9 ms·

Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

387 points by cdrnsf 6mo ago

dang 6mo ago
Recent and related: Claude Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806725 - April 2026 (732 comments)
mojuba 6mo ago
Excellent post. I share the author's sentiment which is essentially "to hell with Figma, at least fix Sketch". Been feeling very lonely in may hatred towards Figma, which is for a whole bunch of reasons (among others, it's an incredibly shitty, memory and CPU hungry Electron app that looks and feels worse than any more or less well designed web site), but now after reading this I realize the number of reasons has doubled.
- ghoulishly 6mo ago
  (author of the post here) I cut a paragraph how Figma costs cuckoo bananas money for your entire team for the privilege of enduring this byzantine nightmare. And they paywall certain features, which you likely can't get authorization for, so you have to do more hacks on top of hacks on top of the “gold standard” practices I shared in the blog post. The price ramp is not gradual.
  - cptcobalt 6mo ago
    man, I dont even use Figma for personal & side projects because its so expensive. I still occasionally fire up sketch or freehand it. Figma is a work tool only and I'm disappointed by its MCP tooling which feels late and behind where it should be, I just feel forced to use Figma Make which stays in their walled garden without practical utility and connections to my actual codebases
  - democracy 6mo ago
    I think this is what kills them, not AI. I know 2 companies (enterprise level) who are migrating away from Atlassian atm just gets too costly.
- dygd 6mo ago
  It may look like a crappy Electron app, but Figma has a quite interesting architecture. The browser editor is developed in C++ and cross-compiled to JavaScript with emscripten. The rendering engine looks like its handling HTML, but it's actually rendering their own document format for cross-browser consistency. They have their own CRDT implementation to handle multi-user edits. [0] https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web/ https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-des... [1] https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/ https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/ [2] https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology-works/ https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/how-figmas-multiplayer-tech...
  - love2read 6mo ago
    I think my biggest question is who cares? What does having an interesting internal architecture have to do with the “its electron though” ideological attack.
    - brulard 6mo ago
      It is made to perform much better than your typical electron app would. Saying electron-based == shitty is complete misunderstanding of the technology. Although i dislike Figma as much as the next guy, their app was in many ways very impressive. See Figma's cofounder old articles at https://madebyevan.com/figma/ https://madebyevan.com/figma/
klueinc 6mo ago
When you can control the model layer like Anthropic, you get more leverage over the traits of the persona, enough so that the system feels closer to havin consistent expert design judgment built-in that complements the 'truth-to-materials'.
sebmellen 6mo ago
This design tool space died a long time ago for me when InVision shut down and pivoted to a digital whiteboard. It’s a really difficult space. But the fundamental problem is that it’s hard to get a design system right long-term, especially because it’s so intertwined with your code and whatever component library you use, which is a layer your designer will never touch. I don’t really see Claude Design fixing the fundamental Storybook hell of designing reusable and pretty components and layouts, but I don’t see Figma or any other tool solving it either. What’s the solution? It feels like something that needs to be fixed more deeply at the component level.
- doug_durham 6mo ago
  What if the approach isn't reusable, but instead is rebuildable? We are stuck in the mindset of creating components that we can grab and plug in to new designs. When we have a component that we like, why not ask the tool to create a markdown definition of it. Later on, when we're doing a new design where we would like to reuse that component, we tell the tool to read the markdown and use that whenever they need to use that component. I think the future will be much more flexible and interesting.
  - sebmellen 6mo ago
    I don’t know what level of complexity you’ve seen in your software buildouts, but at anything “enterprise” scale, building your own components from scratch is a recipe for absolute disaster. There are so many nuances, especially with accessibility, and edge case bugs, that I would really strongly recommend against it. And by extension, I’d be against this approach. Maybe you could make it work if everyone agrees on a base set of headless components to use, but we seem to be moving in the opposite direction with things like ShadCN.
- girvo 6mo ago
  > I don’t really see Claude Design fixing the fundamental Storybook hell of designing reusable and pretty components and layouts FWIW Claude Code is decent at scaffolding those out if you have a good set of examples for it to work from. But the argument is that is unneeded as we move forward as making changes and extracting things and such becomes basically "free". I'm not so convinced, but I do see the argument.
operatingthetan 6mo ago
Front-end, UX, design, and product have become one role. The market is just realizing it slowly.
- esafak 6mo ago
  So your designers debug your React code now when the AI messes up?
  - operatingthetan 6mo ago
    Leading question, feel free to ask a more honest one.
    - ioasuncvinvaer 6mo ago
      How is it a leading question?
      - operatingthetan 6mo ago
        >A leading question is a query that suggests the desired answer or puts words into a witness's mouth, often guiding them toward a "yes" or "no" response.
        viccis 6mo ago
        It was just restating what you already said; no need for this specious response.
        operatingthetan 6mo ago
        Please quote me where I said 'my designers debug react code that AI messes up.' I did not say anything of the sort. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47819428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47819428
mikert89 6mo ago
Basic web development is completely over, and will be automated end to end, product, ux, design, and the code. I have a complicated nextjs webapp, and I havent had to write front end code in six-nine months now.
- only-one1701 6mo ago
  If it’s used by < 1000 people, it’s not a complicated app
  - girvo 6mo ago
    FedRAMP will be the death of me.
  - mikert89 6mo ago
    so like 90% of software?
    - only-one1701 6mo ago
      Scaling and edge cases with real users are the difficulty. Feel like this isn’t even that controversial.
      - mikert89 6mo ago
        we agree, i just think you are overestimating software complexity for most businesses
    - Sateeshm 6mo ago
      If that is the case, 90% software was never lucrative
- slopinthebag 6mo ago
  Congrats? You did what my manicurist could do 5 years ago with Wix.
wuhhh 6mo ago
Great article, the last couple of paragraphs made me laugh! I love the part about things not masquerading as something else and being honest about what they are. I was wondering if PenPot (https://penpot.app https://penpot.app) might be sitting pretty in this new agentic era, considering that they took the direction of designs being actual markup, unlike the canvas approach in fig - if that’s even something that interests them.
- rapnie 6mo ago
  Wasn't the whole Penpot UI itself made in SVG? Or did they change that along the way?
alkonaut 6mo ago
So let me get this straight (Pretend I'm 50, a developer since childhood, but I can't CSS to save my life) are there shops where developers, even front end developers, have to talk to designers who are't just sketching an idea for a logo or landing page, but designers who run this Figma thing and maintain the entire products "design" in some "style database"? And the idea is that these designers - who aren't developers - should be able to tweak the look of things without changing code? Or is it usually just the front end devs that run this Figma thing, but they dislike the disconnect between it and their code?
- skydhash 6mo ago
  UX designers I encountered have mostly been tasked on ensuring consistency across the various product (A lot of devs are very cavalier about spacing and font sizes). Sometimes they proposed new flows and layouts, especially when the product needs a coat of paint. So tools like Figma is nice in that regards as it's simpler to iterate on (From simple to hardest: Sketch on whiteboard|paper, Wireframe tools like Balsimiq, Figma|Sketch, css code) because it's pure fiddling with various properties. Figma has direct feedback while the code may require a compilation phase.
- kevinsync 6mo ago
  lol yes. At least in agency world, a common approach in the last X years has been that designers create entire pixel-perfect, component-based sources-of-truth in Figma (which evolve! they aren't delivered static and complete) -- these are also what the client sees and approves, or at the very least they see branded deck slides that incorporate the Figma designs. Anyways, front end then re-implements from Figma into CSS, except it's usually best-approximation (not pixel-perfect) partially because, despite Figma allowing you to "copy CSS" for an element, it's unusable, almost inline CSS (and usually not aware of its ascendents and descendents, or any variables you're maintaining in CSS, or any class hierarchies, etc), and partially because the units of measurement aren't always identical on either side. You'll also often have multiple FE devs recreating components independently of each other (as a team effort), which can lead to drift and different implementations, which is fun. Then, depending upon the tech stack, FE might be building these components in something like Storybook [0] as a "front end source of truth", which then are either directly injected into a React or NextJS app or whatever, or sometimes they're partially or fully re-implemented again into BE components in the CMS (ex. Sitefinity). Then people ask which one is the source of truth, but really it's a chain of sources of truth that looks more like the telephone game than a canonical "brand bible". Then throw in any out-of-the-box future client efforts (say, a promotional landing page hosted outside of the main project) and you may have yet another reimplementation of part of the same design, but in a completely different system. [0] https://storybook.js.org https://storybook.js.org
ianstormtaylor 6mo ago
The article makes a good point about how Figma's non-open data model is limiting their utility as the source of truth. But I think it's part of a larger mistake Figma is making: they seem to have shifted to an extraction mindset too early, assuming they'd captured the market, right when the ground beneath them is starting to shift. It's most visible in their pricing model evolution, which is now explicitly anti-collaboration. Figma used to be the obvious default because you could quickly share files with non-designers, so they could view and make small edits without fuss. Now that requires a paid "seat", along with a confusing mess of permission flows. It's platform wide too. I taught a college design class recently, and had students sign up for Figma because it seemed archaic not to teach them to use it. Instead of just giving any ".edu" address a free account (like they used to) students are forced through a 3rd-party process of uploading transcripts to prove education status. A few of my students got rejected or ran into confusing errors, and never got access… Now I have to re-evaluate whether its worth using when teaching the class again. (And this is for a population with near-zero short-term purchasing power, but huge potential long-term value… why add barriers?) This is such a weird self-inflicted wound for a collaboration platform to make. The big tools that won on collaboration (eg. Google Docs, GitHub) have understood that low-friction sharing is critical to becoming the default choice. And that being the default is a flywheel that drives adoption, both in users and in tooling. It makes more sense if you see it through the lens of Figma trying to juice short-term numbers for their IPO. But it's sad to see because it had so much long-term potential.
- davemp 6mo ago
  > The big tools that won on collaboration (eg. Google Docs) have understood that low-friction sharing is critical to becoming the default choice. Google docs is a heavily subsidized product and not representative. Also tool pricing seems hard, but I can’t really get behind saying that a company should bait and switch with their pricing models harder.
  - ianstormtaylor 6mo ago
    Under that logic is a free trial a bait and switch? How about a 1-month free deal? How about what Adobe (and many others) do where they license to the school and students get it free until they graduate? It seems like a really weird point to make, when you could just as easily argue that Figma giving their services for free to students is a gift that levels the playing field, by allowing students without means to gain experience with industry standard tools they might not have been exposed to otherwise. It’s not zero-sum.
nate8bit 6mo ago
Some good points, but as a whole - I'm not sure if I agree. Sketch lost to Figma because of it's design tooling & multiplayer. Physical products still get designed before being constructed - I don't see that going away. If anything, I think Figma should stop trying to play both sides of the field and decide what it wants to be.
- dewey 6mo ago
  > Sketch lost to Figma because of it's design tooling & multiplayer. Or maybe because you could just send a Figma link to anyone in your org and it opened in the browser vs having to tell them to download some Mac app and open a specific file that will get outdated over time.
  - russelldjimmy 6mo ago
    Correct, though I believe the parent comment covered that under the broad interpretation of “multiplayer”
johnwhitman 6mo ago
[dead]
markbao 6mo ago
I don’t really buy that Claude Design will remove all the complexity around design. Vibe-coded apps using Claude look simpler because they are simpler. They’re not a gigantic product suite with extremely specific UI components tailored to each use case. The ‘simplicity’ is an illusion coming from conflating the complexity of a bicycle (a vibe coded app) with an airplane (an app like Figma). Building the same design system component in code versus in Figma is going to be slightly more succinct in code; Figma’s primitives don’t have the sort of conditionals and control flow that code has. But code is much less malleable than drawing on a screen, and creative freedom is harder to achieve in code. UI can fix the gap where code feels less malleable than Figma, but complexity comes largely from the worlds that humans create, and humans apparently want to create 8 modes for 4 products and 2 light/dark modes. If you want the same setup in Claude, it’ll be a little easier to maintain, but not much less complex.
- chr15m 6mo ago
  Making the complexity simpler is the whole thing. Any software that does it wins.
- juliusceasar 6mo ago
  Most of the times people just want a bike or a car. Not everybody needs an airplane. This is going to hit Figma very hard.
  - malfist 6mo ago
    The people that want just a bicycle wasn't going to buy figma
  - manyatoms 6mo ago
    > Most of the times people just want a bike with a pelican on it
    - nitroedge 6mo ago
      that runs on a local model and looks better than Opus
jheriko 6mo ago
[dead]
uxcolumbo 6mo ago
I miss the days of having a native desktop design app with a perpetual license. What Figma achieved technically in the 2010s was amazing. Coded the app in C++ and then used WASM to deliver it as a multiplayer web app. But now it's trying to be too many things. Why did they ever feel the need to add slides and this other stuff. Their MCP is poor (sure, they'll improve it). The app struggles with larger files and performance is sloppy. And don't get me started trying to design data grid heavy apps. And they could easily follow Adobe's lead. Enshittify and lock you out of your account whenever they feel it's necessary (remember what happened with Venezuelan Adobe users a few years ago?) Either Penpot gets their act together and will become the opensource design canvas for open-weight AI models or we will see another open source solution that will fill this space.
- alwillis 6mo ago
  > I miss the days of having a native desktop design app with a perpetual license. You can go that route with Affinity Designer [1], owned by Canva, who partnered with Anthropic on Claude Design [2]: We’ve loved collaborating with Anthropic over the past couple of years and share a deep focus on making complex things simple. At Canva, our mission has always been to empower the world to design, and that means bringing Canva to wherever ideas begin. We’re excited to build on our collaboration with Claude, making it seamless for people to bring ideas and drafts from Claude Design into Canva, where they instantly become fully editable and collaborative designs ready to refine, share, and publish. [1]: https://www.affinity.studio https://www.affinity.studio [2]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-design-anthropic-labs https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-design-anthropic-labs
  - uxcolumbo 6mo ago
    I have it, jumped on the affinity band wagon years ago after Adobe started their enshittification process. After Canva bought Affinity, you now have to authenticate with your email from time to time when you launch the desktop app. Annoying and why do they do that? Might go back to Affinity 2.
    - 6mo ago
thomasfl 6mo ago
I hope the authors mom is not on the internet. Cursing in capslock. Good grief.
willio58 6mo ago
I tried yesterday for about an hour to have Claude design make me a simple logo (just the symbol) and didn’t get anywhere good. I’m sure for certain things like UI it’s great, and so is just Claude code, but this Claude Design thing very much to me feels like a demo and not a product. Maybe one day!
- moonu 6mo ago
  You should try the Arrow SVG model by Quiver, should be much better at that sort of thing since it's made for that.
- anamexis 6mo ago
  Claude Design is very explicitly oriented towards product UI design. It's not trying to be a product that can make you a logo.
- furyofantares 6mo ago
  Anthropic has no image generation models, right? We've got an LLM using CSS and emojis and maybe pelicans riding bikes (SVGs).
  - svelle 6mo ago
    Yes, they only do SVGs. I'm actually glad they're focusing on code, and code adjacent tooling only.
- pypt 6mo ago
  Claude Design is just a big opinionated prompt: https://www.lobsterpack.com/blog/claude-design-trenchcoat/ https://www.lobsterpack.com/blog/claude-design-trenchcoat/. Among other things, it knows it isn't that great at drawing SVGs, so it won't try unless you force it to. For a logo, try drawing it with vanilla Claude Code as if it was a separate project: ask a "design agency" to ask you questions, answer them, then make a detailed brief of what you want to draw, then make it output an exact plan of what and where will it draw, lastly ask the chatbot to do the actual drawing using sub-agents for drawing individual components. Also add a "render it to a raster and make sure it looks right" step as well.
troupo 6mo ago
Oh no. Figma has variables and instances and it's hard to debug bad colors. And here I am with Claude Code... That so far generated a 2000-line CSS file for a 7000-line app consisting of literally three web pages [1]. Where almost every single color, component, class and style is duplicated at least two times. Where custom classes are fighting with Tailwind classes (yes, there's also Tailwind ON TOP of custom CSS) that are fighting with inline hardcoded style= declarations. Figma is definitely going to suffer the vibe-coded design slop-app from Anthropic. [1] 7k lines are almost justified for the functionality in them, and I tried to keep an eye on the code. It's harder to keep an eye on CSS
- bombcar 6mo ago
  We can blame AI for slopcoding but it's just what we've been doing for decades now - who cares if it takes 9000 lines to do what in theory Linus and Knuth and Carmack could do in 3000? Our CPUs eat a million lines of code for breakfast and demand more.
  - troupo 6mo ago
    Strange then that so many apps are barely usable on these powerful CPUs. Perhaps, CPUs can no longer demand more
- zmmmmm 6mo ago
  Have had similar dramas with CSS. Opus/Sonnet seem to have far less taste and discipline in writing CSS - constantly they are trying to slam in changes with !important or inline styles rather than think through how to do it properly.
- cageface 6mo ago
  LLMs tend to do better with component libraries like shadcn or daisy than writing raw CSS in my experience.
mickdarling 6mo ago
I used it today to take a look at my previously built design system with Logos, branding, fonts, and everything else. After a lot of annoying tweaking back and forth, finally, I got something that was satisfactory. Then I looked at the usage and it said I had used 95% of my Claude design usage for the week! This isn't a real tool. This is a plaything, if that's what they're providing as examples.
- brandensilva 6mo ago
  Yup it's based off their playground so plaything is the right word. It's a wrapper around that. I definitely appreciate the better design output from Claude code but it has a ways to go before it can replace serious design contenders.
- adriand 6mo ago
  I had a similar experience with running out of usage quite quickly, after setting up one design system properly, and then getting pretty close with a second one. But it's a research preview - I'm sure it will change. I was quite happy with what I pulled off using the first design system: I wanted a new footer section for my IPAAS startup, it generated four options, the fourth of which was quite good. We iterated on it for a bit, then I pulled it into Claude Code (that integrated feature is very cool), CC built it, I deployed it, done. (Bottom section of https://tediware.com/ https://tediware.com/ if you're interested, the bit with "Origin story" on the left and the signup panel on the right). It was not a complicated build by any means but I liked the concept it developed and it was dead-easy to make it all happen. I think the ideas in the UI are very good. Still rough, but you can see where this could go, and it's got a ton of potential.
  - slopinthebag 6mo ago
    I mean, it's fine and serves it's purpose, but I'm a bit confused what you are getting that you wouldn't get with the millions of pre-made designs and design systems? Like Tailwind UI for example. https://tailwindcss.com/plus/ui-blocks https://tailwindcss.com/plus/ui-blocks
peteforde 6mo ago
Honestly, I never understood the move to create an artificial dichotomy between design and code with a heavy layer of tooling. I suppose that a layout engine made sense in the context of Flash, and you saw the future of the web as a set of keyframe animations. But the notion that there's a lot of value in creating a very heavy, high-friction abstraction between the UI/UX and the platform it ultimately runs on was always going to be a loser. In the end, it turns out we're all just web developers, regardless of your weapon of choice.
slopinthebag 6mo ago
I feel like we're leaning way too much into the "vibe" aspect of using LLMs at the moment. There is definitely a good use case for LLM's here, but is just prompting your way into a design really the best method here? I feel like something in between Figma and Claude Design would give designers the control they want, but still removing the friction of going between design files and the code impl.
allan_s 6mo ago
As someone who spent quite some times these days to reverse the figma protocol[0] I can't agree more with > Figma accidentally excluded themselves from the training data that would have made them relevant in the agentic era. Their binary format is so much of a "let's reinvent everything" which I think come from the fact it's a tool you can use for web design, android app design, ios design and anything-you-want design that it became a jack of all trade and so mapping it to web is not a perfect 1:1 translation. And for being useful to agent, any people who got to implement the figma from a UX guy know that even human can't know truly the intent of most figma design, so how a LLM could ? Common source of question that even the UX guy has no answer for: 1. Ok this button looks great, but in German how will it look ? 2. Oh and actually this button does not look great when i put in CSS, it wraps on two line, you cheated again with the letter spacing, did you ? 3. How does it look on a phone that is not an iphone ? 4. You know that doing a border with a gradien is not possible in CSS, so what should i put ? 5. How does it look on a 4k screen ? 6. etc. I know that most of these question can be answered by props and autolayout, and I've been asking the 5 question above these days on a figma that had these but it's just that the UX guy is not that mythical beast that "know-how-to-use-figma-right" So I can't wait for these tools that are html behind to catch up, even more if we can have the prompt with it. (As a developer I never got to see the prompt the product manager made to the UX guy) [0]https://github.com/allan-simon/figma-kiwi-protocol https://github.com/allan-simon/figma-kiwi-protocol
0xdyl 6mo ago
Can someone please help me understand why people are obssessing over this as a Figma killer and not, more clearly, a shot at Replit, Lovable, etc.?
- operatingthetan 6mo ago
  The AI app builders are part of the AI economy already. They are essentially re-selling tokens/compute. It's an existing horse race. Bringing a Figma killer to the market is converting a conventional software sector into an AI one. So it's more disruptive.
i_love_retros 6mo ago
If you get to the post script it sounds like they are just pissed they didn't get hired by figma.
- ghoulishly 6mo ago
  I promise I am fine lol, I actually had a really productive chat with their panel last year and found it wasn’t the right role for me anyway for some logistical reasons.
douglee650 6mo ago
I was making a new brand file in Figma and was about to define all the variables and aliases, paths, all that. Took one look at it and just made the 8 colors I needed and went on with the design.
xnx 6mo ago
Figma is going to regret not having sold to Adobe.
satvikpendem 6mo ago
How does this compare to Google's Stitch? As opposed to Anthropic's, it's free largely due to the largesse of Google. https://stitch.withgoogle.com/ https://stitch.withgoogle.com/
- goosejuice 6mo ago
  Wow, that produced pretty bad results (app). Claude design is much more useful than this but I've only spent around 20 minutes with each.
- qingcharles 6mo ago
  Stitch has way more usage allowance, and it has been absolutely fantastic for some things, but it can get trapped in weird places where whatever you tell it to do it thinks it did it, but it didn't. It's like that Family Guy blinds meme: https://tenor.com/search/family-guy-blinds-gifs https://tenor.com/search/family-guy-blinds-gifs
nitroedge 6mo ago
I tried Claude Design yesterday and fed it the UI of an app I am working on and what I had created already. I asked it to mock up 6 new "layout skins" using different colors, different icon and button placements, different vibes and it churned out 6 good designs with hi-res images plus Claude Code instructions and the ZIP file to boot. Didn't hit the usage, took about an hour. Did a really good overall and I liked the process and thinking structure and question asking.
preommr 6mo ago
I've worked on design tools for the last few years. This article is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the design space, and figma as a company. Just a few of my thoughts: - Figma was always about building a successful company over a successful product. Figma started with a much more ambitious aspiration, and had the ability to deliver through talent like Evan Wallace. A lot of it started with showing how capable webgl was in the browser. And yet, a lot of things like 3d features don't exist because they had the awareness to really hone in and focus on building a specific thing that made them money because everybody in the company ended up with an expensive seat price. - Seriously, Figma is a company that's about design tool second, and about getting a product that businesses use first. To that end, it's already succeeded through the IPO, subsequently, who knows what the market is going to look like. Figma having a war chest is in many ways much better than having a technically impressive demo that might evaporate. - People at Figma, 100%, know everything in this article. And not just figma people, like anybody and everybody that's tried to build a design tool has had these thoughts. It's very obvious that ui/ux is the interesection of design/dev/pm. It's also very obvious that it should stick close to the source of truth, to something like code. - The problem is, that it's almost underselling it to say that it's MASSIVE challenge to execute on these ideas because of how easily it bleeds into building not just a design tool, but a coding, data management, architecture, etc. tool - I could talk at length about all the challenges and potential solutions, but that's neither here nor there. - On AI, I guess other people's guess is as good as mine, but my gut feeling is that while data is important, SOTA AI is generalist enough that the base models, the thinking they're able to do, is better than having a lot of custom data. Especially because ui design is front-facing - you can just scour the web in contrast to private financial documents, or legal documents for example.
kbos87 6mo ago
> "To Figma: I can see a world where this post does numbers in the Figma internal Slack. If that’s the case and you’re reading this from Figma: this wouldn’t have happened if you hired me last year when I was interviewing. Your loss, big dawg." What a counterproductive way to end an otherwise good set of points. Gives the appearance of bitterness and a desire for vengeance.
- ghoulishly 6mo ago
  Do you genuinely think that was earnest?
nailer 6mo ago
I got deeper into Figma than I ever had to before yesterday. It turns out there’s no way to use Math in variables built in to the product. The most common plugin is 99 dollars. To add what is obviously mustache JS. To browser based software. It’s not good.
Olivia_Pan 6mo ago
[flagged]
Olivia_Pan 6mo ago
[flagged]
lastmansitting 6mo ago
“ As product teams scaled and design needed to justify itself inside engineering orgs…” What?
- lastmansitting 6mo ago
  Where are they getting this absurd notion?
  - tene80i 6mo ago
    A lot of engineers find it difficult to conceive of product and design (and marketing, and management…) as actual skilled work. It’s all con artistry orbiting engineering.
    - duskdozer 6mo ago
      Con artists do tend to be skilled.
- cultofmetatron 6mo ago
  what are they talking about product teams needed to justify themselves? a good product guy's job is to talk to the users and figure out what to build. My job is to figure out HOW to make it happen. Neither side need to justify themselves. Good product people are vital to making sure engineers don't spend months building the wrong thing.
agentbc9000 6mo ago
Figma should be worried
zem 6mo ago
no real dog in the fight, and I don't even know if the OP's analysis is correct, but "they had a proprietary file format and got left behind because of it" always gives me a nice bit of schadenfreude.
supermatt 6mo ago
> Figma invented its own primitives to make that work: components, styles, variables, props, and so on Fireworks, Sketch, XD, Axure, etc all had these (or most of them) in some form before Figma even existed. Even illustrator, photoshop, etc have had the applicable ones for decades.
solaire_oa 6mo ago
As far as I'm aware, "source of truth" refers to data/code that drives the actual app, so Figma could never be a source of truth (Figma is a reference of what the app data/code is supposed to do). Saying Figma is a source of truth is like saying JIRA is a source of truth, which doesn't make any sense.

387 points by cdrnsf 6mo ago

dang 6mo ago

Recent and related: Claude Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806725 - April 2026 (732 comments)

mojuba 6mo ago

Excellent post. I share the author's sentiment which is essentially "to hell with Figma, at least fix Sketch". Been feeling very lonely in may hatred towards Figma, which is for a whole bunch of reasons (among others, it's an incredibly shitty, memory and CPU hungry Electron app that looks and feels worse than any more or less well designed web site), but now after reading this I realize the number of reasons has doubled.

ghoulishly 6mo ago
(author of the post here) I cut a paragraph how Figma costs cuckoo bananas money for your entire team for the privilege of enduring this byzantine nightmare. And they paywall certain features, which you likely can't get authorization for, so you have to do more hacks on top of hacks on top of the “gold standard” practices I shared in the blog post. The price ramp is not gradual.
- cptcobalt 6mo ago
  man, I dont even use Figma for personal & side projects because its so expensive. I still occasionally fire up sketch or freehand it. Figma is a work tool only and I'm disappointed by its MCP tooling which feels late and behind where it should be, I just feel forced to use Figma Make which stays in their walled garden without practical utility and connections to my actual codebases
- democracy 6mo ago
  I think this is what kills them, not AI. I know 2 companies (enterprise level) who are migrating away from Atlassian atm just gets too costly.
dygd 6mo ago
It may look like a crappy Electron app, but Figma has a quite interesting architecture. The browser editor is developed in C++ and cross-compiled to JavaScript with emscripten. The rendering engine looks like its handling HTML, but it's actually rendering their own document format for cross-browser consistency. They have their own CRDT implementation to handle multi-user edits. [0] https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web/ https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-des... [1] https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/ https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/ [2] https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology-works/ https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/how-figmas-multiplayer-tech...
- love2read 6mo ago
  I think my biggest question is who cares? What does having an interesting internal architecture have to do with the “its electron though” ideological attack.
  - brulard 6mo ago
    It is made to perform much better than your typical electron app would. Saying electron-based == shitty is complete misunderstanding of the technology. Although i dislike Figma as much as the next guy, their app was in many ways very impressive. See Figma's cofounder old articles at https://madebyevan.com/figma/ https://madebyevan.com/figma/

klueinc 6mo ago

When you can control the model layer like Anthropic, you get more leverage over the traits of the persona, enough so that the system feels closer to havin consistent expert design judgment built-in that complements the 'truth-to-materials'.

sebmellen 6mo ago

This design tool space died a long time ago for me when InVision shut down and pivoted to a digital whiteboard. It’s a really difficult space. But the fundamental problem is that it’s hard to get a design system right long-term, especially because it’s so intertwined with your code and whatever component library you use, which is a layer your designer will never touch. I don’t really see Claude Design fixing the fundamental Storybook hell of designing reusable and pretty components and layouts, but I don’t see Figma or any other tool solving it either. What’s the solution? It feels like something that needs to be fixed more deeply at the component level.

doug_durham 6mo ago
What if the approach isn't reusable, but instead is rebuildable? We are stuck in the mindset of creating components that we can grab and plug in to new designs. When we have a component that we like, why not ask the tool to create a markdown definition of it. Later on, when we're doing a new design where we would like to reuse that component, we tell the tool to read the markdown and use that whenever they need to use that component. I think the future will be much more flexible and interesting.
- sebmellen 6mo ago
  I don’t know what level of complexity you’ve seen in your software buildouts, but at anything “enterprise” scale, building your own components from scratch is a recipe for absolute disaster. There are so many nuances, especially with accessibility, and edge case bugs, that I would really strongly recommend against it. And by extension, I’d be against this approach. Maybe you could make it work if everyone agrees on a base set of headless components to use, but we seem to be moving in the opposite direction with things like ShadCN.
girvo 6mo ago
> I don’t really see Claude Design fixing the fundamental Storybook hell of designing reusable and pretty components and layouts FWIW Claude Code is decent at scaffolding those out if you have a good set of examples for it to work from. But the argument is that is unneeded as we move forward as making changes and extracting things and such becomes basically "free". I'm not so convinced, but I do see the argument.

operatingthetan 6mo ago

Front-end, UX, design, and product have become one role. The market is just realizing it slowly.

esafak 6mo ago
So your designers debug your React code now when the AI messes up?
- operatingthetan 6mo ago
  Leading question, feel free to ask a more honest one.
  - ioasuncvinvaer 6mo ago
    How is it a leading question?
    - operatingthetan 6mo ago
      >A leading question is a query that suggests the desired answer or puts words into a witness's mouth, often guiding them toward a "yes" or "no" response.
      - viccis 6mo ago
        It was just restating what you already said; no need for this specious response.
        operatingthetan 6mo ago
        Please quote me where I said 'my designers debug react code that AI messes up.' I did not say anything of the sort. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47819428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47819428

mikert89 6mo ago

Basic web development is completely over, and will be automated end to end, product, ux, design, and the code. I have a complicated nextjs webapp, and I havent had to write front end code in six-nine months now.

only-one1701 6mo ago
If it’s used by < 1000 people, it’s not a complicated app
- girvo 6mo ago
  FedRAMP will be the death of me.
- mikert89 6mo ago
  so like 90% of software?
  - only-one1701 6mo ago
    Scaling and edge cases with real users are the difficulty. Feel like this isn’t even that controversial.
    - mikert89 6mo ago
      we agree, i just think you are overestimating software complexity for most businesses
  - Sateeshm 6mo ago
    If that is the case, 90% software was never lucrative
slopinthebag 6mo ago
Congrats? You did what my manicurist could do 5 years ago with Wix.

wuhhh 6mo ago

Great article, the last couple of paragraphs made me laugh! I love the part about things not masquerading as something else and being honest about what they are. I was wondering if PenPot (https://penpot.app https://penpot.app) might be sitting pretty in this new agentic era, considering that they took the direction of designs being actual markup, unlike the canvas approach in fig - if that’s even something that interests them.

rapnie 6mo ago
Wasn't the whole Penpot UI itself made in SVG? Or did they change that along the way?

alkonaut 6mo ago

So let me get this straight (Pretend I'm 50, a developer since childhood, but I can't CSS to save my life) are there shops where developers, even front end developers, have to talk to designers who are't just sketching an idea for a logo or landing page, but designers who run this Figma thing and maintain the entire products "design" in some "style database"? And the idea is that these designers - who aren't developers - should be able to tweak the look of things without changing code? Or is it usually just the front end devs that run this Figma thing, but they dislike the disconnect between it and their code?

skydhash 6mo ago
UX designers I encountered have mostly been tasked on ensuring consistency across the various product (A lot of devs are very cavalier about spacing and font sizes). Sometimes they proposed new flows and layouts, especially when the product needs a coat of paint. So tools like Figma is nice in that regards as it's simpler to iterate on (From simple to hardest: Sketch on whiteboard|paper, Wireframe tools like Balsimiq, Figma|Sketch, css code) because it's pure fiddling with various properties. Figma has direct feedback while the code may require a compilation phase.
kevinsync 6mo ago
lol yes. At least in agency world, a common approach in the last X years has been that designers create entire pixel-perfect, component-based sources-of-truth in Figma (which evolve! they aren't delivered static and complete) -- these are also what the client sees and approves, or at the very least they see branded deck slides that incorporate the Figma designs. Anyways, front end then re-implements from Figma into CSS, except it's usually best-approximation (not pixel-perfect) partially because, despite Figma allowing you to "copy CSS" for an element, it's unusable, almost inline CSS (and usually not aware of its ascendents and descendents, or any variables you're maintaining in CSS, or any class hierarchies, etc), and partially because the units of measurement aren't always identical on either side. You'll also often have multiple FE devs recreating components independently of each other (as a team effort), which can lead to drift and different implementations, which is fun. Then, depending upon the tech stack, FE might be building these components in something like Storybook [0] as a "front end source of truth", which then are either directly injected into a React or NextJS app or whatever, or sometimes they're partially or fully re-implemented again into BE components in the CMS (ex. Sitefinity). Then people ask which one is the source of truth, but really it's a chain of sources of truth that looks more like the telephone game than a canonical "brand bible". Then throw in any out-of-the-box future client efforts (say, a promotional landing page hosted outside of the main project) and you may have yet another reimplementation of part of the same design, but in a completely different system. [0] https://storybook.js.org https://storybook.js.org

ianstormtaylor 6mo ago

The article makes a good point about how Figma's non-open data model is limiting their utility as the source of truth. But I think it's part of a larger mistake Figma is making: they seem to have shifted to an extraction mindset too early, assuming they'd captured the market, right when the ground beneath them is starting to shift. It's most visible in their pricing model evolution, which is now explicitly anti-collaboration. Figma used to be the obvious default because you could quickly share files with non-designers, so they could view and make small edits without fuss. Now that requires a paid "seat", along with a confusing mess of permission flows. It's platform wide too. I taught a college design class recently, and had students sign up for Figma because it seemed archaic not to teach them to use it. Instead of just giving any ".edu" address a free account (like they used to) students are forced through a 3rd-party process of uploading transcripts to prove education status. A few of my students got rejected or ran into confusing errors, and never got access… Now I have to re-evaluate whether its worth using when teaching the class again. (And this is for a population with near-zero short-term purchasing power, but huge potential long-term value… why add barriers?) This is such a weird self-inflicted wound for a collaboration platform to make. The big tools that won on collaboration (eg. Google Docs, GitHub) have understood that low-friction sharing is critical to becoming the default choice. And that being the default is a flywheel that drives adoption, both in users and in tooling. It makes more sense if you see it through the lens of Figma trying to juice short-term numbers for their IPO. But it's sad to see because it had so much long-term potential.

davemp 6mo ago
> The big tools that won on collaboration (eg. Google Docs) have understood that low-friction sharing is critical to becoming the default choice. Google docs is a heavily subsidized product and not representative. Also tool pricing seems hard, but I can’t really get behind saying that a company should bait and switch with their pricing models harder.
- ianstormtaylor 6mo ago
  Under that logic is a free trial a bait and switch? How about a 1-month free deal? How about what Adobe (and many others) do where they license to the school and students get it free until they graduate? It seems like a really weird point to make, when you could just as easily argue that Figma giving their services for free to students is a gift that levels the playing field, by allowing students without means to gain experience with industry standard tools they might not have been exposed to otherwise. It’s not zero-sum.

nate8bit 6mo ago

Some good points, but as a whole - I'm not sure if I agree. Sketch lost to Figma because of it's design tooling & multiplayer. Physical products still get designed before being constructed - I don't see that going away. If anything, I think Figma should stop trying to play both sides of the field and decide what it wants to be.

dewey 6mo ago
> Sketch lost to Figma because of it's design tooling & multiplayer. Or maybe because you could just send a Figma link to anyone in your org and it opened in the browser vs having to tell them to download some Mac app and open a specific file that will get outdated over time.
- russelldjimmy 6mo ago
  Correct, though I believe the parent comment covered that under the broad interpretation of “multiplayer”

johnwhitman 6mo ago

[dead]

markbao 6mo ago

I don’t really buy that Claude Design will remove all the complexity around design. Vibe-coded apps using Claude look simpler because they are simpler. They’re not a gigantic product suite with extremely specific UI components tailored to each use case. The ‘simplicity’ is an illusion coming from conflating the complexity of a bicycle (a vibe coded app) with an airplane (an app like Figma). Building the same design system component in code versus in Figma is going to be slightly more succinct in code; Figma’s primitives don’t have the sort of conditionals and control flow that code has. But code is much less malleable than drawing on a screen, and creative freedom is harder to achieve in code. UI can fix the gap where code feels less malleable than Figma, but complexity comes largely from the worlds that humans create, and humans apparently want to create 8 modes for 4 products and 2 light/dark modes. If you want the same setup in Claude, it’ll be a little easier to maintain, but not much less complex.

chr15m 6mo ago
Making the complexity simpler is the whole thing. Any software that does it wins.
juliusceasar 6mo ago
Most of the times people just want a bike or a car. Not everybody needs an airplane. This is going to hit Figma very hard.
- malfist 6mo ago
  The people that want just a bicycle wasn't going to buy figma
- manyatoms 6mo ago
  > Most of the times people just want a bike with a pelican on it
  - nitroedge 6mo ago
    that runs on a local model and looks better than Opus

jheriko 6mo ago

[dead]

uxcolumbo 6mo ago

I miss the days of having a native desktop design app with a perpetual license. What Figma achieved technically in the 2010s was amazing. Coded the app in C++ and then used WASM to deliver it as a multiplayer web app. But now it's trying to be too many things. Why did they ever feel the need to add slides and this other stuff. Their MCP is poor (sure, they'll improve it). The app struggles with larger files and performance is sloppy. And don't get me started trying to design data grid heavy apps. And they could easily follow Adobe's lead. Enshittify and lock you out of your account whenever they feel it's necessary (remember what happened with Venezuelan Adobe users a few years ago?) Either Penpot gets their act together and will become the opensource design canvas for open-weight AI models or we will see another open source solution that will fill this space.

alwillis 6mo ago
> I miss the days of having a native desktop design app with a perpetual license. You can go that route with Affinity Designer [1], owned by Canva, who partnered with Anthropic on Claude Design [2]: We’ve loved collaborating with Anthropic over the past couple of years and share a deep focus on making complex things simple. At Canva, our mission has always been to empower the world to design, and that means bringing Canva to wherever ideas begin. We’re excited to build on our collaboration with Claude, making it seamless for people to bring ideas and drafts from Claude Design into Canva, where they instantly become fully editable and collaborative designs ready to refine, share, and publish. [1]: https://www.affinity.studio https://www.affinity.studio [2]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-design-anthropic-labs https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-design-anthropic-labs
- uxcolumbo 6mo ago
  I have it, jumped on the affinity band wagon years ago after Adobe started their enshittification process. After Canva bought Affinity, you now have to authenticate with your email from time to time when you launch the desktop app. Annoying and why do they do that? Might go back to Affinity 2.
  - 6mo ago

thomasfl 6mo ago

I hope the authors mom is not on the internet. Cursing in capslock. Good grief.

willio58 6mo ago

I tried yesterday for about an hour to have Claude design make me a simple logo (just the symbol) and didn’t get anywhere good. I’m sure for certain things like UI it’s great, and so is just Claude code, but this Claude Design thing very much to me feels like a demo and not a product. Maybe one day!

moonu 6mo ago
You should try the Arrow SVG model by Quiver, should be much better at that sort of thing since it's made for that.
anamexis 6mo ago
Claude Design is very explicitly oriented towards product UI design. It's not trying to be a product that can make you a logo.
furyofantares 6mo ago
Anthropic has no image generation models, right? We've got an LLM using CSS and emojis and maybe pelicans riding bikes (SVGs).
- svelle 6mo ago
  Yes, they only do SVGs. I'm actually glad they're focusing on code, and code adjacent tooling only.
pypt 6mo ago
Claude Design is just a big opinionated prompt: https://www.lobsterpack.com/blog/claude-design-trenchcoat/ https://www.lobsterpack.com/blog/claude-design-trenchcoat/. Among other things, it knows it isn't that great at drawing SVGs, so it won't try unless you force it to. For a logo, try drawing it with vanilla Claude Code as if it was a separate project: ask a "design agency" to ask you questions, answer them, then make a detailed brief of what you want to draw, then make it output an exact plan of what and where will it draw, lastly ask the chatbot to do the actual drawing using sub-agents for drawing individual components. Also add a "render it to a raster and make sure it looks right" step as well.

troupo 6mo ago

Oh no. Figma has variables and instances and it's hard to debug bad colors. And here I am with Claude Code... That so far generated a 2000-line CSS file for a 7000-line app consisting of literally three web pages [1]. Where almost every single color, component, class and style is duplicated at least two times. Where custom classes are fighting with Tailwind classes (yes, there's also Tailwind ON TOP of custom CSS) that are fighting with inline hardcoded style= declarations. Figma is definitely going to suffer the vibe-coded design slop-app from Anthropic. [1] 7k lines are almost justified for the functionality in them, and I tried to keep an eye on the code. It's harder to keep an eye on CSS

bombcar 6mo ago
We can blame AI for slopcoding but it's just what we've been doing for decades now - who cares if it takes 9000 lines to do what in theory Linus and Knuth and Carmack could do in 3000? Our CPUs eat a million lines of code for breakfast and demand more.
- troupo 6mo ago
  Strange then that so many apps are barely usable on these powerful CPUs. Perhaps, CPUs can no longer demand more
zmmmmm 6mo ago
Have had similar dramas with CSS. Opus/Sonnet seem to have far less taste and discipline in writing CSS - constantly they are trying to slam in changes with !important or inline styles rather than think through how to do it properly.
cageface 6mo ago
LLMs tend to do better with component libraries like shadcn or daisy than writing raw CSS in my experience.

mickdarling 6mo ago

I used it today to take a look at my previously built design system with Logos, branding, fonts, and everything else. After a lot of annoying tweaking back and forth, finally, I got something that was satisfactory. Then I looked at the usage and it said I had used 95% of my Claude design usage for the week! This isn't a real tool. This is a plaything, if that's what they're providing as examples.

brandensilva 6mo ago
Yup it's based off their playground so plaything is the right word. It's a wrapper around that. I definitely appreciate the better design output from Claude code but it has a ways to go before it can replace serious design contenders.
adriand 6mo ago
I had a similar experience with running out of usage quite quickly, after setting up one design system properly, and then getting pretty close with a second one. But it's a research preview - I'm sure it will change. I was quite happy with what I pulled off using the first design system: I wanted a new footer section for my IPAAS startup, it generated four options, the fourth of which was quite good. We iterated on it for a bit, then I pulled it into Claude Code (that integrated feature is very cool), CC built it, I deployed it, done. (Bottom section of https://tediware.com/ https://tediware.com/ if you're interested, the bit with "Origin story" on the left and the signup panel on the right). It was not a complicated build by any means but I liked the concept it developed and it was dead-easy to make it all happen. I think the ideas in the UI are very good. Still rough, but you can see where this could go, and it's got a ton of potential.
- slopinthebag 6mo ago
  I mean, it's fine and serves it's purpose, but I'm a bit confused what you are getting that you wouldn't get with the millions of pre-made designs and design systems? Like Tailwind UI for example. https://tailwindcss.com/plus/ui-blocks https://tailwindcss.com/plus/ui-blocks

peteforde 6mo ago

Honestly, I never understood the move to create an artificial dichotomy between design and code with a heavy layer of tooling. I suppose that a layout engine made sense in the context of Flash, and you saw the future of the web as a set of keyframe animations. But the notion that there's a lot of value in creating a very heavy, high-friction abstraction between the UI/UX and the platform it ultimately runs on was always going to be a loser. In the end, it turns out we're all just web developers, regardless of your weapon of choice.

slopinthebag 6mo ago

I feel like we're leaning way too much into the "vibe" aspect of using LLMs at the moment. There is definitely a good use case for LLM's here, but is just prompting your way into a design really the best method here? I feel like something in between Figma and Claude Design would give designers the control they want, but still removing the friction of going between design files and the code impl.

allan_s 6mo ago

As someone who spent quite some times these days to reverse the figma protocol[0] I can't agree more with > Figma accidentally excluded themselves from the training data that would have made them relevant in the agentic era. Their binary format is so much of a "let's reinvent everything" which I think come from the fact it's a tool you can use for web design, android app design, ios design and anything-you-want design that it became a jack of all trade and so mapping it to web is not a perfect 1:1 translation. And for being useful to agent, any people who got to implement the figma from a UX guy know that even human can't know truly the intent of most figma design, so how a LLM could ? Common source of question that even the UX guy has no answer for: 1. Ok this button looks great, but in German how will it look ? 2. Oh and actually this button does not look great when i put in CSS, it wraps on two line, you cheated again with the letter spacing, did you ? 3. How does it look on a phone that is not an iphone ? 4. You know that doing a border with a gradien is not possible in CSS, so what should i put ? 5. How does it look on a 4k screen ? 6. etc. I know that most of these question can be answered by props and autolayout, and I've been asking the 5 question above these days on a figma that had these but it's just that the UX guy is not that mythical beast that "know-how-to-use-figma-right" So I can't wait for these tools that are html behind to catch up, even more if we can have the prompt with it. (As a developer I never got to see the prompt the product manager made to the UX guy) [0]https://github.com/allan-simon/figma-kiwi-protocol https://github.com/allan-simon/figma-kiwi-protocol

0xdyl 6mo ago

Can someone please help me understand why people are obssessing over this as a Figma killer and not, more clearly, a shot at Replit, Lovable, etc.?

operatingthetan 6mo ago
The AI app builders are part of the AI economy already. They are essentially re-selling tokens/compute. It's an existing horse race. Bringing a Figma killer to the market is converting a conventional software sector into an AI one. So it's more disruptive.

i_love_retros 6mo ago

If you get to the post script it sounds like they are just pissed they didn't get hired by figma.

ghoulishly 6mo ago
I promise I am fine lol, I actually had a really productive chat with their panel last year and found it wasn’t the right role for me anyway for some logistical reasons.

douglee650 6mo ago

I was making a new brand file in Figma and was about to define all the variables and aliases, paths, all that. Took one look at it and just made the 8 colors I needed and went on with the design.

xnx 6mo ago

Figma is going to regret not having sold to Adobe.

satvikpendem 6mo ago

How does this compare to Google's Stitch? As opposed to Anthropic's, it's free largely due to the largesse of Google. https://stitch.withgoogle.com/ https://stitch.withgoogle.com/

goosejuice 6mo ago
Wow, that produced pretty bad results (app). Claude design is much more useful than this but I've only spent around 20 minutes with each.
qingcharles 6mo ago
Stitch has way more usage allowance, and it has been absolutely fantastic for some things, but it can get trapped in weird places where whatever you tell it to do it thinks it did it, but it didn't. It's like that Family Guy blinds meme: https://tenor.com/search/family-guy-blinds-gifs https://tenor.com/search/family-guy-blinds-gifs

nitroedge 6mo ago

I tried Claude Design yesterday and fed it the UI of an app I am working on and what I had created already. I asked it to mock up 6 new "layout skins" using different colors, different icon and button placements, different vibes and it churned out 6 good designs with hi-res images plus Claude Code instructions and the ZIP file to boot. Didn't hit the usage, took about an hour. Did a really good overall and I liked the process and thinking structure and question asking.

preommr 6mo ago

I've worked on design tools for the last few years. This article is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the design space, and figma as a company. Just a few of my thoughts: - Figma was always about building a successful company over a successful product. Figma started with a much more ambitious aspiration, and had the ability to deliver through talent like Evan Wallace. A lot of it started with showing how capable webgl was in the browser. And yet, a lot of things like 3d features don't exist because they had the awareness to really hone in and focus on building a specific thing that made them money because everybody in the company ended up with an expensive seat price. - Seriously, Figma is a company that's about design tool second, and about getting a product that businesses use first. To that end, it's already succeeded through the IPO, subsequently, who knows what the market is going to look like. Figma having a war chest is in many ways much better than having a technically impressive demo that might evaporate. - People at Figma, 100%, know everything in this article. And not just figma people, like anybody and everybody that's tried to build a design tool has had these thoughts. It's very obvious that ui/ux is the interesection of design/dev/pm. It's also very obvious that it should stick close to the source of truth, to something like code. - The problem is, that it's almost underselling it to say that it's MASSIVE challenge to execute on these ideas because of how easily it bleeds into building not just a design tool, but a coding, data management, architecture, etc. tool - I could talk at length about all the challenges and potential solutions, but that's neither here nor there. - On AI, I guess other people's guess is as good as mine, but my gut feeling is that while data is important, SOTA AI is generalist enough that the base models, the thinking they're able to do, is better than having a lot of custom data. Especially because ui design is front-facing - you can just scour the web in contrast to private financial documents, or legal documents for example.

kbos87 6mo ago

> "To Figma: I can see a world where this post does numbers in the Figma internal Slack. If that’s the case and you’re reading this from Figma: this wouldn’t have happened if you hired me last year when I was interviewing. Your loss, big dawg." What a counterproductive way to end an otherwise good set of points. Gives the appearance of bitterness and a desire for vengeance.

ghoulishly 6mo ago
Do you genuinely think that was earnest?

nailer 6mo ago

I got deeper into Figma than I ever had to before yesterday. It turns out there’s no way to use Math in variables built in to the product. The most common plugin is 99 dollars. To add what is obviously mustache JS. To browser based software. It’s not good.

Olivia_Pan 6mo ago

[flagged]

Olivia_Pan 6mo ago

[flagged]

lastmansitting 6mo ago

“ As product teams scaled and design needed to justify itself inside engineering orgs…” What?

lastmansitting 6mo ago
Where are they getting this absurd notion?
- tene80i 6mo ago
  A lot of engineers find it difficult to conceive of product and design (and marketing, and management…) as actual skilled work. It’s all con artistry orbiting engineering.
  - duskdozer 6mo ago
    Con artists do tend to be skilled.
cultofmetatron 6mo ago
what are they talking about product teams needed to justify themselves? a good product guy's job is to talk to the users and figure out what to build. My job is to figure out HOW to make it happen. Neither side need to justify themselves. Good product people are vital to making sure engineers don't spend months building the wrong thing.

agentbc9000 6mo ago

Figma should be worried

zem 6mo ago

no real dog in the fight, and I don't even know if the OP's analysis is correct, but "they had a proprietary file format and got left behind because of it" always gives me a nice bit of schadenfreude.

supermatt 6mo ago

> Figma invented its own primitives to make that work: components, styles, variables, props, and so on Fireworks, Sketch, XD, Axure, etc all had these (or most of them) in some form before Figma even existed. Even illustrator, photoshop, etc have had the applicable ones for decades.

solaire_oa 6mo ago

As far as I'm aware, "source of truth" refers to data/code that drives the actual app, so Figma could never be a source of truth (Figma is a reference of what the app data/code is supposed to do). Saying Figma is a source of truth is like saying JIRA is a source of truth, which doesn't make any sense.