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For my agency this won't replace Figma or designers. It's just a really useful tool to express yourself and communicate intent. Before these tools, when a clie
by Growtika 6mo ago
For my agency this won't replace Figma or designers. It's just a really useful tool to express yourself and communicate intent.
Before these tools, when a client wanted a specific section built, we'd spend hours hunting references across the web. The output always ended up feeling like a mesh of 2-3 sites, never fully unique. Then we'd burn more time explaining the intent to the client's designers and devs, usually with multiple rounds because words don't convey layout well.
Now we throw a quick mockup together in Claude or Lovable and send it. The designer gets the idea in 30 seconds instead of a 45-minute call, then pushes it further with their own taste and the client's branding.
It's not replacing designers. Most clients don't know what they want until they see it. These tools collapse that feedback loop from weeks to minutes, so the designer actually spends their time on the parts that need human taste, not on decoding a vague brief.
- mickeyp 6mo agoIndeed. Kitbashing is a thing, and it was always a thing. Designers I worked with would spend hours doomscrolling pinterest, google images, etc. looking for their, uh... 'spark' when they were given a briefing. This is just a really cool way of building. I'm impressed. I tried Google Stitch but it was slow and useless. Sad, because Gemini has a pretty good creative flair, ironically enough.
- MisterPea 6mo agoStitch has been very good for me to prototype some designs, and the exporting design feature is great. But jeez, is it buggy, slow and unintuitive at times. Complete shift in google's old engineering culture of high quality - they seem to be shipping quickly in favor of stability
- chrisweekly 6mo ago"in favor" is hard to parse; "instead"?
- WarmWash 6mo agoThat culture died forever ago, google has been launching half-baked shit that they kill in 18 months after no updates for a decade now.
- paulryanrogers 6mo ago> It's not replacing designers. Except it is. Plenty of places will say this is all good enough and not hire, or even lay off, the UI/UX person. I've seen this firsthand.
- enraged_camel 6mo agoYeah, agreed. And realistically they are correct. I’d argue that “good enough” is how most things are done.
- jameslk 6mo agoI have seen this as well, except the UI ends up all looking similar, because the harness prompt and training data doesn’t change much The average becomes the same shade of gray. Familiarity breeds contempt. New types of design will emerge that are expensive to copy, because differentiation drives competition
- buzzerbetrayed 6mo agoWhich is perfectly adequate for 95% of applications. Hell, it’d probably improve most applications if they adopted some proven shade of gray. Why do people feel that each and every tool they use needs its own unique look and feel? And why are people willing to pay more for that? In some cases, sure. For my smart sprinkler app.. I don’t give a damn if it looks like 1000 other apps.
- bdangubic 6mo agoI’d actually prefer if all of them looked and worked the same, especially useful if you have elderly family members you need to teach how to use app for XYZ. all government websites (especially functional ones that citizens use to do something on) for instance should be exactly the same
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 6mo agoY’all would have much more productive conversations about AI if you were even for a second able to differentiate the aspects of $x that you care about as a craft via which the majority of people care about. HN has truly become the embodiment of the “this is fine” meme.
- d0gsg0w00f 6mo agoThat's how I see most of the system design capabilities of Opus. I've been an engineer for 15 years. It's so nice to describe what you want, it gets you in the ballpark, and you can refine and tweak to get it just right. Sometimes it's fun to have it design crazy stuff so you can play out a crazy idea without wasting too much time. I can see how it could easily translate to the visual design space. Now, if I could only get a model to draw arch diagrams....
- solatic 6mo agoThere's multiple tools that generate architecture diagrams from text/code (Mermaid, LikeC4...). You start using one and tell the model to generate the text for the architecture diagram and it'll do it. Stuff like https://erode.dev https://erode.dev tries to use LLMs to keep it in sync.
- alchemism 6mo agoSpec-mode in the Kiro IDE generates requirements and design docs for a feature; the design always contains one or more Mermaid diagrams of the arch in the feature.
- twobitshifter 6mo ago1. This workflow is beneficial for a per design pricing model not hourly. 2. Long term you can expect the minimum bar for aesthetically pleasing design to be raised and there to be overall less demand for human produced generic design. 3. This will mean all designers get pushed into the same corner or complex, unique, uninferable design and trying to fight it out.
- fortzi 6mo ago> this won't replace Figma or designers If every designer takes less time to do their job, you need less designers. There’s no getting around that simple math.
- democracy 6mo agoAs if designers spend most of their time actually "designing". Same flaw of thinking with programmers and AI replacing their jobs. As if the main problem (and a major time waster) is actually programming and not dealing with a million of other things.
- vanviegen 6mo agoBut AI is replacing programmer jobs. AI is taking on a part of those 'million other things' as well, and if you can shrink your organization due to AI use, many of those other things just go away.
- wiz21c 6mo agoThe job of the programmer/Designer will be to answer questions about what the program can do/not do and tweak it outside of Claude's abilities. To be able to answer those questions (like: can we do this ? will it fail under pressure ? etc) requires a deep understanding of the programs which you only have if you actually build them (with or without AI). So, less jobs for sure, but not like 50% less jobs.
- democracy 6mo agoBut it is not replacing programmer jobs, it's a fantasy world
- kavok 6mo agoI don’t know a single engineer that has been terminated and replaced with AI. I know lots of engineers that were terminated due to shifting jobs offshore for cost savings, over hiring during COVID, and a poor economy.
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- josefrichter 6mo agoI'd be curious to hear from you in 3 months whether or not it ended up replacing designers at your agency, and why. Perhaps you could commit to answer?
- democracy 6mo agoYou replace designers with who? Who is the magic person (who is not a designer) doing the work? CEO? CTO? I heard these stories when Midjourney started and everyone on gamedev channels where screaming how artists/graphic designers would be irrelevant... I was always puzzlde by who is going to be doing their work if they are gone...
- ehnto 6mo agoI think the long term idea is that AI becomes continuous in the sense that it behaves like a regular employee, not something you have to prompt. So at a mid sized company say 100 "entities", the CEO has directors still, they have managers, but the managers are managing AI agents not humans. But I don't think that's how it plays out. I think you still need to imbue talent, skills and direction into these tools and I don't see management, who did not have the skills initially, being able to do that task across multiple business aspects and agents simultaneously. I think for now and perhaps until/if AGI, the sweet spot is having skilled individuals with experience using the tools to known good results. You still can't really delegate to the tools, you have to work with them. The benefit to management that a human has is they can delegate to a human, even when they completely lack the skillset they are delegating.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- vanviegen 6mo agoWhoever used to assign tasks to the designer might now be able to assign them to a bot instead. Or the design may be part of a larger task that has been delegated to a bot.
- mettamage 6mo ago> Most clients don't know what they want until they see it. This is also true for entire applications. I vibecode apps in 2 days then say: is this what you want? Then they are enthusiastic and I will say that it will take 2 to 4 weeks to properly create it. They are always confused and then I start teaching them the conceptual basics of how apps are built and what corners are cut. Clients usually listen because they know we’re near the finish line