I met Christian yesterday and he showed me the beta of Contextual. It's a tool to pull up production web apps and websites to leverage them as context, to eventually directly manipulate and experiment with it.
The gap Contextual is filling is real: leveraging live production websites and apps for better context while working with LLMs. Not only is it giving context. Contextual generates entire new features, based on the exact apps or websites design principles.
The example Christian demonstrated was impressive. In Contextual he navigated to Airbnb (just like you would do in a browser) and scrolled down in a listing detail, to add a new section after the Map section. He then described what he wanted to add and the LLM put out several different versions of it. Every version was slightly different but always in line with the Airbnb core design principles.
I can see the value here. In my past I was often experimenting with different approaches that we first had to design, develop and then production testing it with different user groups. The build cycle is a nightmare and the quantified results came in late. With Contextual you'll design (not really, since you only write and decide - which is an important part in design) the feature. The beauty: it is being visually put in the production environment, to see if it is working in the overall context.
Hand-off
This is gold! With Contextual you're not only generating the designs. There is actual code being generated that can be directly used. Don't know about the overall quality but I assume it will take the codebase of the app or website I am manipulating.
What I wish for
Working demo, I know. There is plenty of cool stuff coming. Without knowing the actual planned features here are my 2 cents: I'd love to have a probability determination. Whenever several versions of a new feature have been generated, there is a score of how well a specific version would perform. This would help young designers or developer teams without designers. This matters!
Thinking out loud about the code hand-off: Decided for a certain feature variation? Then just pull the remote repo, create a new branch and push to staging. All in Contextual. Devs then only need to review and push to production. Done. How cool would that be?
Anyways. There is a lot to unpack but I feel with Contextual Christian and Emanuel are already filling gaps. Thanks for the discussion!