ben

@contraben • 15,214 subscribers

building @contra and @contralabs_ai

Shorts

For Anthropic’s Claude Design, your opening prompt sets the ceiling of the project. If your prompt is a comprehensive brief, it will land somewhere near production-ready Seems obvious, but here is something interesting we observed: one designer wrote: >16 prompts >climbed in specificity over the session >and still finished worse than they started A single "reconsider" prompt at iteration 2 tanked output quality by -0.7 and the session never recovered. 2/3 of every prompt typed across all 5 sessions was refinement or correction. TLDR: Your first move is the whole game. and prompting is an art. What a time to be alive.

For Anthropic’s Claude Design, your opening prompt sets the ceiling of the project. If your prompt is a comprehensive brief, it will land somewhere near production-ready Seems obvious, but here is something interesting we observed: one designer wrote: >16 prompts >climbed in specificity over the session >and still finished worse than they started A single "reconsider" prompt at iteration 2 tanked output quality by -0.7 and the session never recovered. 2/3 of every prompt typed across all 5 sessions was refinement or correction. TLDR: Your first move is the whole game. and prompting is an art. What a time to be alive.

229,536 Aufrufe

Fable is back (enjoy the final hours of in-sub usage) so we made it fight Anthropic's Opus 4.8: >5 real landing page and portfolio briefs, built in Claude Code, >judged blind by 9 working designers across 90 matchups. Fable's best brief won 88.9% of its head-to-heads. Its worst output only won 11.1%. The difference was the brief 🧵

Fable is back (enjoy the final hours of in-sub usage) so we made it fight Anthropic's Opus 4.8: >5 real landing page and portfolio briefs, built in Claude Code, >judged blind by 9 working designers across 90 matchups. Fable's best brief won 88.9% of its head-to-heads. Its worst output only won 11.1%. The difference was the brief 🧵

104,724 Aufrufe

In our Anthropic Claude Design study, 5 designers approved a design system before they typed their first prompt. >Brand palette >type system >components the whole thing all set up. Only 1 of them named any of it in their opening prompt. That designer was the only one to finish production-ready. The other 4 assumed Claude would carry the system over. It didn't. TLDR: Claude doesn't reliably carry the design system you just approved. If you don't name it in the prompt, it doesn’t exist. It's never been a better time to be a designer, but you must learn the art of the prompt.

163,778 Aufrufe

hey x, Contra Labs is hiring Researchers in SF/NY that are interested in making AI better for creativity. You will collaborate directly with the frontier labs on cutting edge projects that directly impact the tools creatives use every single day tag someone who could be interested!

hey x, Contra Labs is hiring Researchers in SF/NY that are interested in making AI better for creativity. You will collaborate directly with the frontier labs on cutting edge projects that directly impact the tools creatives use every single day tag someone who could be interested!

20,188 Aufrufe

What is the best video editing agent for short form social? Does it actually work? We watched professional video editors, step by step, as they built short-form social reels in Adobe Premiere Pro. Today we're open-sourcing this preview dataset on Hugging Face, to make AI agents better at editing videos. The data set is 234 annotated steps across 4 computer-use trajectories. Editors narrated their reasoning aloud as they worked, so every step pairs a screenshot with the expert's own thought, a structured action, and executable grounding: >a Premiere MCP tool call, keyboard shortcut, menu path, or coordinate click. >The format follows the AgentNet trajectory schema, extended with a Premiere action taxonomy and multi-path execution. ***That makes it directly usable for computer-use agent SFT, reasoning mid-training, tool-use and function calling, and benchmarking agents against a human expert baseline. Enjoy!

What is the best video editing agent for short form social? Does it actually work? We watched professional video editors, step by step, as they built short-form social reels in Adobe Premiere Pro. Today we're open-sourcing this preview dataset on Hugging Face, to make AI agents better at editing videos. The data set is 234 annotated steps across 4 computer-use trajectories. Editors narrated their reasoning aloud as they worked, so every step pairs a screenshot with the expert's own thought, a structured action, and executable grounding: >a Premiere MCP tool call, keyboard shortcut, menu path, or coordinate click. >The format follows the AgentNet trajectory schema, extended with a Premiere action taxonomy and multi-path execution. ***That makes it directly usable for computer-use agent SFT, reasoning mid-training, tool-use and function calling, and benchmarking agents against a human expert baseline. Enjoy!

39,867 Aufrufe

It's never been a better time to be creative. (ever) The two best frontier models (ever) have been released within 30 days of each other. Here’s what we learned from running 4 frontier models head to head. >Sol has taste and Fable takes direction. 10 identical landing page briefs, judged blind by working creatives. GPT 5.6 Sol won 82% on loose briefs. But when handed a real design spec it finished last. 🧵

It's never been a better time to be creative. (ever) The two best frontier models (ever) have been released within 30 days of each other. Here’s what we learned from running 4 frontier models head to head. >Sol has taste and Fable takes direction. 10 identical landing page briefs, judged blind by working creatives. GPT 5.6 Sol won 82% on loose briefs. But when handed a real design spec it finished last. 🧵

35,609 Aufrufe

It's safe to say Meta is back in the game. We ran a blind "style-transfer" tournament with AI at Meta's new Muse Image vs >OpenAI's GPT Image 2 >Google Gemini's Nano Banana Pro >BlackForestLabsAI - Unofficial's FLUX.2. on 10 real world briefs, 55 tournaments, with every output ranked blind by professional working creatives. GPT won the most, but Muse placed top-two in 59%, more than any other model, already beating Nano Banana Pro 👀 (Image reference created with Muse Image btw)

It's safe to say Meta is back in the game. We ran a blind "style-transfer" tournament with AI at Meta's new Muse Image vs >OpenAI's GPT Image 2 >Google Gemini's Nano Banana Pro >BlackForestLabsAI - Unofficial's FLUX.2. on 10 real world briefs, 55 tournaments, with every output ranked blind by professional working creatives. GPT won the most, but Muse placed top-two in 59%, more than any other model, already beating Nano Banana Pro 👀 (Image reference created with Muse Image btw)

36,620 Aufrufe

hey X fam Contra Labs is hiring multiple Strategic Project Leads in NY/SF to work on some very, very... cool projects tag someone who could be interested

hey X fam Contra Labs is hiring multiple Strategic Project Leads in NY/SF to work on some very, very... cool projects tag someone who could be interested

38,387 Aufrufe

who's at Config next week ? Contra Labs is hosting our annual "Config Kick Off Party" on Monday the 22nd for >creatives >researchers >designers to talk about the latest AI powered workflows, the role of human taste in creative work + all things creative intelligence. + a live panel with product leaders from Open AI, Qiver, Krea, and of course Figma See you there! (link in comments)

who's at Config next week ? Contra Labs is hosting our annual "Config Kick Off Party" on Monday the 22nd for >creatives >researchers >designers to talk about the latest AI powered workflows, the role of human taste in creative work + all things creative intelligence. + a live panel with product leaders from Open AI, Qiver, Krea, and of course Figma See you there! (link in comments)

29,461 Aufrufe

Anthropic just shipped Claude Opus 5. It's state of the art for coding, close to Claude Fable 5. So we re-ran our landing page study: >10 client briefs, >4 models, >10 expert designers, >600 blind comparisons, >400 write ups. TLDR: designers liked its words more than its pages. more in the 🧵

Anthropic just shipped Claude Opus 5. It's state of the art for coding, close to Claude Fable 5. So we re-ran our landing page study: >10 client briefs, >4 models, >10 expert designers, >600 blind comparisons, >400 write ups. TLDR: designers liked its words more than its pages. more in the 🧵

14,210 Aufrufe

What are the biggest failure points for AI generated landing pages ? >8 working designers. >40 AI landing pages. >754 failure points found. OpenAI’s Sol fumbles layout Anthropic’s Fable fumbles the finish xAI’s Grok fumbles interaction AI at Meta’s Muse Spark has room to improve across the board Every AI model breaks a landing page in its own signature way. We mapped all 4. 🧵

What are the biggest failure points for AI generated landing pages ? >8 working designers. >40 AI landing pages. >754 failure points found. OpenAI’s Sol fumbles layout Anthropic’s Fable fumbles the finish xAI’s Grok fumbles interaction AI at Meta’s Muse Spark has room to improve across the board Every AI model breaks a landing page in its own signature way. We mapped all 4. 🧵

17,255 Aufrufe

We benchmarked @openai’s ChatGPT Images 2.0 against the top image models. It won everything. Then we asked the harder question: can brand designers really ship with it? Here's where the model breaks.

30,778 Aufrufe

Can AI really do logos ? Seems to be a hot topic. So, we ran 155 blind tournaments with 10 professional brand designers instead to dig in. >OpenAI's GPT Image 2 crushed the field. >Google Gemini's Nano Banana Pro, Microsoft AI's MAI Image 2.5, and AI at Meta's Meta Muse split the scraps. But still, winning a tournament and being production-ready are very different realities. 🧵

15,816 Aufrufe

Kimi K3 just jumped 17 places to #1 on Arena.ai's Frontend Code Arena. So we gave it real client work to see where leaderboards meet reality: >10 landing page briefs, >judged blind by 8 working designers >against GPT 5.6 Sol, Gemini 3.5 Flash, and Claude Fable 5. It tied the best model in the study. And on detailed briefs, it won. Details in 🧵:

Kimi K3 just jumped 17 places to #1 on Arena.ai's Frontend Code Arena. So we gave it real client work to see where leaderboards meet reality: >10 landing page briefs, >judged blind by 8 working designers >against GPT 5.6 Sol, Gemini 3.5 Flash, and Claude Fable 5. It tied the best model in the study. And on detailed briefs, it won. Details in 🧵:

13,798 Aufrufe

We ran a blind head-to-head on the leading image models for one specific job: >product detail shots. Seedream 5.0 Lite (BytePlus, ByteDance) beat the flagship models from Google, OpenAI, and Black Forest Labs. It won 2 out of 3 times.

We ran a blind head-to-head on the leading image models for one specific job: >product detail shots. Seedream 5.0 Lite (BytePlus, ByteDance) beat the flagship models from Google, OpenAI, and Black Forest Labs. It won 2 out of 3 times.

26,202 Aufrufe

For Google Gemini, your prompt is the difference between Client V1 and Production Ready. We observed 10 designers going through a real world campaign workflow: >Hero stills >Social cuts >Secondary assets total: 29 deliverables. Only 24% were "Production Ready" And they all wrote prompts the same way. Below are the prompts and outputs 👇⬇️

For Google Gemini, your prompt is the difference between Client V1 and Production Ready. We observed 10 designers going through a real world campaign workflow: >Hero stills >Social cuts >Secondary assets total: 29 deliverables. Only 24% were "Production Ready" And they all wrote prompts the same way. Below are the prompts and outputs 👇⬇️

21,383 Aufrufe

Wow, killer work from the Krea team 👀 Krea 2 Large is the #2 style-transfer model, already closing in on GPT Image 2. Average Style Fidelity gap from Krea's latest model to OpenAI's GPT Image 2: 0.14 points. Gap from Krea to the rest of the field: more than 4x larger. Full study below.

Wow, killer work from the Krea team 👀 Krea 2 Large is the #2 style-transfer model, already closing in on GPT Image 2. Average Style Fidelity gap from Krea's latest model to OpenAI's GPT Image 2: 0.14 points. Gap from Krea to the rest of the field: more than 4x larger. Full study below.

20,158 Aufrufe

"Spotify Wrapped" was built with Rive. LinkedIn's "Year End Review" was built in Rive. The UI inside of every BMW is built with Rive. And now, Rive just launched Scripting! Want to try it out, and win $5k? Today we are launching the "Scripting with Rive" challenge on Contra. What are you going to build ?

"Spotify Wrapped" was built with Rive. LinkedIn's "Year End Review" was built in Rive. The UI inside of every BMW is built with Rive. And now, Rive just launched Scripting! Want to try it out, and win $5k? Today we are launching the "Scripting with Rive" challenge on Contra. What are you going to build ?

32,925 Aufrufe

Convergence on quality, divergence on taste. >Across our Contra Labs benchmark >12 frontier models from OpenAI Google DeepMind Black Forest Labs ByteDance >across 5 creative domains ~15,000 evaluator judgments this theme dominated.

Convergence on quality, divergence on taste. >Across our Contra Labs benchmark >12 frontier models from OpenAI Google DeepMind Black Forest Labs ByteDance >across 5 creative domains ~15,000 evaluator judgments this theme dominated.

16,690 Aufrufe

Can Adobe Firefly's "Edit" feature compete with Photoshop? Select a region, describe the fix, keep the rest of the frame intact. That's the pitch. Here’s what we observed across 4 sessions and 8 targeted edits with real working creatives: >1 edit landed cleanly 🥇 >5 landed partial 🥈 >2 missed entirely ❌ Firefly understood the request almost every time, it just couldn't hold the rest of the image still while executing it. Avoiding drift is hard. In the partials, the target moved but something else broke. >A product lost prominence / focus >A shadow stayed broken >A new artifact appeared on the wall while the format crept closer to the brief Social was the hardest category. 0 clean wins across 4 attempts. With social content, crop, pose, and product placement ARE the deliverable, so any drift fails the job. TLDR: Firefly can edit like Photoshop, but avoiding drifts is the real challenge. I personally use this feature a lot, how have you solved for this ?

Can Adobe Firefly's "Edit" feature compete with Photoshop? Select a region, describe the fix, keep the rest of the frame intact. That's the pitch. Here’s what we observed across 4 sessions and 8 targeted edits with real working creatives: >1 edit landed cleanly 🥇 >5 landed partial 🥈 >2 missed entirely ❌ Firefly understood the request almost every time, it just couldn't hold the rest of the image still while executing it. Avoiding drift is hard. In the partials, the target moved but something else broke. >A product lost prominence / focus >A shadow stayed broken >A new artifact appeared on the wall while the format crept closer to the brief Social was the hardest category. 0 clean wins across 4 attempts. With social content, crop, pose, and product placement ARE the deliverable, so any drift fails the job. TLDR: Firefly can edit like Photoshop, but avoiding drifts is the real challenge. I personally use this feature a lot, how have you solved for this ?

13,452 Aufrufe

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Introducing Contra Payments. The first payments platform that lets you sell to AI Agents. RT + Comment “Contra” and I’ll send you 100 products AI agents are looking for.

Introducing Contra Payments. The first payments platform that lets you sell to AI Agents. RT + Comment “Contra” and I’ll send you 100 products AI agents are looking for.

2,283,027 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

Introducing the Human Creativity Benchmark. The first eval that scores AI models the way creative experts do.

Introducing the Human Creativity Benchmark. The first eval that scores AI models the way creative experts do.

399,491 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

Introducing Contra Labs. The first frontier data and evaluation lab for Creative AI.

Introducing Contra Labs. The first frontier data and evaluation lab for Creative AI.

449,540 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten

We all know AI has a "taste" problem. We measured it. It’s (somewhat) fixable, but AI judges can't replace human creative judgement. Introducing Design Crit. New research from Contra Labs and Lica World, now live on arXiv.org

We all know AI has a "taste" problem. We measured it. It’s (somewhat) fixable, but AI judges can't replace human creative judgement. Introducing Design Crit. New research from Contra Labs and Lica World, now live on arXiv.org

135,419 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

Big congrats to the Ideogram team on v4. We tested it blind against Google Gemini 3.1, Grok Grok Imagine, and Black Forest Labs FLUX.2 [max] with >10 professional designers > across 240 images Quick thread on it's strengths and how to prompt it 👇

Big congrats to the Ideogram team on v4. We tested it blind against Google Gemini 3.1, Grok Grok Imagine, and Black Forest Labs FLUX.2 [max] with >10 professional designers > across 240 images Quick thread on it's strengths and how to prompt it 👇

26,597 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

It's Launch Day Contra and this is one of our biggest launches yet. 🚀. Today we are launching Portfolio Magic, an AI powered portfolio builder with built in 💸payments 📈analytics 💰contracts, proposals, invoices + a ton of platform upgrades as well. More in the 🧵

It's Launch Day Contra and this is one of our biggest launches yet. 🚀. Today we are launching Portfolio Magic, an AI powered portfolio builder with built in 💸payments 📈analytics 💰contracts, proposals, invoices + a ton of platform upgrades as well. More in the 🧵

180,708 Aufrufe • vor 3 Jahren

hey X fam Contra Labs is hiring an Human Computer Interaction Researcher in SF / NY. Tag someone who could be interested.

hey X fam Contra Labs is hiring an Human Computer Interaction Researcher in SF / NY. Tag someone who could be interested.

31,831 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

the biggest complaints we get at Contra are 1. not enough leads 2. clients dont respond to applications the reality is, job boards are dead.. the best way to find new projects is from your own network. Today we are launching Indy, and its going to change everything.

the biggest complaints we get at Contra are 1. not enough leads 2. clients dont respond to applications the reality is, job boards are dead.. the best way to find new projects is from your own network. Today we are launching Indy, and its going to change everything.

59,260 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

we are officially past the "creatives will be replaced" phase of the AI adoption cycle product leaders from the best creative AI companies in the world think that creativity will be more important than ever, it will just look different than it does today. thanks again Adele Li vicc Joan Rodriguez and Rodrigo Davies for the great panel.

we are officially past the "creatives will be replaced" phase of the AI adoption cycle product leaders from the best creative AI companies in the world think that creativity will be more important than ever, it will just look different than it does today. thanks again Adele Li vicc Joan Rodriguez and Rodrigo Davies for the great panel.

13,535 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

Such a great conversation with Chris Leavens from Age of Learning. We discussed his journey from being a freelance illustrator, to working with Stewart Butterfield on Tinyspeck that turned into Slack... and then his journey at Disney creating the top two apps in the app store. I actually learned about Tinyspeck and Glitch from andrew chen's book "The Cold Start Problem". Chris also talks about how Age of Learning uses tools like Rive, Scenario and Figma to make industry leading education products and mobile apps. We even discussed Procreate 's genAI stance vs Adobe's head first dive into AI tooling. So much wisdom on how to evolve and stay true to yourself as a creative. Thanks again Chris for being on the show and sharing your knowledge with the Contra community! As always, on X first!

Such a great conversation with Chris Leavens from Age of Learning. We discussed his journey from being a freelance illustrator, to working with Stewart Butterfield on Tinyspeck that turned into Slack... and then his journey at Disney creating the top two apps in the app store. I actually learned about Tinyspeck and Glitch from andrew chen's book "The Cold Start Problem". Chris also talks about how Age of Learning uses tools like Rive, Scenario and Figma to make industry leading education products and mobile apps. We even discussed Procreate 's genAI stance vs Adobe's head first dive into AI tooling. So much wisdom on how to evolve and stay true to yourself as a creative. Thanks again Chris for being on the show and sharing your knowledge with the Contra community! As always, on X first!

53,994 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Framer is breaking the internet. I’ve been a user and fan since 2020, when we were prototyping the early versions of Contra. Can't believe I get to say this, but today, Framer is launching their new expert network, powered by Contra Want to become a framer expert? ->

Framer is breaking the internet. I’ve been a user and fan since 2020, when we were prototyping the early versions of Contra. Can't believe I get to say this, but today, Framer is launching their new expert network, powered by Contra Want to become a framer expert? ->

55,457 Aufrufe • vor 3 Jahren

6. You can make absurd amounts of money on Contra. Creatives have changed their lives with Contra: Daniel G Bright made $250k in the last year on Contra. Ismel Figueroa made 100K.

6. You can make absurd amounts of money on Contra. Creatives have changed their lives with Contra: Daniel G Bright made $250k in the last year on Contra. Ismel Figueroa made 100K.

14,649 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

Over the last month, Contra teamed up with DANN© to survey over 500,000 independent creators to learn about the tools they use to run their businesses. Excited to share the winners and launch the "Creator Tools Show" here on X, where we discuss the jobs of the future with the people inventing them and interview the creators behind the tools we all use every day. There were some obvious winners like Figma, Canva, Adobe, Framer, Webflow, but also a bunch of new and up and coming tools like Spline, FlutterFlow and Rive all used by creators to run their businesses. You check out all of the winners and honorees here:

Over the last month, Contra teamed up with DANN© to survey over 500,000 independent creators to learn about the tools they use to run their businesses. Excited to share the winners and launch the "Creator Tools Show" here on X, where we discuss the jobs of the future with the people inventing them and interview the creators behind the tools we all use every day. There were some obvious winners like Figma, Canva, Adobe, Framer, Webflow, but also a bunch of new and up and coming tools like Spline, FlutterFlow and Rive all used by creators to run their businesses. You check out all of the winners and honorees here:

38,176 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

People ask me in dm's how to build reputation and get more clients on Contra, but so many people have no idea we have free world class proposal, invoice, escrow and contract tools that you can use to run your business and supercharge your reputation and discoverability at the same time. + it's 100% commission FREE. You can get paid out via bank accounts, paypal, payoneer, USDC etc. We also have some huge upgrades coming to our payouts as well, making it even cheaper for your clients to pay you on Contra. We want to make Contra the best place on the internet to run your business, find new clients and connect with other creatives. More to come 👀

People ask me in dm's how to build reputation and get more clients on Contra, but so many people have no idea we have free world class proposal, invoice, escrow and contract tools that you can use to run your business and supercharge your reputation and discoverability at the same time. + it's 100% commission FREE. You can get paid out via bank accounts, paypal, payoneer, USDC etc. We also have some huge upgrades coming to our payouts as well, making it even cheaper for your clients to pay you on Contra. We want to make Contra the best place on the internet to run your business, find new clients and connect with other creatives. More to come 👀

17,334 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

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