As with interior design for houses, interior design for vehicles is also subject to fashion trends. And like any fashion trend, even the best ideas can become stale and played out with overuse. Some ideas weren’t the best, either, like demonstrably worse human-machine interfaces that add to driver distraction; yet, they still proliferated throughout the industry and across the cars offered for sale. But the good news is that the pushback seems to be working.

“When the trend of the Piano Black and the switchless interior was happening, it was during a time when designers and companies and engineers and everybody were thinking that, 'Hey, we can just get rid of all these switches on the interior. We can put it all in the software. It'll save money. It'll save us tooling up all these extra parts for unique cars and all this stuff and make the interior more like a software experience.' And it was done with those intentions,” said Hiren Patel, senior design manager at Nissan.

That resulted in cars with minimalist interiors that looked good in the dealership. But people drive their cars on roads; they don’t just sit inside them, parked inside a dealership. “So lots of people were complaining about it and saying, 'Hey, it takes my eyes off the road to change the temperature or to adjust my seat or do whatever.' It's not as easy as doing something on your phone where it's just right at your fingertips and intuitive,” Patel said.

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Protein design tools may be getting increasingly sophisticated, but you still need a sophisticated understanding of protein structure for them to work. This can include knowing enzyme mechanisms down to the positions of specific amino acids, as well as the water molecules that also occupy the area where catalysis takes place. Once you specify these, the tools can build the rest of a protein around this target.

A large collaboration of researchers based in China, however, decided to bring protein design to the masses, making a tool that can take natural language prompts and use them to produce proteins with the function you specify. If your measure for success is a working protein, then the success rate may not be great. But they still manage to get the job done. And, in a separate announcement, Hugging Face shared that it's now hosting a tool that does similar things on the DNA level.

The equivalent of vibe coding may have come to protein design—at least if you have access to a lab where you can sort the good designs from the dozens of failed ones.

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