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> Anthropic themselves launched Claude Design which is a pretty direct competitor to Figma in many ways. While it's nowhere near functional and polished enough

> Anthropic themselves launched Claude Design which is a pretty direct competitor to Figma in many ways. While it's nowhere near functional and polished enough to replace Figma's core design product, I expect it will get significant traction outside of that The reaction that designers I know have given Claude Design couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for designers, their workflow is very different from software devs. You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs. People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate. Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers. Figma will probably better integrate AI in their own offering at some point which will help designers become more productive. And that will be the end of it.

TMWNN 6mo ago
[flagged]
- foolswisdom 6mo ago
  Personally, as a developer, I interact with figma to use designs made by designers. So a portion of that userbase probably isn't going anywhere?
- rafram 6mo ago
  A very large portion of the non-design users are using it to reference/implement the designs created by their designer colleagues. They’re not going anywhere.
  - thinkindie 6mo ago
    if you export the .fig file (even programatically) and you ingest in Claude Design you won't need to create users in Figma, right?
    - rafram 6mo ago
      Sure, if your design decisions are completely one-sided and transactional. In my experience, though, being able to comment and collaborate in Figma is important, as is being able to go find specific icons and components on my own.
      - thinkindie 6mo ago
        i believe it depends on the design system maturity too.
- stingraycharles 6mo ago
  > Quoting from the article, which of course you did not read 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.
- easton 6mo ago
  The developer seats are read-only, so they rely on designer seats existing to actually create files to inspect for development (and I’d guess PMs are using figma because designers are using figma). 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.)
  - sublimee 6mo ago
    As a PM in a startup, it took me a while to convince my boss I’m not a designer. It’s so easy nowadays to get a Figma file with an established design system and produce new features. 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.
kgwgk 6mo ago
> People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate. Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. Maybe it will replace (a large share of) Figma users.
- sbarre 6mo ago
  Yeah this is my take too.. I know a lot of front-end developers who pay for Figma and/or are not so invested in design that they need to do it all by hand. 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?
aurareturn 6mo ago
People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate. The entire workflow between designer --> dev hand off is going to change. 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.
NitpickLawyer 6mo ago
> couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for designers, their workflow is very different from software devs. You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs. 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...
- deaux 6mo ago
  > 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.
- troupo 6mo ago
  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.
  - coldtea 6mo ago
    >It still produces subpar code, with horrendous data access patterns, endless duplication of fucntionality etc Not really. 2024 called.
    - troupo 6mo ago
      Just because you don't look at the code, doesn't mean it doesn't produce subpar code constantly. Opus 4.7, high effort. Literally 30 minutes ago. There's a `const UNMATCHED_MARKER = "<hardcoded value>"` that we want to remove from a file. Behold (the first version was a full on AST walk for absolutely no reason whatsoever, by the way): function restoreUnmatchedSelectors(cssPath) { const cssContent = readFileSync(cssPath, "utf-8"); const marker = UNMATCHED_MARKER + " "; const count = (cssContent.match(new RegExp(escapeRegExp(marker), "g")) || []).length; if (count > 0) { writeFileSync(cssPath, cssContent.replaceAll(marker, "")); return count; } } function escapeRegExp(s) { return s.replace(/[.*+?^${}()|[\]\\]/g, "\\$&"); } Don't get me started on all the code duplications, utility functions written from scratch in every module that needs them, reading full database just to count number of records...
tobr 6mo ago
I tried uploading our design system. Claude Design’s environment was so limited it had to reimplement it from scratch in HTML, JS and CSS. Doing that burned through more than half the token limit. Along the way it completely changed it and made up things that don’t fit in at all, neither visually or as code. The output of making a mockup is one huge HTML file with minified CSS that just can’t be used meaningfully for anything. I guess I had expected something like Claude Code with visual tools added on top, but that’s not what this is.
- nekooooo 6mo ago
  to be honest even if it had worked, i don't see claude design ever working as your source of truth
ymolodtsov 6mo ago
There are many designers. I know a bunch who basically stopped using Figma altogether and just prototype what they're working on directly in code these days. For them, Claude Design was a very interesting addition.
nkoren 6mo ago
As someone who does both development and design, I agree. With some caveats. 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.
- petra 6mo ago
  Are there goals for an app design? can they be measured? specified? constrained? 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.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
embedding-shape 6mo ago
> Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers. 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.
samiv 6mo ago
"Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers." So...we can shitcan the designers and offload the work to the 10 developers still keeping the lights on?
- stingraycharles 6mo ago
  Small startups / orgs? Definitely. But they’re not where the money comes from for Figma. Enterprise is not gonna lay off all their designers any time soon.
arbuge 6mo ago
> Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers. Well, when you put it that way, that sounds bad for designers, and, by extension, Figma. ps. I do like commas.
- stingraycharles 6mo ago
  As a proponent of the Oxford comma, I didn’t mind those commas.
  - d1sxeyes 6mo ago
    Those are not Oxford commas, they’re parenthetical (and I like them too!)
coldtea 6mo ago
>You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs. Sure you can, and many otherwise would-be human-designer-clients, will do exactly that. Nike might not, but 99% of the companies hiring designers are not Nike scale.
- ehnto 6mo ago
  You are right I think, a lot of clients need a design as a practicality rather than a differentiating factor, they will be more than happy with a generic design output for next to nothing. Many companies are not really based around their web design being a big factor in their business. Some very influential companies in my area look like they last updated their website in 1998.

TMWNN 6mo ago

[flagged]

foolswisdom 6mo ago
Personally, as a developer, I interact with figma to use designs made by designers. So a portion of that userbase probably isn't going anywhere?
rafram 6mo ago
A very large portion of the non-design users are using it to reference/implement the designs created by their designer colleagues. They’re not going anywhere.
- thinkindie 6mo ago
  if you export the .fig file (even programatically) and you ingest in Claude Design you won't need to create users in Figma, right?
  - rafram 6mo ago
    Sure, if your design decisions are completely one-sided and transactional. In my experience, though, being able to comment and collaborate in Figma is important, as is being able to go find specific icons and components on my own.
    - thinkindie 6mo ago
      i believe it depends on the design system maturity too.
stingraycharles 6mo ago
> Quoting from the article, which of course you did not read 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.
easton 6mo ago
The developer seats are read-only, so they rely on designer seats existing to actually create files to inspect for development (and I’d guess PMs are using figma because designers are using figma). 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.)
- sublimee 6mo ago
  As a PM in a startup, it took me a while to convince my boss I’m not a designer. It’s so easy nowadays to get a Figma file with an established design system and produce new features. 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.

kgwgk 6mo ago

> People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate. Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. Maybe it will replace (a large share of) Figma users.

sbarre 6mo ago
Yeah this is my take too.. I know a lot of front-end developers who pay for Figma and/or are not so invested in design that they need to do it all by hand. 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?

aurareturn 6mo ago

People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate. The entire workflow between designer --> dev hand off is going to change. 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.

NitpickLawyer 6mo ago

> couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for designers, their workflow is very different from software devs. You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs. 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...

deaux 6mo ago
> 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.
troupo 6mo ago
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.
- coldtea 6mo ago
  >It still produces subpar code, with horrendous data access patterns, endless duplication of fucntionality etc Not really. 2024 called.
  - troupo 6mo ago
    Just because you don't look at the code, doesn't mean it doesn't produce subpar code constantly. Opus 4.7, high effort. Literally 30 minutes ago. There's a `const UNMATCHED_MARKER = "<hardcoded value>"` that we want to remove from a file. Behold (the first version was a full on AST walk for absolutely no reason whatsoever, by the way): function restoreUnmatchedSelectors(cssPath) { const cssContent = readFileSync(cssPath, "utf-8"); const marker = UNMATCHED_MARKER + " "; const count = (cssContent.match(new RegExp(escapeRegExp(marker), "g")) || []).length; if (count > 0) { writeFileSync(cssPath, cssContent.replaceAll(marker, "")); return count; } } function escapeRegExp(s) { return s.replace(/[.*+?^${}()|[\]\\]/g, "\\$&"); } Don't get me started on all the code duplications, utility functions written from scratch in every module that needs them, reading full database just to count number of records...

tobr 6mo ago

I tried uploading our design system. Claude Design’s environment was so limited it had to reimplement it from scratch in HTML, JS and CSS. Doing that burned through more than half the token limit. Along the way it completely changed it and made up things that don’t fit in at all, neither visually or as code. The output of making a mockup is one huge HTML file with minified CSS that just can’t be used meaningfully for anything. I guess I had expected something like Claude Code with visual tools added on top, but that’s not what this is.

nekooooo 6mo ago
to be honest even if it had worked, i don't see claude design ever working as your source of truth

ymolodtsov 6mo ago

There are many designers. I know a bunch who basically stopped using Figma altogether and just prototype what they're working on directly in code these days. For them, Claude Design was a very interesting addition.

nkoren 6mo ago

As someone who does both development and design, I agree. With some caveats. 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.

petra 6mo ago
Are there goals for an app design? can they be measured? specified? constrained? 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.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

embedding-shape 6mo ago

> Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers. 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.

samiv 6mo ago

"Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers." So...we can shitcan the designers and offload the work to the 10 developers still keeping the lights on?

stingraycharles 6mo ago
Small startups / orgs? Definitely. But they’re not where the money comes from for Figma. Enterprise is not gonna lay off all their designers any time soon.

arbuge 6mo ago

> Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers. Well, when you put it that way, that sounds bad for designers, and, by extension, Figma. ps. I do like commas.

stingraycharles 6mo ago
As a proponent of the Oxford comma, I didn’t mind those commas.
- d1sxeyes 6mo ago
  Those are not Oxford commas, they’re parenthetical (and I like them too!)

coldtea 6mo ago

>You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs. Sure you can, and many otherwise would-be human-designer-clients, will do exactly that. Nike might not, but 99% of the companies hiring designers are not Nike scale.

ehnto 6mo ago
You are right I think, a lot of clients need a design as a practicality rather than a differentiating factor, they will be more than happy with a generic design output for next to nothing. Many companies are not really based around their web design being a big factor in their business. Some very influential companies in my area look like they last updated their website in 1998.