Agreed - For the last 20 years or so, designers at basecamp.com do all of their frontend design directly in rails/html/css and then have the developers "re-implement it". The upside of this approach is designs which really work in the browser and they found it to be faster. The downside of this approach is that it's harder to find designers who have both of those skills, but that was an acceptable tradeoff for them because they are a smaller run company.

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.

Fair point but unlike code, design (webpage), audio, video are seen by consumers. If Sora (AI video) didn't fly, how'd AI web-design fly?

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.

Seems like The Innovators Dilemma playing out.

It's still an autocomplete on steroids (that's what LLMs are).

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, that's exactly how cc was received initially.

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.