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Lightcone · 3 min · Oct 22, 2026

Bring company context into AI design before prompting

Alex Danilowicz recommends loading company skills, a design system and components before prompting; those guardrails also enabled a detailed 3D theme-park prototype. A small setup investment can reduce repeated direction.

Alex Danilowicz

Alex Danilowicz is cofounder and CEO of Magic Patterns.

Co-founded Magic Patterns, an AI prototyping tool, and grew it profitably to $1M ARR with no employees.

  • Aaron Epstein, Host · General partner, Y Combinator

    Co-founded Creative Market, a design marketplace later sold to Autodesk; hosts YC's Design Review.

About this segment

Alex Danilowicz recommends loading company skills, a design system and components before prompting; those guardrails also enabled a detailed 3D theme-park prototype. A small setup investment can reduce repeated direction.

From “How To Stand Out In A World Of AI Designs”, Oct 22, 2026. Watch the full episode

Answers “Is AI paying off for companies?” See all 9 answers

“spend the 10 minutes to bring in your existing context. It'll save you hours in the long run.”
Alex Danilowiczat 15:14 · Lightcone15:14

Takeaways

  1. Spend 10 minutes adding existing company context first.
  2. Bring in skills, design systems and reusable components.
  3. Components can give AI guardrails for complex designs.
Watch 2:36 from 14:33

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 23:40Animation should explain the product, not just decorate it8:13
  2. 31:51Startup sites need specific, user-centered product explanations5:11
  3. 43:10Daily customer support improves design without sacrificing speed3:05
  4. 18:08A visible prompt can outperform a more creative landing page5:36
  5. 2:00Magic Patterns took nine months of pivots to find paid users2:41

  6. 14:33Bring company context into AI design before prompting2:36

Up next · SourcesGoogle justifies AI spending with demand and capability signals6:53

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 14:41

    integrations with anything you can think of. So prompting is obviously very important here. What's your advice for how people should improve their prompts and get better results from them? Yeah, I think it's leveraging the features that tools offer. I think it's really interesting that I've seen is there's more and more AI enablement teams popping up for that, especially large companies. And what are they doing? They're leveraging things like skills, Agents MD, right? And bringing in your unique context that's relevant to your company. So of course we have, you know, skills feature and magic patterns where you can go ahead and, and add your skills. Or as we were talking about, add your design system and bring in your components. And that's what I always recommend first is like, spend the 10 minutes to bring

  2. 15:24

    in your existing context. It'll save you hours in the long run. What's one of the coolest things that that you've seen created with magic patterns yeah one of the most fun is this roller coaster tycoon theme park uh it's like a chocolate park which is crazy because when we first started this you know you would prompt like a form and it would give you back like a drop down like the models were so bad and now suddenly you know we're seeing folks literally bring in like building entire video game experiences again this is not a very common use case but it's kind of sharing what's possible when the input and output is code and what was this created for this is really just created for fun um you know experimenting with what is possible like in in the browser and actually thinking through how components can help you design in a tool like this right so actually when you think about a

  3. 16:17

    chocolate factory theme park in roller coaster tycoon the track is a component the chocolate bar twister ride is a component the path that guests walk on our components and so when you give the ai those guardrails how can it output like a theme park in one shot or two shots bringing in that context very cool and you can even get right in there see all the little people walking around yeah and again it's amazing we're like this is literally just you know webgl rendering in the in the browser right and we can see that we again the way that we did this is we used a design system that we call the 3D theme park, right?

  4. 16:55

    So I can go ahead and update that to bring in my latest components. And updating it is really as simple as prompting something like no trees,