Telling AI to design is hard

Ben Tossell has released Design Words, a work-in-progress site intended to help non-designers describe design styles and layouts to AI agents, he wrote in a post for Ben's Bites.

The tool acts as a prompt or instruction builder: users select styles and components, and it produces text they can copy to prompt an agent. Tossell said explaining design styles, layouts and components is difficult for non-designers because the field has its own language, and he wanted a site with pre-filled styles that could be tweaked or shuffled to find the words to tell an agent what he wants.

According to Tossell's account, the project grew out of prototyping work. He generated 11 versions in one round, with v8 his front-runner at that stage, and later added a shuffle button that generates a site in the chosen styles. He described using Pi with Fable 5.1 for early brainstorming and Factory's Droid for building, including subagents for design critiques. He said he used GLM 5.3 through Droid Core for general fixes and Fable for larger design work and orchestration, and that he has since started using Deepseek v4 Flash as a daily driver.

Tossell wrote that he created a new folder, style-picker, and had Droid set up a design.md file describing the site's design system. For publishing, the site is deployed through here.now and made available at bensbites.com/design-words using a Cloudflare Worker proxy, since bensbites.com is hosted on Cloudflare.

He reported the behind-the-build figures as 38 sessions, including subagent threads, and 116 prompts across roughly two days of on-and-off work. Token usage was listed as 150K for the idea phase, 27.4M for prototyping and 353.5M for building. Tossell said there is lots more work to do and asked for feedback and feature requests, telling readers the tool is still in progress.