The next afternoon, instead of a new iteration of the calculator, Chris unveiled his new approach, which he called “the Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set”. Every decision regarding graphical attributes of the calculator were parameterized by pull-down menus. You could select line thicknesses, button sizes, background patterns, etc.
Steve took a look at the new program, and immediately started fiddling with the parameters. After trying out alternatives for ten minutes or so, he settled on something that he liked. When I implemented the calculator UI (Donn Denman did the math semantics) for real a few months later, I used Steve’s design, and it remained the standard calculator on the Macintosh for many years, all the way up through OS 9.
This story is one of those that has just stuck with me even after all these years after reading the Steve Jobs book by Walter Isaacson. The link has the full story which isn’t that long and worth the read.
I think potentially it takes on a new significance in the age of AI where instead of asking the AI to make a change and waiting for it to create the code and regenerate whatever, you instead ask for a tool to get quick feedback on new iterations. It works for UI but also probably other things too, anything that needs fast feedback.