Figma is targeted towards designers who create thoughtful design systems and cohesive UIs and who don't code, while this is targeted towards vibe coders who can't design. Two different circles that intersect to some level.
But like you said, if anthropic adds the tools in Figma, only then they can can take customers from Figma IMO.
Figma is for those who could design but can’t code.
This is for those who could neither design nor code.
The challenge is that this sets an expectation of what "design" is, de-valuing the former and shifting us culturally towards the latter and a space where "design" is seen as a subjective visual exercise with little intrinsic value.
But for the other 95% of people, being able to just say "ok can you make it look more modern" and have 4 variants in 5 mins, (like me) Figma will lose users like me.
But then again I was never a "designer" – more a builder.
Same here. I work in Claude Code all day long on slightly complex b2b apps, and the builder MVP for what I want to do with Claude.ai, to work on ideas is far simpler.
I just want to be able to create a React artifact prototype on claude.ai, then share it privately with a stakeholder (internal or external.) I want to allow those users to prompt changes, then see their changes in the artifact.
The bespoke design is not what I am really worried about at this phase. For b2b prototype stuff, claude.ai already does an excellent job with just a bit of project-specific prompting.
Why is this shared artifact building not yet doable? This seems "so simple." Yes, maybe some shared artifact specific git to allow version control is required, but is my ask really that hard, or unique?
The Anthropic video on that page at 0:53 literally shows them clicking a "knobs" button and adjusting the pixel CSS value.
I know it's not exactly the same ... but it has that functionality to a degree.
I've never paid for a figma seat. A couple of employers have so that I can collaborate with designers in the product, but I don't think this changes that.
In an era where it's cheaper and more common to end up at that undifferentiated state, the ability for companies to make their products go above and beyond it is more valuable, not less.
I see this across the board with AI. It lowers the bar to get to passable, but as slop fills the internet we're already seeing people place more value in good products, good writing, good art, thoughtful code architecture, etc. Everyone and their cousin's uber driver is vibe coding a SaaS startup no one's going to pay for right now.
If you are talking about a consumer product, one of these is not like the others.
You also clearly misread what I said. I didn't say I spent 5 minutes prompting an LLM. I say the ability to get FEEDBACK (a revision) in 5 minutes is amazing. And I stand by that. That allows me to do 20 more revisions and do in a couple of hours what would take two weeks.
You seem to be romanticizing the concept of grunt work – that for something to have value or be of good quality, you have to put in some sort of minimum amount of time on it, and it has to be tedious. It's the same concept that nobody can make a good quality piece of furniture unless they used a hand saw and spoke sweet nothings to the tree before it was cut.
There are ways to do things quicker while preserving quality. I had already left a caveat saying that for the 5% of people that really want to push web design forward, totally, go ahead. But for the rest of us (including those of us who have lived and breathed code and engineering principles for decades), these tools are phenomenal for iterating quickly.
Anyway, the term builder is more about separating the goals from a vanilla "programmer" - even though i've programmed my whole life, it's always been in service of an outcome. And the outcome is almost never "good code for the sake of good code" - it has to serve a real outcome in the real world.
By the way, lots of good designers are also using coding agents now, so you can keep romanticizing grunt work while most of the market moves on.
Perhaps this phrasing is what invited the interpretation you seem to be annoyed with.
There is not much to gain by suggesting everyone is simply bad faith.
I think you like the other person is assuming that 5 minutes = low quality. Instead of thinking "5 mins means you can make 8-10 iterations in an hour" or "5 minutes making the front end look pretty good means I can spend more time on the backend"
There are many good faith ways to interpret this.
No one is assuming the output is strictly low quality from what I can tell. I am personally evaluating the method you provided, which suggested you are championing a sloppy but highly iterative design flow against a seasoned curated suite for defining design. I dont see any reason to assume the other comment was doing anything otherwise.
You made a broad generalized strong claim and were met with the opposing force, which is actually acting from their own understanding of good faith, believe it or not (see how this analysis is void of meaning?).
It probably reduces the tasks which customers might engage an agency using Figma, though. Down the line, creeping onto Figma’s turf absolutely becomes a strategy for Anthropic.
this overlap has been widening incredibly quickly. lots of designers are now writing code with the help of cursor, claude code, etc.
even if you believe "real designers" wont ever use this product, it's not hard to see how a low barrier-of-entry tool could affect Figams bottom line. slowing down Figma's adoption from the new wave of entry-level designers who dont already have muscle memory would not at all surprise me at all.
Not convinced Figma cares about traditional design craft anymore.
So I helped her look into it and I was shocked to find out that it just a react slop generator, not a Figma file generator. And extremely limited at that, too.
Who is Figma targeting with this exactly? Developers, who are interested in react apps will simply use claude code, and UX designers don't really care for react apps.
These areas obviously tie into engineering very closely, but the thinking that goes into them happens at the design stage, at a lower cost than starting with engineering. AI models suck at getting every facet of this process right, because designers are achieving a balance between branding, usability, standards, taste, and differentiation -- the exact opposite of a model trained to reach for the most average outputs.
Had they not included support for it, where would they be now? I'd wager a critical mass would be screeching to High Heaven for integrations, seeing as a Figma document is effectively a config file that can be translated to real code.
Not entirely but I would use this and not Figma. I am passionate about system design not visual design so I don’t want to waste time in figma.
How many such people does the world need? Probably less than 1,000. Not a very big market for Figma.
> The folks at Wall Street do not understand
But for me, I will never use it again.
He should probably go and let someone else take the reigns.
https://stitch.withgoogle.com/
I'm now pasting all my Stitch output into Claude Design to see what happens.
edit: First impressions are great. It asked me a ton of really great questions about my design aspirations and direction, which were incredibly relevant and insightful. Waiting to see what it makes.
edit2: It did astonishingly well with the first design pass. Really outstanding. This is probably going to be my primary prototyping tool until the Next Best Thing(tm) drops in a few weeks.
They're down 80% over the last year. Ouch.
The SWE people I know at SW companies now heavily using these agents complain to me how their workday is nothing but code-reviews of the agents output and tedious prompting to prod it back into line; they say they don’t get to actually write code until they get home to work on their personal projects.
3 years ago I never would have believed this capability was possible; I’ve since adjusted my expectations to now assume that in another 3 years the models/agents will have improved enough to reduce the amount of code-review required, leaving us with precious little else to do for our shareholders, or the opposite: they don’t improve and we’re stuck doing thankless PR reviews until the end.
Please tell me where and how in this future I’m supposed to find satisfaction and pride in my work when what-gets-produced isn’t my own work anymore?
I also understand that our wonderful quality of life is due to automation, and sometimes that means I draw the short straw. That's okay.
Figma actually put the work in to make a great product that performs well and offers anything you could imagine to design just about anything you need, with AI integrations and deep manual editing to sweat the details.