Haha, that's exactly how cc was received initially. It's just autocomplete. It's useless. It can't even x. I tried to y and it gave me z. Over and over all over the internet this was the reaction. Then the bargaining began. Oh, it will maybe speed up some simple things. Like autocomplete on steroids. Maaaybe do some junior tasks once in a while. And so on...
To me, it seems obvious that AI will attack this from both directions - upskilling developers to make more design changes AND upskilling designers to make more design iterations and more changes to the codebase -- the design artifact is "new react components" (which can be re-implemented or not) instead of a figma design.
It is pretty good for internal apps and dashboards or small hobby pages and websites where being generic look and feel doesn't matter much.
It still produces subpar code, with horrendous data access patterns, endless duplication of fucntionality etc. You still need a human in the loop to fix all the mistakes (unless you're Garry Tan or Steve Yegge who assume that quality is when you push hundreds of thousands of LoC per day).
Same here.
Oh, and Claude Code is significantly worse at generating design code than almost any other type of code.
Haha, maybe by you. By many on HN, but HN is a bubble of its own. By plenty of others it was received very differently. Many of us had been doing agentic coding for more than a year already when Claude Code was released, because we found it valuable.
We will see if such groups of professional designers also form for Claude Design or other such tools.
I guess I had expected something like Claude Code with visual tools added on top, but that’s not what this is.
So...we can shitcan the designers and offload the work to the 10 developers still keeping the lights on?
Enterprise is not gonna lay off all their designers any time soon.
At this point, Claude now writes > 99% of my code. I wasn't an enthusiastic early adopter; it took me a while to be willing to let go of the reins. But in tandem with LLMs getting better, I also began to realize that what happens inside the code is very rarely important enough for me to care about. Like, I care that it's secure, and performant where it needs to be, etc. -- but mostly I just care about its outputs. If it does what I want it to do, then how it does this doesn't really matter to me or my clients or my users. On the development side, my attention has focused to writing specifications and monitoring the correctness of the test suite, and > 99% of the time that's good enough. It's been a lesson in non-attachment to let go of lovingly crafting every single line of code, but the tradeoff in terms of productivity has absolutely been worth it.
What makes this viable is the fact that there's essentially a "hidden layer" (the code) upon which Claude can operate. My clients don't actually care about the code, and within certain bounds (correctness, security, performance, extensibility, etc.) it turns out that neither do I. This gives Claude a lot of latitude to solve things in its own way, and I think that's a bit part of its effectiveness.
On the other hand, with design there is no hidden layer. Every single aspect of the design is visible to the user and the customer. So the design reflects upon my work in ways that code does not. This means that the conditions which allow me to relax my grip on coding just don't exist for design. It's very difficult for me to imagine delegating design in the same way that I've become comfortable delegating coding.
That said: I suspect that the use-case for Claude Design will be for applications which today receive very little design attention. There are loads of applications where design is less than an afterthought, and the product suffers terribly for it. Delegating to Claude, in those contexts, would likely be a very big win. But for applications which already have designers obsessing over every pixel, I see a very limited role for this. Figma's market is mostly the latter -- the former, by definition, is not part of the market for design tools -- so I don't see them being threatened by this for a long time.
For example, in the world of e-commerce, one goal is improving conversion rate, as long as we get that and the design looks nice, that's OK.
These sort of issues are what you trust the judgement of a good designer to navigate through. I have no doubt that Claude Design can be better than no designer, and probably better than a bad designer, too. But better than a good designer? I'm more skeptical of that than I am of software engineering.
Well, when you put it that way, that sounds bad for designers, and, by extension, Figma.
ps. I do like commas.
There is a bunch of repetitive work in design as well, once you start working on larger projects. Yes, everything should be setup with components/reusability and what not, but just like programmers take shortcuts sometimes, so do designers, and you have to repeat the same change across many instances/files whenever you have to pay back the "technical debt".
Probably Claude Design could be quite helpful in those cases, and the same goes for other domains too, same happens in video editing and 3D work, probably any creative effort has moments of dull, repetitive "do this change across X" where any automation would be of serious help to reduce that. It seems like a quite good thing to try to address with LLM tooling, still driven by actual humans.
What makes you think that I didn’t read the article, but rather just disagree with it?
“which of course you did not read” is such a negative/toxic statement that adds no value.
obviously developers use the product to collaborate with designers. but it’s not the developers that are buying this product. they’re just stakeholders.
If designers still want Figma then the other people are along for the ride (unless the idea is the designers are being replaced with a PM+Claude.)
There are Figma plugins that let you extract a static HTML website into a Figma file. Copying that over Figma Make and prompting for a while can make pretty good prototypes that need very little adjustment back in Figma.
However, I believe that being able to do something doesn’t mean you should do it. Prompting back and forth can easily introduce a lot of cognitive load on top of all sorts of other daily task.
I feel the modern human in the loop is similar to the factory processing line workflow where just almost anyone can learn how to use a tool and produce output.
Maybe it will replace (a large share of) Figma users.
They will gladly use something like this (many have already started experimenting with other similar products) to get them even 60% of the way there and then they can polish the rest in code...
Which is basically how they used Figma before. Visualize to close enough and then iterate to final in code.
If Claude Design can ingest your design system and previous examples and go further than templates and scaffolding, if it can help you brainstorm ideas and variations so you can - as the human in the loop - get to your final design faster..
Why wouldn't you do that?
People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate.
I think the most effective teams will be working within Claude, not within Figma.
For individual creators, this will definitely replace Figma. I bought Sketch for use as an individual creator because I wanted to create mocks before coding them. There's no way I'd make the same purchase today.
Anyways, I'm sure Claude Design will incorporate some of Figma's features such as a company wide design language.