Why now?
Galileo AI just launched their public beta and raised their seed round led by Khosla Ventures, it's an interesting tool that I think lots of people could leverage to communicate ideas and learn a bit about product design.A few notable features:
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Text to UI: the standard format we've come to know through other LLM interfaces, I think this un-opinionated interface is good for people who generally have an inkling of an idea but bad for getting down to specifics as a co-pilot for a designer or PM. It's nice that it gives you multiple outputs to riff on, from what I can tell it tries to generally keep them distinct enough that it's an easy choice which one to proceed with.
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Image to UI: Use images or wireframes to generate hi-fi designs. I think this could be neat for exploring different design patterns. as simple as uploading a post-it note and adding some context, it seems.
Testing the tool
My first prompt with Galileo was focused on seeing how far I could stretch the tool, and how far it would propagate things like style requests. Its output was three fairly distinct designs. Each one has glaring faults/fallacies immediately obvious to me but could be good starting points for working off of.
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/read-cv/image/upload/c_limit,h_2048,w_2048/v1/1/pages/dZYy1hUn8Ud6iIoIHOvn2T6UGXI3/1kUhVRwrCTr7ONfS1Rsy/6f003093-ade9-4b4c-85fd-6b7a91bc9eaf.png?_a=DATAdtfiZAA0)
Interestingly Galileo then allows you to:
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"Choose" which design to riff on by selecting "Edit" indicating to the tool to focus on this single frame. Interestingly in my next prompt I mentioned I liked a feature from one frame and wanted to apply it to the others, but it chose to focus on the first frame and modify that instead.
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Export the design into figma (copy+paste). It generates a pretty gnarly design for you, with everything auto-layouted or absolutely positioned, making quickly changing the design in figma a bit of a nightmare.
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Edit the theme of your designs quickly, this is a nice touch that allows you to quickly see the difference between tones (playful, very round v. sharp, more masculine etc.)
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/read-cv/image/upload/c_limit,h_2048,w_2048/v1/1/pages/dZYy1hUn8Ud6iIoIHOvn2T6UGXI3/1kUhVRwrCTr7ONfS1Rsy/11a4188c-e565-4742-82a8-ba44478e288b.png?_a=DATAdtfiZAA0)
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/read-cv/image/upload/c_limit,h_2048,w_2048/v1/1/pages/dZYy1hUn8Ud6iIoIHOvn2T6UGXI3/1kUhVRwrCTr7ONfS1Rsy/f5ad1d3d-3fd2-4deb-aafa-8abd0698f824.png?_a=DATAdtfiZAA0)
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/read-cv/image/upload/c_limit,h_2048,w_2048/v1/1/pages/dZYy1hUn8Ud6iIoIHOvn2T6UGXI3/1kUhVRwrCTr7ONfS1Rsy/e5d130f9-531d-4dbb-bad3-043e761205b2.png?_a=DATAdtfiZAA0)
Who is it for?
So, after testing the tool I have a few thoughts about how something like this can and should be used.
Is this for designers?
This is for designers in the same way Dribbble is for designers—this is a cool tool to quickly get inspired and explore different looks and feels for features. It's not a tool for designing, yet. I think we, in the next one to two years, will see a tool like this that is for designing.
Is this for product managers and engineers?
This could be a great tool for communicating your ideas visually, or testing out a theory, as a PM. I would caution anyone in product from using this as a tool to spin up a design based on your PRD or as a shortcut to design heuristics/pattern-matching. This isn't a tool that will design with these things in mind. It will design you a page for your product in the same way apartment complexes are made today—cleanly, repetitiously, and without consideration for the user.
Closing thoughts
I think this is a cool proof of concept tool for what a design copilot could feel like outside of a tool like Figma. I'd like to see them push the feature set further. I'd also like to see competition from tools like Figma (I'm sure we will see this at Config '24, and I'm sure it will cost extra), TLDraw, Sketch, etc. We need healthy competition and a solid amount of thought put into how we might interact with AI while designing and solving problems, rather than just being handed un-opinionated LLM interfaces. But this is coming, and it's coming quickly. I'll be looking at more of these tools as they crop up so I can understand how to adapt my workflow to them.