for design context. By making this file exhaustive, she can feed it to the AI at any point and get decisions that are consistent with the full history of the project — a practical approach to long-context project memory that many designers and developers could adopt immediately.
📺 Source: Y Combinator · Published July 10, 2026
🏷️ Format: Workflow Case Study
