10 ms·

I design with Claude more than Figma now

324 points by MrBuddyCasino 5mo ago

hyperionultra 5mo ago
For design tools and website builders tough times ahead. Wix for example lay down 20% of staff in some countries. All due to “optimization” with LLM. Klankers will fix everything. Right?
discordance 5mo ago
I’ve been using Claude Design for my front ends. The output looks and feels good enough, but the designs often look very similar and generally adhere to contemporary web tropes. Keen to hear if anyone has had unconventional creative adventures with it.
- JasonSage 5mo ago
  I've had that experience and I've started testing different prompts and inputs. I find it funny about meeting requirements when you give them, and making safe choices when you don't give direction. So if you're going to rate the output aesthetics and UX/content, but you don't prompt especially much around the aesthetics, you're only getting the safe assumed defaults. It's good at making bootstrap/tailwind clone designs unless you work that angle. For simple web pages, I've started making this the only focus for initial iteration.
  - firemelt 5mo ago
    any tips for design/aesthetics prompts?
    - JasonSage 5mo ago
      I keep a bookmarks folder of websites that have non-cookie-cutter design. If I have an aesthetic in mind I'll use some screenshots of those sites in the prompt and phrase their inclusion as: "Look at these slightly non-standard designs that work really well for me." So far I've only seen Claude look for through-lines and high-level takeaways--"user likes <design feature> based on the screenshots, so I'll include that"--and screenshots aren't currently a granularity level where it can lift specific details or produce something derivative. Other than that I try to encourage specific consideration of: type scale, borders and rounding, padding/whitespace, elevation as shadow vs blur, colors. I don't think one needs to pull every customization lever on every project.
      - qingcharles 5mo ago
        This. Keep a list of sites you like and just jam screenshots of the best bits into Claude Design when you are asking it for help. I've been designing sites for 32 years, and I've tried almost all the tools. I was very impressed with Stitch, but I've now migrated all my designs to Claude. My aesthetic is born in the simplicity and cleanliness of mid-90s, coupled with modern CSS. I want the purest, simplest HTML, with the simplest CSS and the absolute minimum of JS. Claude generates some of the best looking, most user-friendly designs I've seen. I don't need crazy scroll effects and tons of animations; I just need sites that are easy to read, easy to navigate and let the user get the task done in the quickest way.
- slopinthebag 5mo ago
  Sort of, I've given it examples of unconventional UI's and then had it sort of create a mashup of them and it's been decent. But I feel like that's cheating.
- techpression 5mo ago
  I’ve done a few different things, some different presentations, web mockups etc. They all look more or less identical out of the box, and in every single case of a presentation, Claude Design has zero concept of layout boundaries, happily making slides that expand 200% or more out of the visible viewport (I have a lot of content and it just can’t figure out nice ways of presenting it). There’s still value in it for me, I get decent enough output to convey my intent and I sometimes manually tweak the HTML. Defining fonts is a good way to at least not get the same typography as everyone else.
- jaapz 5mo ago
  Most applications don't need unconventional creativity though.
  - hparadiz 5mo ago
    Most applications are years long projects that already have styling and code structure done by humans so if the mock up is not perfectly aligned it doesn't even matter because when you finally approve the design and get to building it; that's where the pixel perfect tweaking comes in. And again if it's a mature code base with an existing stylesheet it tends to come out with all the expectations you'd have of it because it's re-using components that already exist 99% of the time.
  - qingcharles 5mo ago
    Exactly. 99% of sites don't need bleeding edge design and fancy fonts.
- epolanski 5mo ago
  I use claude design too. It has been suggested to me by some very respected and experienced designers which now prototype almost exclusively in claude and then when happy refine in figma. By the way, you can always tune your prompts to not be generic, if you ask for generic UIs without detailed styling prompts you will get generic designs.
  - fragmede 5mo ago
    But then how do they get it back out from Figma and make it live?
    - epolanski 5mo ago
      That was never a designer's concern? By the way figma has a decent mcp that you can connect your LLMs to and extract the design tokens from.
    - FireBeyond 5mo ago
      It would seem a circuitous process and I'd suggest another workflow, but Claude Design can ingest Figma files.
- monkeydust 5mo ago
  Same, you can instruct it specifically to look non-standard and give it examples of website styles I want. After some wrangling it feels a bit more creative but takes prompting.
  - itake 5mo ago
    Do you have any like dyes or work clothes describing this process? I don’t know what prompted to get it away from the base model and any of like the non-standard web design like styles are a little bit too harsh for me if that makes sense. Like for example I like brutalist design, but it just feels heavy sometimes on the apps that I’m making. I’ve tried to get the AI to describe a style based on the product name or you know it seem that I wanna have for example travel. But then it creates us like steal, amorphic design where everything looks like a boarding pass airplane ticket.
- Reebz 5mo ago
  [Take a look at my portfolio site](https://reebz.com https://reebz.com), please view on desktop. This is about 3 weeks of effort to date. It is unfinished, but you get the idea. Just like SaaS boilerplate from the decade prior, there is LLM boilerplate (since it’s trained on the internet). So if you put in enough elbow-grease anything is (still) possible!
  - rirze 5mo ago
    This is amazing.
hemc4 5mo ago
Even for the large products, figma is not the starting point for new concepts anymore. I start with a quick prototype on dev environment and then share it with designer for further improvements in figma or in the app itself. With every new model or agent improvement, going back to figma for polishing the ui is decllinig. If we can find a way to keep the frontend code static templates without complex logic, need for this polishing in figma will go away completey as llms can understand it one context window. With the modern frameworks designed for client side rendering, keeping everything in one context is still tricky.
- saaspirant 5mo ago
  I use LLMs to design things and build wireframes. Product people can actually play with the wireframes and it's trivial to implement changes. And same LLM generated files can be used to guide the LLM to build the actual pages too.
meszmate 5mo ago
Same here. I mostly use Figma for logos and random assets now.
dilyevsky 5mo ago
Figma make and gpt designer have a bunch of catching up to do. I couldn’t even import our brand guidelines into make which is already a .fig like what are we even doing here, guys? CD crunches through ungodly amount of tokens and is really slow on iteration but at least you can get some really nice prototypes extremely quickly there. GPT beats any Anthropic models on illustrations so they really should get a grip on multimodal. Overall, it seems like we’re still super early but you can already see glimpses of what may come
mi_lk 5mo ago
Is it just me or the bar to publish janestreet blogposts has been lowered recently?
- colesantiago 5mo ago
  It is not just you. This is a very disappointing post from Jane Street.
osti 5mo ago
I think Jane Street is an Anthropic investor, so take it fwiw.
- wartywhoa23 5mo ago
  The whole HN is one huge AI ad now.
  - OtomotO 5mo ago
    It's a cult. And frankly, I am not interested in churches or cults.
    - Terr_ 5mo ago
      In between some old family history and recent US politics, I think there are other things I'd rather reserve the weighty word "cult" for... However, should it arise, one of the features that might convince me is this: In the name of "loyalty" or "faith" cults require members to burn their bridges, actively cutting off their own potential to escape to any other social support network. That may mean creating enemies out of former associates, humiliating rituals or blackmail material, or simply ruining their reputations through obvious lies.
      - OtomotO 5mo ago
        I don't particularly care about the US or US politics since 2016. Unless you invade a country again and we have to deal with the Fallout for years to come, that is. For example: I have banned all news about Trump administration from my home. It's simply not interesting. He is a toddler, and I have a toddler of my own.
        Terr_ 5mo ago
        I think I did quite enough to be vague and oblique on that context, so that it wasn't the focus, and any reader could avoid the topic... if they chose to.
firemelt 5mo ago
amyone know how to use claude design more effectively I always alhave a feeling I use a slot machine from 6 sessions and 5 projects only one template that I choose anything else is really really bad
karolist 5mo ago
> Oh no, Figma ER was actually positive, release mode SaaS FUD
osullivj 5mo ago
Sounds like desk strat RAD work is moving to LLM gen code at JS. My recentish experience of that kind of work has been Athena at JPMC and Quartz at BoA; both Python with functional style via DAG or pixie with py ui framework to match. Which enables quick dev of the parts of trading workflow that don't need to be quick, like booking tools or EOD risk. I know first hand Athena and Qz are crufty when you get into the weeds. The bonsai framework with Elm inspired ocaml impl sounds v cool. So I can see how this approach can accelerate a lot of trading tech dev. But does it have any traction over the hard problems where we turn to C++ or Rust: near real pricing and risk across multiple instruments and markets?
t0mas88 5mo ago
I use the same approach a lot. Before AI I also did this manually. First sit down with a user and just paper and pencil, then hack together a frontend POC / demo, have them play with it and adjust until it works as they wanted. For me building a quick (not production quality) frontend demo in code was already often faster than getting the right interaction working in Figma. And it allowed to make it fully interactive so you can catch much more edge cases on the UX side. Now with Claude Code it's even faster to build the throw away prototype. But not a huge difference since discussing with the users and thinking about how it should work is 80% of the time. Claude maybe halves the other 20% compared to quickly doing it yourself. Faster to first version, slower to iterate if it didn't fully get it.
__mharrison__ 5mo ago
I'm my work as an FDE this week, Copilot did the initial UI. Feedback was given and tells were adjusted all through prompting.
kcrwfrd_ 5mo ago
We are doing this on my team (I am the frontend engineer) and honestly I really miss the old way of doing things. Written specifications are being reduced in favor of these working prototypes, and now there’s this extra cognitive burden of reading the code and trying to determine what were the intended changes, and what’s the slop that needs to be tossed aside. We also have to figure out, should we take over this generated PR and make any needed changes? Or do we start over from scratch? There’s often a sense of friction either way. There have been times where a bunch of unintended changes were generated and I took time to port them over on my reimplementation, and then later on it’s “oops! Sorry! We didn’t mean to change that.” I get it’s empowering but it does take away from some of the joy I used to find in my work and replaced it with some headaches.
- Iolaum 5mo ago
  Why not ask Claude design to write a document fully specifying the prototype?
- zuzululu 5mo ago
  old way that was clunky, long feedback cycles and gate keeping UI no thanks. BE boys do FE now
- drpotato 5mo ago
  I am in a similar boat. Design and product use Claude to vibe design/code a feature/experience and rapidly prototype it, getting it in front of customers to get feedback with minimal engineering time. Amazing! However, you might be surprised to find out it hasn’t really helped us ship stuff faster overall. The reason, I believe, is we’ve lost something along the way. Thinking. A non-trivial amount of which is now outsourced to a language model. It paints over the cracks in the prompt, hallucinates how things should work when unspecified, what would normally make someone stop and say “this isn’t quite working”, “how should I communicate this idea” or “what happens when…” has gone. Now, these details are left for after it’s been built proper. Sure, we can improve the process and reflect more on how to utilise this new technique … but is it better than how things used to be? Yeah nah
  - 5mo ago
felixlu2026 5mo ago
[flagged]
zuzululu 5mo ago
I use codex
- DANmode 5mo ago
  Great story.
  - zuzululu 5mo ago
    codex can do UI well if you know what you are doing.
    - DANmode 5mo ago
      Add a detail on how, and you’re contributing!
      - zuzululu 5mo ago
        "hey codex make me a nice UI" not enough for you ?
        DANmode 5mo ago
        I’m just asking what makes you “know what you are doing”, regarding using Codex for UI. (I’m just trying to get something interesting or substantive from this sub-thread.)
        stemchar 5mo ago
        Damn prompt engineering has become an art already. No wonder so many people have been left behind.
sorry_outta_gas 5mo ago
[dead]
conradfr 5mo ago
> Claude gave me free, unlimited iteration, unbothered when I changed my mind for the 50th time or asked for a small tweak Do you not pay for Claude?
- kevmo314 5mo ago
  Free with an easy monthly payment of $20!
  - hparadiz 5mo ago
    When you are used to ordering humans around that are paid a salary measured in tens of thousands $20 seems like nothing in comparison.
  - LoganDark 5mo ago
    50 iterations on the Pro plan? You kidding?
    - nikanj 5mo ago
      50 iterations of CSS / layout? Easy, not even pushing it. A freelancer will cuss you out after 3-4 rounds of re-doing everything, but an LLM is happy to keep generating.
      - SV_BubbleTime 5mo ago
        There is something to this. I have been able to iterate with Claude Design in a way that I wouldn’t illiterate with a human coworker. “Ok, that’s good. Kill options 2,3,4,5 and make entirely new variations of them, be bold and use wildly different design theories” “Take the submit button from 1, the list from 2, the item spacing from 3, the hamburger from 4 and then make that into variation 5” “I liked the button design before. Split this design into two and use the old button and while we’re doing this, move the buttons to the top of the page outside the scrollable area” I’ve found Design has been great for me who can’t blank page a design to save my life.
  - 5mo ago
slopinthebag 5mo ago
Honestly, I'm not really pro or anti llm and I think there are a ton of limitations for using it to generate code, but UI has been probably the only thing I've been able to vibe code. It helps that I've done a lot of UI work over the years, but I think the combination of defects being easily visible through normal usage, the UI being a non-critical component of a system (bugs don't cause vulns or data corruption (usually), combined with the amount of churn that UI's see, make it a somewhat uniquely good candidate for vibe coding. Also a lot of UI toolkits are declarative, and I think language models do much better with declarative code. In a way it's not much different from copy-pasting components from templates or whatever, just with more customisability. And for stuff that isn't HTML-based like React it does worse. It's also not great at building component libraries, I still write those myself with little LLM involvement, but that makes sense because the architecture is actually relevant with that, unlike generating CSS and xml-derived components, which is mostly just declarative templating anyways. I've had decent success writing the core logic myself and then delegating the UI to AI. I think if I didn't write the core logic it would not work very well, but since it's designed well by myself the AI has a much smaller scope to work in which constrains it enough where vibe coding works. Pretty cool.
designerarvid 5mo ago
The benefit here is designers learning to code. It was always weird to me that designers were shaping software without knowing how it was built. I'm a designer btw. However, designing in code is technology-first. One could argue that the purpose of design - to shape the artifacts for human purpose - is better done NOT starting with the strict rules of code. Pen and paper is still hard to beat, not for anything that looks nice, but for helping your mind forward.
- ozim 5mo ago
  But then you „design like software developers”.
  - consp 5mo ago
    What's wrong with a good cli?
    - 946789987649 5mo ago
      My mum doesn't know how to use a cli.
      - preg_match 5mo ago
        [dead]
- halapro 5mo ago
  > without knowing how it was built It helps to understand the constraints of a medium, but you really don't need to know every level down to the electrons moving through the silicon.
  - designerarvid 5mo ago
    Certainly, it helps the architect to know the constraints of concrete and bricks, but you don’t really have to know every level of down to the chemistry.
trick-or-treat 5mo ago
I don't see how a coding model competes with figma TBH, an image model maybe but that's a stretch too.
satvikpendem 5mo ago
I worry about Figma stock, I know some who bought during the IPO who are now underwater. Figma launched their own design agent but not sure how well that's doing.
- jen729w 5mo ago
  > I know some who bought during the IPO who are now underwater Yeah you don't say. High of $124, currently $22. But hey: that's ~~gambling~~ stock trading for you. https://au.finance.yahoo.com/quote/FIG/ https://au.finance.yahoo.com/quote/FIG/
  - kubb 5mo ago
    No sympathy from me. I just wish it happened more to people who overpay for stuff like houses or Tesla stock.
    - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
      > I just wish it happened more to people who overpay for stuff like houses or Tesla stock That's pretty mean. I disagree with a lot of people on their investment choices and evangelism. That doesn't mean I want them to suffer for it.
      - kubb 5mo ago
        It’s not that I want them to suffer, it’s that them being rewarded incentivizes suboptimal behavior and outcomes. Markets don’t work anymore. Which results in even more suffering.
        JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
        > them being rewarded incentivizes suboptimal behavior and outcomes What if they're choosing correctly? Like, I've been pretty consistently critical of crypto. Yet I'm glad my index funds have to buy Coinbase.
tonyoconnell 5mo ago
i gave claude code my design system that i built in figma and haven't opened it again. it's much faster designing with your voice.
misiek08 5mo ago
Even if this is ad only - are we really ready for a rug pull from Anthropic? Maybe I’m completely unaware in this tools space, but I feel like it’s last tool that’s worth (and not pricey)…
- DANmode 5mo ago
  For SVG and html/css generation? When they paywall hard, I’ll use a local model on my laptop processor instead, or phone, and wait a few hours as needed.
weitendorf 5mo ago
You should note that Claude Design is most likely a DPO->PPO->Actor-Critic bootstrap play: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18290 https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18290 / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximal_policy_optimization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximal_policy_optimization / https://spinningup.openai.com/en/latest/algorithms/sac.html https://spinningup.openai.com/en/latest/algorithms/sac.html It's much harder to RL out design taste because it's not self-grounding, and human labelers have no real skin in the game, so this (having a human with a vested outcome in the process directing a model's work) is the best way to get LLMs better at design/"taste"/aesthetic judgment themselves. We were working on the same thing 7 months ago and then I realized that winning over designers to do this would be a huge uphill battle setting up an inevitable fall from grace later on. What makes me most suspicious of Claude Design is that when you disconnect and reconnect later, it loses context and nags you that the product doesn't work like that. Bullshit. It's at best an anti-abuse/implementation detail (to keep you from launching 10 at once and coming back to them later) or product shortcoming that just so happens to be optimized for keeping you from continuing your design in better tools than theirs for the inevitable followups. It's great for one shots and it makes sense when you're trying to build a vertical product development stack like Anthropic but I'm disappointed it feels more like a tool optimized for keeping you in their product than for what you're working on. If a company other than Anthropic had shipped this - it's not that hard to build a visual self-eval loop, just use Chrome Devtools Protocol to run headless chrome and take screenshots -> feed into a judge LLM for feedback -> continue - I don't think it would really have seen much adoption. That said, AI trained on Actor-Critic with a tight human feedback loop definitely seems like the right approach to solving the problem, just not something I want to spend my time training for someone else unless I can do so with higher "entropy" ie high parallelism/optionality
- gobdovan 5mo ago
  Where does the article mention Claude Design? It seems to me the author is using LLMs as a tool for iteration, given he is a designer. Also, you're mentioning a lot of unrelated tech. DPO, PPO, actor-critic, visual self-eval loops, Anthropic's "vertical product development stack" may be interesting, but they are mostly orthogonal. The article's point is simply that a designer can now turn design proposals into working prototypes faster than with Figma. Also, you mention what seems to be a random product bug about disconnect and reconnect that doesn't have anything to do with this workflow. It seems to me that you're post-rationalising some insights that are not really there. Good to think things through and in public, not discouraging it. I hope this reads as constructive.
cawksuwcka 5mo ago
[dead]
itsnkr2293 5mo ago
Claud design burns lots of tokens
ulfw 5mo ago
Yea I mean okay JaneStreet. World wide renowned to be a tech design powerhouse...
tam159 5mo ago
I still prefer Figma for collaboration
junglistguy 5mo ago
[dead]
cryo32 5mo ago
You aren't designing.
iLoveOncall 5mo ago
> Having joined Jane Street this past summer, I’m finding AI support indispensable. There’s just so much that’s new to me, and so much I’m not good at yet, like OCaml and Bonsai. Using AI for things you aren't good at, or not experienced with, is literally the worst way to use AI. You WANT to struggle when learning a new language, and use reliable documentation to solve your problems, not circumvent them entirely by using AI. This is extreme incompetence, I'm shocked that Jane Street would advertise it.
- asfjhq 5mo ago
  They apparently pressure their new hires to blog and talk their book. It happens a lot in U.S. corporations.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
Tanxsinxlnx 5mo ago
upvote
superkickstart 5mo ago
[dead]
asfjhq 5mo ago
Janestreet is now known for shady trading in India and its aggressive AI trading strategies: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-04/jane-street-plans-new-data-center-as-compute-power-runs-scarce https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-04/jane-stre... In other words, it is an AI booster. Abusing the goodwill of programmers for their OCaml involvement even though most of it was convoluted bloat and inferior to INRIA code is devious. It happens all the time now and people need to inoculate themselves against it: A single famous open source person or an open source involved company invested in AI suddenly posts "organic" testimonies in favor of AI. It means nothing. The person is not the same person, the company is not the same company (or is now overtly evil).
croes 5mo ago
And how much of these designs are used in the end compared to when they where done with Figma?
bobkb 5mo ago
At work we are now in the process of migrating away from Figma. We had spend years perfecting our Figma based design workflow. Currently we are moving all the designs into the code itself using Storybook. The gap currently is reviews and feedback which is addressed by Chromatic now.
lifeisstillgood 5mo ago
>>> prototypes are living proposal docs, the code is disposable, and a reviewer’s job is to give feedback about the design and user experience. Eventually, reviewers still take over the idea and implement it in a separate feature, referencing the prototype but owning the production code That’s solves an issue I have with all POC - a really good approach
- ale 5mo ago
  The article does not come from someone who relies of Figma for a living. It's easy to call it a "proposal doc" when you're working on a specific issue for a specific product. There are still millions of designers who use Figma to define and maintain design systems that span across products and platforms, where Figma is the source of truth.
sfjailbird 5mo ago
We already have the business side come with requirements in the form of 'solutions' that they have thought up, which more often than not are Rube Golberg-esque contraptions, that you have to conversationally reverse engineer to arrive at the actual requirements. In the future they will come with their 'ready' solution, already 'working' and be even less receptive to look at design and architecture holistically. Just make it like that. And why do you need to spend X man hours? The thing is basically already done!
- gwerbin 5mo ago
  I have seen this already. Vibecoded top to bottom. The downside is that the business people don't understand why you can't just put their app in production as is. And then there's a lot of pressure to make it happen quickly "because we can use AI to move fast". This is going to come down to healthy organization dynamics, and hopefully represents a learning opportunity for leadership. The upside is that the idea has already been proven out much more thoroughly than a sketch on a napkin. Claude has already prompted them about edge cases and design decisions. It's very likely that at some point they had to explicitly tell Claude "don't worry about that and just make an assumption", or "I actually don't like that interaction after trying it a few times, can you do a differently". They had to write out much of their idea in clear and direct language in order to prompt the AI. They've probably been playing with their own toy because it's fun to play with toys you summoned from thin air, so they've had a chance to discover the experience and refine their own preferences. It's probably a net negative right now because the "ship it what's the problem team" pressure is intense and stupid and demoralizing and miserable to work under. But I think it will stabilize and it might be a net positive in future projects.
  - iamjs 5mo ago
    > It's very likely that at some point they had to explicitly tell Claude "don't worry about that and just make an assumption", Non technical folks vibe coding aren't explicitly telling Claude anything other than "Accept"
  - slyzmud 5mo ago
    I've working on a small side project with a non technical friend for a couple months. It's really small but we are selling it to some clients. The other day my friend discovered lovable and vibe coded an entire app and he started feeling like I was scamming him. Why would I take weeks or months in building our app if he could do it on hours? He might be stubborn but ended up blindly believing me, but I couldn't find a good way of explaining that a prototype wasn't a final product. It has lots of errors, doesn't consider edge cases and it's impossible to fix if something breaks. Of course what I said didn't mean much because he didn't understand what I was talking about. How do you communicate this problem? That there's much more than what you see in a frontend? Seems really hard to explain to non technical people.
Hazemamirrr 5mo ago
true it is much more easier using claude design rather than Figma yet it does not produce the same output quality.
- GoToRO 5mo ago
  They are not using design. They vibe code the feature.
azangru 5mo ago
> Submit a feature (our version of a pull request) that looks and behaves exactly the way I want What happens after the submission? Who reviews the feature? How long? Are there any limits to the size of the diff? Do reviewers push back? How often are features submitted?
bradleykingz 5mo ago
honestly, for me, chatgpt has more replaced dribbble than it has figma. where i'd normally spend hours combing through dribbble looking for inspiration for layouts for specific components (most of the time finding nothing), now I use chatgpt to come up with a number of different designs, then port them over to figma. most designs produced by cgpt arent production-ready, especially for mobile. figma allows me to set proper constraints (screen size, for example), that give it a more grounded "shape" for that reason, the actual final design is still by hand for now. however, the translation from design to implementation is greatly sped up by codex, which basically does it pixel-perfect. all the same, still lots of tweaks needed before the final implementation is ready. design to code still has a bunch of issues that often need figuring out/standardising - font sizes, weights, etc. this is on mobile btw, where space is very limited. havent worked on a website in a while, but i'd imagine the extra space would allow for far more liberty. i do not miss having to craft ten different designs just to ensure responsiveness. massive pita.
nether1 5mo ago
I use Claude code a lot for design too but it just does a lot of regurgitation in design too
tsouth2 5mo ago
Claude is pretty great at designing certain images. For favicons, logos, og cards, it does extremely well. For full image generation, I go elsewhere.
coldtea 5mo ago
Funnily, that's the first stage in how you end up designing "will work for food" signs with markers, more than with Figma or Claude...
janpeuker 5mo ago
> workflow improvements that would have taken days or weeks of engineering It's a nice article and good point but I feel "design" in the title is misleading - the example given has an extremely reduced visual or spatial scope (something models are still not good at). The post is more about rapid prototyping.
sspoisk 5mo ago
[flagged]
nixpulvis 5mo ago
Hey Edwin. Glad to see your post pop up. I remember doing a hackathon with you back in like 2012/2013. I think the ability to get to a working prototype faster is very empowering, even if some will be tempted to ship these incomplete ideas. Design and UX needs benefits greatly from being able to play with it, and experience the actual flows beyond just a storyboard and wireframes.
- ehmorris 5mo ago
  Hi!
trinsic2 5mo ago
> There’s also a fear I have that designing with Claude keeps me out of a fluid, creative mindset and stuck in an iterative one, constrained to the outcomes I think Claude can produce. That’s fine for mature tools, where changes are iterative, but might mean I miss ideas when working on something new I some times notice this. the LLM cant see past the interation so I have to think outside the box and say, what if we look at it from this perspective, and suddenly a new way of designing it comes into existance. Somes times I have to create a flow chart to get the LLM to see past its own progression steps.
itsTyrion 5mo ago
"i design with claude" no, you don't
- MayCXC 5mo ago
  "i design with claude" yes, they do
MayCXC 5mo ago
With a vibecoded multiplayer web IDE for our flutter app, I have two nontechnical team members prototype app features from a browser all day. The outcome is a git branch with functional dart code, and a strictly more powerful design prompt than figma make. Claude built its own claude -p harness that communicates with the browser via websocket flawlessly. To use our max subscription after [1] takes effect, we are considering adapting that setup to an approach like [2] instead. [1] https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2054610152817619388 https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2054610152817619388 [2] https://lanes.sh/blog/claude-billing-split https://lanes.sh/blog/claude-billing-split
alexpatin 5mo ago
Designer here. There is a lot of pressure at the startup I work at to use AI for everything so we can 'move faster'. Often working with vague requirements. Given leaderships inexperience building software, having something to look at and point to is helpful for sussing out requirements and edge cases. Figma is still my preferred canvas. Figjam is still great for rough wireframes, flows, and agreeing on data models with my eng counterparts. But Claude accelerates the divergent early stage 'exploration' work. Unfortunately we don't take the time to properly validate the concepts with customers. Again in the name of 'moving fast'. They will learn eventually I guess. I'm getting off-topic. Claude is super helpful. As time passes I'm doing more and more work with it. But sometimes taking my design system and pushing pixels is genuinely faster when there is an obvious solution, opposed to ensuring Claude has all the right context to solve a relatively simple problem. All depends on what I'm working on really.
yieldcrv 5mo ago
Claude Design is great because I always knew what I needed UX designers to do. A software engineer can pick up frontend UX concepts really easily, but it's just still a full time job to keep up, iterate, do states. I've worked with graphic designers, whether its 1 person on a team, or a group, or a division, and had the back and forth for years. I've also contracted with many graphic designers to polish my own applications as well as promotional materials. I've contracted with agencies, I know what a style guide looks like, a press kit, a design library shared between applications and departments needs to have. Now it's not a full time job. Its 3 tabs for different user flows in the application. And on the flip side, designers can also deploy software now that's good enough - (I feel like I can deploy more efficient software than an AI will initially suggest, and do things that stay on free tiers for far longer than anyone just going along with AI's suggestions.)
awbvious 5mo ago
" At present, there are no other major purchasers of AI compute outside of NVIDIA, hyperscalers (who are selling it to Anthropic and OpenAI, or they’re Meta, which has no AI strategy), OpenAI, and Anthropic. None. I can’t find a single one outside of Jane Street spending more than a few hundred million. We need a few hundred billion. " https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-slowing-down/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-slowing-down/ The one non-circular-financing entity that is heavily spending on AI, is interested in you knowing how wisely they think they are spending their money. Jane Street isn't one to telegraph their moves (seems like they prefer to Telegram them privately https://protos.com/what-weve-learned-from-terraform-labs-unredacted-jane-street-lawsuit/ https://protos.com/what-weve-learned-from-terraform-labs-unr... , so not only Jump Crypto felt fine letting everyone believe the ponzi, per these allegations it seems Jane Street did too). If Jane Street is spending the most, and their staff is supposedly high value pay/profit but low headcount, for all the end user knows, their "AI agent" is half chat bot / half software engineer with 20 years experience who checks each result before sending it. Literally the Mechanical Turk scam of hundreds of years ago, where a midget hides in the stand and moves the chess pieces--with shades of Amazon Fresh self checkout. Maybe the higher ups at Jane Street know this, maybe not. But unless they have a closed system that Anthropic can't get into, I would be suspicious. And, of course, they aren't /that/ free from the circular financing because they are a major investor of Anthropic. To me the fact that the blog post doesn't start with a disclosure doesn't seem like a misstep/accident. And if they find out they are being Mechanical-Turked, I think it far more likely they'll find some way of shorting before telling anyone, or they won't tell anyone.
sid_ships 5mo ago
[dead]

324 points by MrBuddyCasino 5mo ago

For design tools and website builders tough times ahead. Wix for example lay down 20% of staff in some countries. All due to “optimization” with LLM. Klankers will fix everything. Right?

discordance 5mo ago

I’ve been using Claude Design for my front ends. The output looks and feels good enough, but the designs often look very similar and generally adhere to contemporary web tropes. Keen to hear if anyone has had unconventional creative adventures with it.

JasonSage 5mo ago
I've had that experience and I've started testing different prompts and inputs. I find it funny about meeting requirements when you give them, and making safe choices when you don't give direction. So if you're going to rate the output aesthetics and UX/content, but you don't prompt especially much around the aesthetics, you're only getting the safe assumed defaults. It's good at making bootstrap/tailwind clone designs unless you work that angle. For simple web pages, I've started making this the only focus for initial iteration.
- firemelt 5mo ago
  any tips for design/aesthetics prompts?
  - JasonSage 5mo ago
    I keep a bookmarks folder of websites that have non-cookie-cutter design. If I have an aesthetic in mind I'll use some screenshots of those sites in the prompt and phrase their inclusion as: "Look at these slightly non-standard designs that work really well for me." So far I've only seen Claude look for through-lines and high-level takeaways--"user likes <design feature> based on the screenshots, so I'll include that"--and screenshots aren't currently a granularity level where it can lift specific details or produce something derivative. Other than that I try to encourage specific consideration of: type scale, borders and rounding, padding/whitespace, elevation as shadow vs blur, colors. I don't think one needs to pull every customization lever on every project.
    - qingcharles 5mo ago
      This. Keep a list of sites you like and just jam screenshots of the best bits into Claude Design when you are asking it for help. I've been designing sites for 32 years, and I've tried almost all the tools. I was very impressed with Stitch, but I've now migrated all my designs to Claude. My aesthetic is born in the simplicity and cleanliness of mid-90s, coupled with modern CSS. I want the purest, simplest HTML, with the simplest CSS and the absolute minimum of JS. Claude generates some of the best looking, most user-friendly designs I've seen. I don't need crazy scroll effects and tons of animations; I just need sites that are easy to read, easy to navigate and let the user get the task done in the quickest way.
slopinthebag 5mo ago
Sort of, I've given it examples of unconventional UI's and then had it sort of create a mashup of them and it's been decent. But I feel like that's cheating.
techpression 5mo ago
I’ve done a few different things, some different presentations, web mockups etc. They all look more or less identical out of the box, and in every single case of a presentation, Claude Design has zero concept of layout boundaries, happily making slides that expand 200% or more out of the visible viewport (I have a lot of content and it just can’t figure out nice ways of presenting it). There’s still value in it for me, I get decent enough output to convey my intent and I sometimes manually tweak the HTML. Defining fonts is a good way to at least not get the same typography as everyone else.
jaapz 5mo ago
Most applications don't need unconventional creativity though.
- hparadiz 5mo ago
  Most applications are years long projects that already have styling and code structure done by humans so if the mock up is not perfectly aligned it doesn't even matter because when you finally approve the design and get to building it; that's where the pixel perfect tweaking comes in. And again if it's a mature code base with an existing stylesheet it tends to come out with all the expectations you'd have of it because it's re-using components that already exist 99% of the time.
- qingcharles 5mo ago
  Exactly. 99% of sites don't need bleeding edge design and fancy fonts.
epolanski 5mo ago
I use claude design too. It has been suggested to me by some very respected and experienced designers which now prototype almost exclusively in claude and then when happy refine in figma. By the way, you can always tune your prompts to not be generic, if you ask for generic UIs without detailed styling prompts you will get generic designs.
- fragmede 5mo ago
  But then how do they get it back out from Figma and make it live?
  - epolanski 5mo ago
    That was never a designer's concern? By the way figma has a decent mcp that you can connect your LLMs to and extract the design tokens from.
  - FireBeyond 5mo ago
    It would seem a circuitous process and I'd suggest another workflow, but Claude Design can ingest Figma files.
monkeydust 5mo ago
Same, you can instruct it specifically to look non-standard and give it examples of website styles I want. After some wrangling it feels a bit more creative but takes prompting.
- itake 5mo ago
  Do you have any like dyes or work clothes describing this process? I don’t know what prompted to get it away from the base model and any of like the non-standard web design like styles are a little bit too harsh for me if that makes sense. Like for example I like brutalist design, but it just feels heavy sometimes on the apps that I’m making. I’ve tried to get the AI to describe a style based on the product name or you know it seem that I wanna have for example travel. But then it creates us like steal, amorphic design where everything looks like a boarding pass airplane ticket.
Reebz 5mo ago
[Take a look at my portfolio site](https://reebz.com https://reebz.com), please view on desktop. This is about 3 weeks of effort to date. It is unfinished, but you get the idea. Just like SaaS boilerplate from the decade prior, there is LLM boilerplate (since it’s trained on the internet). So if you put in enough elbow-grease anything is (still) possible!
- rirze 5mo ago
  This is amazing.

hemc4 5mo ago

Even for the large products, figma is not the starting point for new concepts anymore. I start with a quick prototype on dev environment and then share it with designer for further improvements in figma or in the app itself. With every new model or agent improvement, going back to figma for polishing the ui is decllinig. If we can find a way to keep the frontend code static templates without complex logic, need for this polishing in figma will go away completey as llms can understand it one context window. With the modern frameworks designed for client side rendering, keeping everything in one context is still tricky.

saaspirant 5mo ago
I use LLMs to design things and build wireframes. Product people can actually play with the wireframes and it's trivial to implement changes. And same LLM generated files can be used to guide the LLM to build the actual pages too.

meszmate 5mo ago

Same here. I mostly use Figma for logos and random assets now.

dilyevsky 5mo ago

Figma make and gpt designer have a bunch of catching up to do. I couldn’t even import our brand guidelines into make which is already a .fig like what are we even doing here, guys? CD crunches through ungodly amount of tokens and is really slow on iteration but at least you can get some really nice prototypes extremely quickly there. GPT beats any Anthropic models on illustrations so they really should get a grip on multimodal. Overall, it seems like we’re still super early but you can already see glimpses of what may come

mi_lk 5mo ago

Is it just me or the bar to publish janestreet blogposts has been lowered recently?

colesantiago 5mo ago
It is not just you. This is a very disappointing post from Jane Street.

osti 5mo ago

I think Jane Street is an Anthropic investor, so take it fwiw.

wartywhoa23 5mo ago
The whole HN is one huge AI ad now.
- OtomotO 5mo ago
  It's a cult. And frankly, I am not interested in churches or cults.
  - Terr_ 5mo ago
    In between some old family history and recent US politics, I think there are other things I'd rather reserve the weighty word "cult" for... However, should it arise, one of the features that might convince me is this: In the name of "loyalty" or "faith" cults require members to burn their bridges, actively cutting off their own potential to escape to any other social support network. That may mean creating enemies out of former associates, humiliating rituals or blackmail material, or simply ruining their reputations through obvious lies.
    - OtomotO 5mo ago
      I don't particularly care about the US or US politics since 2016. Unless you invade a country again and we have to deal with the Fallout for years to come, that is. For example: I have banned all news about Trump administration from my home. It's simply not interesting. He is a toddler, and I have a toddler of my own.
      - Terr_ 5mo ago
        I think I did quite enough to be vague and oblique on that context, so that it wasn't the focus, and any reader could avoid the topic... if they chose to.

firemelt 5mo ago

amyone know how to use claude design more effectively I always alhave a feeling I use a slot machine from 6 sessions and 5 projects only one template that I choose anything else is really really bad

karolist 5mo ago

> Oh no, Figma ER was actually positive, release mode SaaS FUD

osullivj 5mo ago

Sounds like desk strat RAD work is moving to LLM gen code at JS. My recentish experience of that kind of work has been Athena at JPMC and Quartz at BoA; both Python with functional style via DAG or pixie with py ui framework to match. Which enables quick dev of the parts of trading workflow that don't need to be quick, like booking tools or EOD risk. I know first hand Athena and Qz are crufty when you get into the weeds. The bonsai framework with Elm inspired ocaml impl sounds v cool. So I can see how this approach can accelerate a lot of trading tech dev. But does it have any traction over the hard problems where we turn to C++ or Rust: near real pricing and risk across multiple instruments and markets?

t0mas88 5mo ago

I use the same approach a lot. Before AI I also did this manually. First sit down with a user and just paper and pencil, then hack together a frontend POC / demo, have them play with it and adjust until it works as they wanted. For me building a quick (not production quality) frontend demo in code was already often faster than getting the right interaction working in Figma. And it allowed to make it fully interactive so you can catch much more edge cases on the UX side. Now with Claude Code it's even faster to build the throw away prototype. But not a huge difference since discussing with the users and thinking about how it should work is 80% of the time. Claude maybe halves the other 20% compared to quickly doing it yourself. Faster to first version, slower to iterate if it didn't fully get it.

__mharrison__ 5mo ago

I'm my work as an FDE this week, Copilot did the initial UI. Feedback was given and tells were adjusted all through prompting.

kcrwfrd_ 5mo ago

We are doing this on my team (I am the frontend engineer) and honestly I really miss the old way of doing things. Written specifications are being reduced in favor of these working prototypes, and now there’s this extra cognitive burden of reading the code and trying to determine what were the intended changes, and what’s the slop that needs to be tossed aside. We also have to figure out, should we take over this generated PR and make any needed changes? Or do we start over from scratch? There’s often a sense of friction either way. There have been times where a bunch of unintended changes were generated and I took time to port them over on my reimplementation, and then later on it’s “oops! Sorry! We didn’t mean to change that.” I get it’s empowering but it does take away from some of the joy I used to find in my work and replaced it with some headaches.

Iolaum 5mo ago
Why not ask Claude design to write a document fully specifying the prototype?
zuzululu 5mo ago
old way that was clunky, long feedback cycles and gate keeping UI no thanks. BE boys do FE now
drpotato 5mo ago
I am in a similar boat. Design and product use Claude to vibe design/code a feature/experience and rapidly prototype it, getting it in front of customers to get feedback with minimal engineering time. Amazing! However, you might be surprised to find out it hasn’t really helped us ship stuff faster overall. The reason, I believe, is we’ve lost something along the way. Thinking. A non-trivial amount of which is now outsourced to a language model. It paints over the cracks in the prompt, hallucinates how things should work when unspecified, what would normally make someone stop and say “this isn’t quite working”, “how should I communicate this idea” or “what happens when…” has gone. Now, these details are left for after it’s been built proper. Sure, we can improve the process and reflect more on how to utilise this new technique … but is it better than how things used to be? Yeah nah
- 5mo ago

felixlu2026 5mo ago

[flagged]

zuzululu 5mo ago

I use codex

DANmode 5mo ago
Great story.
- zuzululu 5mo ago
  codex can do UI well if you know what you are doing.
  - DANmode 5mo ago
    Add a detail on how, and you’re contributing!
    - zuzululu 5mo ago
      "hey codex make me a nice UI" not enough for you ?
      - DANmode 5mo ago
        I’m just asking what makes you “know what you are doing”, regarding using Codex for UI. (I’m just trying to get something interesting or substantive from this sub-thread.)
      - stemchar 5mo ago
        Damn prompt engineering has become an art already. No wonder so many people have been left behind.

sorry_outta_gas 5mo ago

[dead]

conradfr 5mo ago

> Claude gave me free, unlimited iteration, unbothered when I changed my mind for the 50th time or asked for a small tweak Do you not pay for Claude?

kevmo314 5mo ago
Free with an easy monthly payment of $20!
- hparadiz 5mo ago
  When you are used to ordering humans around that are paid a salary measured in tens of thousands $20 seems like nothing in comparison.
- LoganDark 5mo ago
  50 iterations on the Pro plan? You kidding?
  - nikanj 5mo ago
    50 iterations of CSS / layout? Easy, not even pushing it. A freelancer will cuss you out after 3-4 rounds of re-doing everything, but an LLM is happy to keep generating.
    - SV_BubbleTime 5mo ago
      There is something to this. I have been able to iterate with Claude Design in a way that I wouldn’t illiterate with a human coworker. “Ok, that’s good. Kill options 2,3,4,5 and make entirely new variations of them, be bold and use wildly different design theories” “Take the submit button from 1, the list from 2, the item spacing from 3, the hamburger from 4 and then make that into variation 5” “I liked the button design before. Split this design into two and use the old button and while we’re doing this, move the buttons to the top of the page outside the scrollable area” I’ve found Design has been great for me who can’t blank page a design to save my life.
- 5mo ago

slopinthebag 5mo ago

Honestly, I'm not really pro or anti llm and I think there are a ton of limitations for using it to generate code, but UI has been probably the only thing I've been able to vibe code. It helps that I've done a lot of UI work over the years, but I think the combination of defects being easily visible through normal usage, the UI being a non-critical component of a system (bugs don't cause vulns or data corruption (usually), combined with the amount of churn that UI's see, make it a somewhat uniquely good candidate for vibe coding. Also a lot of UI toolkits are declarative, and I think language models do much better with declarative code. In a way it's not much different from copy-pasting components from templates or whatever, just with more customisability. And for stuff that isn't HTML-based like React it does worse. It's also not great at building component libraries, I still write those myself with little LLM involvement, but that makes sense because the architecture is actually relevant with that, unlike generating CSS and xml-derived components, which is mostly just declarative templating anyways. I've had decent success writing the core logic myself and then delegating the UI to AI. I think if I didn't write the core logic it would not work very well, but since it's designed well by myself the AI has a much smaller scope to work in which constrains it enough where vibe coding works. Pretty cool.

designerarvid 5mo ago

The benefit here is designers learning to code. It was always weird to me that designers were shaping software without knowing how it was built. I'm a designer btw. However, designing in code is technology-first. One could argue that the purpose of design - to shape the artifacts for human purpose - is better done NOT starting with the strict rules of code. Pen and paper is still hard to beat, not for anything that looks nice, but for helping your mind forward.

ozim 5mo ago
But then you „design like software developers”.
- consp 5mo ago
  What's wrong with a good cli?
  - 946789987649 5mo ago
    My mum doesn't know how to use a cli.
    - preg_match 5mo ago
      [dead]
halapro 5mo ago
> without knowing how it was built It helps to understand the constraints of a medium, but you really don't need to know every level down to the electrons moving through the silicon.
- designerarvid 5mo ago
  Certainly, it helps the architect to know the constraints of concrete and bricks, but you don’t really have to know every level of down to the chemistry.

trick-or-treat 5mo ago

I don't see how a coding model competes with figma TBH, an image model maybe but that's a stretch too.

satvikpendem 5mo ago

I worry about Figma stock, I know some who bought during the IPO who are now underwater. Figma launched their own design agent but not sure how well that's doing.

jen729w 5mo ago
> I know some who bought during the IPO who are now underwater Yeah you don't say. High of $124, currently $22. But hey: that's ~~gambling~~ stock trading for you. https://au.finance.yahoo.com/quote/FIG/ https://au.finance.yahoo.com/quote/FIG/
- kubb 5mo ago
  No sympathy from me. I just wish it happened more to people who overpay for stuff like houses or Tesla stock.
  - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    > I just wish it happened more to people who overpay for stuff like houses or Tesla stock That's pretty mean. I disagree with a lot of people on their investment choices and evangelism. That doesn't mean I want them to suffer for it.
    - kubb 5mo ago
      It’s not that I want them to suffer, it’s that them being rewarded incentivizes suboptimal behavior and outcomes. Markets don’t work anymore. Which results in even more suffering.
      - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
        > them being rewarded incentivizes suboptimal behavior and outcomes What if they're choosing correctly? Like, I've been pretty consistently critical of crypto. Yet I'm glad my index funds have to buy Coinbase.

tonyoconnell 5mo ago

i gave claude code my design system that i built in figma and haven't opened it again. it's much faster designing with your voice.

misiek08 5mo ago

Even if this is ad only - are we really ready for a rug pull from Anthropic? Maybe I’m completely unaware in this tools space, but I feel like it’s last tool that’s worth (and not pricey)…

DANmode 5mo ago
For SVG and html/css generation? When they paywall hard, I’ll use a local model on my laptop processor instead, or phone, and wait a few hours as needed.

weitendorf 5mo ago

You should note that Claude Design is most likely a DPO->PPO->Actor-Critic bootstrap play: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18290 https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18290 / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximal_policy_optimization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximal_policy_optimization / https://spinningup.openai.com/en/latest/algorithms/sac.html https://spinningup.openai.com/en/latest/algorithms/sac.html It's much harder to RL out design taste because it's not self-grounding, and human labelers have no real skin in the game, so this (having a human with a vested outcome in the process directing a model's work) is the best way to get LLMs better at design/"taste"/aesthetic judgment themselves. We were working on the same thing 7 months ago and then I realized that winning over designers to do this would be a huge uphill battle setting up an inevitable fall from grace later on. What makes me most suspicious of Claude Design is that when you disconnect and reconnect later, it loses context and nags you that the product doesn't work like that. Bullshit. It's at best an anti-abuse/implementation detail (to keep you from launching 10 at once and coming back to them later) or product shortcoming that just so happens to be optimized for keeping you from continuing your design in better tools than theirs for the inevitable followups. It's great for one shots and it makes sense when you're trying to build a vertical product development stack like Anthropic but I'm disappointed it feels more like a tool optimized for keeping you in their product than for what you're working on. If a company other than Anthropic had shipped this - it's not that hard to build a visual self-eval loop, just use Chrome Devtools Protocol to run headless chrome and take screenshots -> feed into a judge LLM for feedback -> continue - I don't think it would really have seen much adoption. That said, AI trained on Actor-Critic with a tight human feedback loop definitely seems like the right approach to solving the problem, just not something I want to spend my time training for someone else unless I can do so with higher "entropy" ie high parallelism/optionality

gobdovan 5mo ago
Where does the article mention Claude Design? It seems to me the author is using LLMs as a tool for iteration, given he is a designer. Also, you're mentioning a lot of unrelated tech. DPO, PPO, actor-critic, visual self-eval loops, Anthropic's "vertical product development stack" may be interesting, but they are mostly orthogonal. The article's point is simply that a designer can now turn design proposals into working prototypes faster than with Figma. Also, you mention what seems to be a random product bug about disconnect and reconnect that doesn't have anything to do with this workflow. It seems to me that you're post-rationalising some insights that are not really there. Good to think things through and in public, not discouraging it. I hope this reads as constructive.

cawksuwcka 5mo ago

[dead]

itsnkr2293 5mo ago

Claud design burns lots of tokens

ulfw 5mo ago

Yea I mean okay JaneStreet. World wide renowned to be a tech design powerhouse...

tam159 5mo ago

I still prefer Figma for collaboration

junglistguy 5mo ago

[dead]

cryo32 5mo ago

You aren't designing.

iLoveOncall 5mo ago

> Having joined Jane Street this past summer, I’m finding AI support indispensable. There’s just so much that’s new to me, and so much I’m not good at yet, like OCaml and Bonsai. Using AI for things you aren't good at, or not experienced with, is literally the worst way to use AI. You WANT to struggle when learning a new language, and use reliable documentation to solve your problems, not circumvent them entirely by using AI. This is extreme incompetence, I'm shocked that Jane Street would advertise it.

asfjhq 5mo ago
They apparently pressure their new hires to blog and talk their book. It happens a lot in U.S. corporations.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

Tanxsinxlnx 5mo ago

upvote

superkickstart 5mo ago

[dead]

asfjhq 5mo ago

Janestreet is now known for shady trading in India and its aggressive AI trading strategies: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-04/jane-street-plans-new-data-center-as-compute-power-runs-scarce https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-04/jane-stre... In other words, it is an AI booster. Abusing the goodwill of programmers for their OCaml involvement even though most of it was convoluted bloat and inferior to INRIA code is devious. It happens all the time now and people need to inoculate themselves against it: A single famous open source person or an open source involved company invested in AI suddenly posts "organic" testimonies in favor of AI. It means nothing. The person is not the same person, the company is not the same company (or is now overtly evil).

croes 5mo ago

And how much of these designs are used in the end compared to when they where done with Figma?

bobkb 5mo ago

At work we are now in the process of migrating away from Figma. We had spend years perfecting our Figma based design workflow. Currently we are moving all the designs into the code itself using Storybook. The gap currently is reviews and feedback which is addressed by Chromatic now.

lifeisstillgood 5mo ago

>>> prototypes are living proposal docs, the code is disposable, and a reviewer’s job is to give feedback about the design and user experience. Eventually, reviewers still take over the idea and implement it in a separate feature, referencing the prototype but owning the production code That’s solves an issue I have with all POC - a really good approach

ale 5mo ago
The article does not come from someone who relies of Figma for a living. It's easy to call it a "proposal doc" when you're working on a specific issue for a specific product. There are still millions of designers who use Figma to define and maintain design systems that span across products and platforms, where Figma is the source of truth.

sfjailbird 5mo ago

We already have the business side come with requirements in the form of 'solutions' that they have thought up, which more often than not are Rube Golberg-esque contraptions, that you have to conversationally reverse engineer to arrive at the actual requirements. In the future they will come with their 'ready' solution, already 'working' and be even less receptive to look at design and architecture holistically. Just make it like that. And why do you need to spend X man hours? The thing is basically already done!

gwerbin 5mo ago
I have seen this already. Vibecoded top to bottom. The downside is that the business people don't understand why you can't just put their app in production as is. And then there's a lot of pressure to make it happen quickly "because we can use AI to move fast". This is going to come down to healthy organization dynamics, and hopefully represents a learning opportunity for leadership. The upside is that the idea has already been proven out much more thoroughly than a sketch on a napkin. Claude has already prompted them about edge cases and design decisions. It's very likely that at some point they had to explicitly tell Claude "don't worry about that and just make an assumption", or "I actually don't like that interaction after trying it a few times, can you do a differently". They had to write out much of their idea in clear and direct language in order to prompt the AI. They've probably been playing with their own toy because it's fun to play with toys you summoned from thin air, so they've had a chance to discover the experience and refine their own preferences. It's probably a net negative right now because the "ship it what's the problem team" pressure is intense and stupid and demoralizing and miserable to work under. But I think it will stabilize and it might be a net positive in future projects.
- iamjs 5mo ago
  > It's very likely that at some point they had to explicitly tell Claude "don't worry about that and just make an assumption", Non technical folks vibe coding aren't explicitly telling Claude anything other than "Accept"
- slyzmud 5mo ago
  I've working on a small side project with a non technical friend for a couple months. It's really small but we are selling it to some clients. The other day my friend discovered lovable and vibe coded an entire app and he started feeling like I was scamming him. Why would I take weeks or months in building our app if he could do it on hours? He might be stubborn but ended up blindly believing me, but I couldn't find a good way of explaining that a prototype wasn't a final product. It has lots of errors, doesn't consider edge cases and it's impossible to fix if something breaks. Of course what I said didn't mean much because he didn't understand what I was talking about. How do you communicate this problem? That there's much more than what you see in a frontend? Seems really hard to explain to non technical people.

Hazemamirrr 5mo ago

true it is much more easier using claude design rather than Figma yet it does not produce the same output quality.

GoToRO 5mo ago
They are not using design. They vibe code the feature.

azangru 5mo ago

> Submit a feature (our version of a pull request) that looks and behaves exactly the way I want What happens after the submission? Who reviews the feature? How long? Are there any limits to the size of the diff? Do reviewers push back? How often are features submitted?

bradleykingz 5mo ago

honestly, for me, chatgpt has more replaced dribbble than it has figma. where i'd normally spend hours combing through dribbble looking for inspiration for layouts for specific components (most of the time finding nothing), now I use chatgpt to come up with a number of different designs, then port them over to figma. most designs produced by cgpt arent production-ready, especially for mobile. figma allows me to set proper constraints (screen size, for example), that give it a more grounded "shape" for that reason, the actual final design is still by hand for now. however, the translation from design to implementation is greatly sped up by codex, which basically does it pixel-perfect. all the same, still lots of tweaks needed before the final implementation is ready. design to code still has a bunch of issues that often need figuring out/standardising - font sizes, weights, etc. this is on mobile btw, where space is very limited. havent worked on a website in a while, but i'd imagine the extra space would allow for far more liberty. i do not miss having to craft ten different designs just to ensure responsiveness. massive pita.

nether1 5mo ago

I use Claude code a lot for design too but it just does a lot of regurgitation in design too

tsouth2 5mo ago

Claude is pretty great at designing certain images. For favicons, logos, og cards, it does extremely well. For full image generation, I go elsewhere.

coldtea 5mo ago

Funnily, that's the first stage in how you end up designing "will work for food" signs with markers, more than with Figma or Claude...

janpeuker 5mo ago

> workflow improvements that would have taken days or weeks of engineering It's a nice article and good point but I feel "design" in the title is misleading - the example given has an extremely reduced visual or spatial scope (something models are still not good at). The post is more about rapid prototyping.

sspoisk 5mo ago

[flagged]

nixpulvis 5mo ago

Hey Edwin. Glad to see your post pop up. I remember doing a hackathon with you back in like 2012/2013. I think the ability to get to a working prototype faster is very empowering, even if some will be tempted to ship these incomplete ideas. Design and UX needs benefits greatly from being able to play with it, and experience the actual flows beyond just a storyboard and wireframes.

ehmorris 5mo ago
Hi!

trinsic2 5mo ago

> There’s also a fear I have that designing with Claude keeps me out of a fluid, creative mindset and stuck in an iterative one, constrained to the outcomes I think Claude can produce. That’s fine for mature tools, where changes are iterative, but might mean I miss ideas when working on something new I some times notice this. the LLM cant see past the interation so I have to think outside the box and say, what if we look at it from this perspective, and suddenly a new way of designing it comes into existance. Somes times I have to create a flow chart to get the LLM to see past its own progression steps.

itsTyrion 5mo ago

"i design with claude" no, you don't

MayCXC 5mo ago
"i design with claude" yes, they do

MayCXC 5mo ago

With a vibecoded multiplayer web IDE for our flutter app, I have two nontechnical team members prototype app features from a browser all day. The outcome is a git branch with functional dart code, and a strictly more powerful design prompt than figma make. Claude built its own claude -p harness that communicates with the browser via websocket flawlessly. To use our max subscription after [1] takes effect, we are considering adapting that setup to an approach like [2] instead. [1] https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2054610152817619388 https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2054610152817619388 [2] https://lanes.sh/blog/claude-billing-split https://lanes.sh/blog/claude-billing-split

alexpatin 5mo ago

Designer here. There is a lot of pressure at the startup I work at to use AI for everything so we can 'move faster'. Often working with vague requirements. Given leaderships inexperience building software, having something to look at and point to is helpful for sussing out requirements and edge cases. Figma is still my preferred canvas. Figjam is still great for rough wireframes, flows, and agreeing on data models with my eng counterparts. But Claude accelerates the divergent early stage 'exploration' work. Unfortunately we don't take the time to properly validate the concepts with customers. Again in the name of 'moving fast'. They will learn eventually I guess. I'm getting off-topic. Claude is super helpful. As time passes I'm doing more and more work with it. But sometimes taking my design system and pushing pixels is genuinely faster when there is an obvious solution, opposed to ensuring Claude has all the right context to solve a relatively simple problem. All depends on what I'm working on really.

yieldcrv 5mo ago

Claude Design is great because I always knew what I needed UX designers to do. A software engineer can pick up frontend UX concepts really easily, but it's just still a full time job to keep up, iterate, do states. I've worked with graphic designers, whether its 1 person on a team, or a group, or a division, and had the back and forth for years. I've also contracted with many graphic designers to polish my own applications as well as promotional materials. I've contracted with agencies, I know what a style guide looks like, a press kit, a design library shared between applications and departments needs to have. Now it's not a full time job. Its 3 tabs for different user flows in the application. And on the flip side, designers can also deploy software now that's good enough - (I feel like I can deploy more efficient software than an AI will initially suggest, and do things that stay on free tiers for far longer than anyone just going along with AI's suggestions.)

awbvious 5mo ago

" At present, there are no other major purchasers of AI compute outside of NVIDIA, hyperscalers (who are selling it to Anthropic and OpenAI, or they’re Meta, which has no AI strategy), OpenAI, and Anthropic. None. I can’t find a single one outside of Jane Street spending more than a few hundred million. We need a few hundred billion. " https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-slowing-down/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-slowing-down/ The one non-circular-financing entity that is heavily spending on AI, is interested in you knowing how wisely they think they are spending their money. Jane Street isn't one to telegraph their moves (seems like they prefer to Telegram them privately https://protos.com/what-weve-learned-from-terraform-labs-unredacted-jane-street-lawsuit/ https://protos.com/what-weve-learned-from-terraform-labs-unr... , so not only Jump Crypto felt fine letting everyone believe the ponzi, per these allegations it seems Jane Street did too). If Jane Street is spending the most, and their staff is supposedly high value pay/profit but low headcount, for all the end user knows, their "AI agent" is half chat bot / half software engineer with 20 years experience who checks each result before sending it. Literally the Mechanical Turk scam of hundreds of years ago, where a midget hides in the stand and moves the chess pieces--with shades of Amazon Fresh self checkout. Maybe the higher ups at Jane Street know this, maybe not. But unless they have a closed system that Anthropic can't get into, I would be suspicious. And, of course, they aren't /that/ free from the circular financing because they are a major investor of Anthropic. To me the fact that the blog post doesn't start with a disclosure doesn't seem like a misstep/accident. And if they find out they are being Mechanical-Turked, I think it far more likely they'll find some way of shorting before telling anyone, or they won't tell anyone.

sid_ships 5mo ago

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