Posted by cdrnsf 6 hours ago
Then I looked at the usage and it said I had used 95% of my Claude design usage for the week!
This isn't a real tool. This is a plaything, if that's what they're providing as examples.
And then I was scrolling Twitter, and saw someone else post their own "success story" and the design was nearly identical to the mock up Claude Design made for me. Lol. The homogenization problem will continue to plague tools like these to some degree, much in the same way AI generated text or code or imagery has a sort of homogenous tone or feel to it.
The fact that you are using this language tells me you are probably more advanced than the average individual, and likely have higher expectations.
My sister-in-law has a small apparel company. She’s developed quite a bit of skill over the past six years but she really struggled at the start. She had great ideas, but translating them to something she could apply was frustrating. *Anything* that could have helped her there would have been worth a look.
I was quite happy with what I pulled off using the first design system: I wanted a new footer section for my IPAAS startup, it generated four options, the fourth of which was quite good. We iterated on it for a bit, then I pulled it into Claude Code (that integrated feature is very cool), CC built it, I deployed it, done. (Bottom section of https://tediware.com/ if you're interested, the bit with "Origin story" on the left and the signup panel on the right).
It was not a complicated build by any means but I liked the concept it developed and it was dead-easy to make it all happen. I think the ideas in the UI are very good. Still rough, but you can see where this could go, and it's got a ton of potential.
Granted, not every component on every surface will need this amount of scrutiny. But I'm usually the outlier developer warning teammates that design is not a solved problem. Granted, there's a huge difference between an existing app and its evolution and throwing a nextjs landing page up in search of any life.
"make things pretty" would be a graphic designer or artist. Are you saying the entire arm of Product design is a made up value?
So you can take bootstrap (or even raw html) and create something useful. Then you make it nice, not the other way around.
You would have to be a big outlier to feel the need to create a custom widget. Most widgets have been defined since decades.
But i don't think that's what tailwind and bootstrap are doing. But people very much use these tools to "solve design".
The layouts, widgets, and primitives in these tools are not primitives. I can't deny they get tons of people very far very fast. But my main disagreement is that all of this isn't design and it's not what designers do. You touched on what i agree with: UX flows, diagrams, stories, journeys, personas, etc, these all need to be designed and connected in reality using various primitives for the medium.
Then you slap a cohesive paint job on it, interaction elements, tone and terminology and yes, there is that element of design too.
• Claude Design uses Opus 4.7, which is more expensive than earlier models.
• It's just Day 2; it's not a finished product. It's ridiculous how quickly Anthropic iterates.
• If you've been using Claude for a while, Design already knows your style and preferences. You'd have to start from scratch using a different AI design tool. I don’t doubt that'll pay dividends in the long run.
We don't know that for sure—they've dropped prices before:
1. Claude 3 → Claude 3.5/3.7 generation (mid-2024 to early 2025): Haiku went from $0.25/$1.25 to $0.80/$4.00 per MTok — this was actually a price increase for Haiku, but Sonnet stayed flat at $3/$15 while delivering significantly better performance, effectively a price-per-capability reduction.
2. Claude 3/4 Opus → Claude Opus 4.5/4.6 (late 2025): This was the big one. Opus dropped from $15/$75 per MTok down to $5/$25 per MTok — a 67% reduction on input and output. This is the most significant explicit price cut Anthropic has made, delivering a far more capable model at one-third the price.
It's a wrapper around that. I definitely appreciate the better design output from Claude code but it has a ways to go before it can replace serious design contenders.
Building the same design system component in code versus in Figma is going to be slightly more succinct in code; Figma’s primitives don’t have the sort of conditionals and control flow that code has. But code is much less malleable than drawing on a screen, and creative freedom is harder to achieve in code.
UI can fix the gap where code feels less malleable than Figma, but complexity comes largely from the worlds that humans create, and humans apparently want to create 8 modes for 4 products and 2 light/dark modes. If you want the same setup in Claude, it’ll be a little easier to maintain, but not much less complex.
with a pelican on it
But yes, the "design to code" gap has always been where designers' intentions were butchered and/or where frontend developers would discover/have to deal with designs that didn't take into account that some strings need more space, or what to do when there are more or less elements in a component, how things should scroll in real life, how things should react to a variety of screen sizes, etc.
this short meme video is funny/not funny because it hits too close to home - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/r6JXc4zfWw4 - but yes, "designers don't code and developers don't design", roughly speaking
and then of course you meet some people who do both really well... but they are pretty rare. :-)
I don't believe that people who can design and code are as rare as folks seem to believe, either. What seems more likely is that there are a LOT of coders who are extremely fluent in CSS but aren't particularly gifted when it comes to making things look good.
It wasn't that long ago that designers understood that they couldn't just hand off a 2D comp of what they want to see. The job isn't done until the output can be integrated into the app. Nobody gets to launch cows over the wall and go for lunch.
You mean Fireworks. Photoshop was for graphic design. Web designers used Adobe Fireworks. Figma is a successor to Fireworks, not Photoshop.
Everyone used whatever they were familiar with regardless of the purpose of the application.
As someone who has done front-end development for both web and mobile devices for a very long time in the pre-Figma days I was handed a lot more designs that were mocked up in Photoshop than Fireworks.
It's kind of horrible, but I guess it's better than previous alternatives. But, it's not better than a tool that works with code directly and mostly automates away the tedium or translating a visual design into code. I haven't tried Claude Design, but I know I don't find Figma enjoyable (but I'm not much of a designer...I'm more comfortable with code than with pages and pages of options in a GUI).
Perhaps because I have a similar bio to yours, I am allergic to this view.
So tools like Figma is nice in that regards as it's simpler to iterate on (From simple to hardest: Sketch on whiteboard|paper, Wireframe tools like Balsimiq, Figma|Sketch, css code) because it's pure fiddling with various properties. Figma has direct feedback while the code may require a compilation phase.
> Figma accidentally excluded themselves from the training data that would have made them relevant in the agentic era.
Their binary format is so much of a "let's reinvent everything" which I think come from the fact it's a tool you can use for web design, android app design, ios design and anything-you-want design that it became a jack of all trade and so mapping it to web is not a perfect 1:1 translation.
And for being useful to agent, any people who got to implement the figma from a UX guy know that even human can't know truly the intent of most figma design, so how a LLM could ? Common source of question that even the UX guy has no answer for:
1. Ok this button looks great, but in German how will it look ?
2. Oh and actually this button does not look great when i put in CSS, it wraps on two line, you cheated again with the letter spacing, did you ?
3. How does it look on a phone that is not an iphone ?
4. You know that doing a border with a gradien is not possible in CSS, so what should i put ?
5. How does it look on a 4k screen ?
6. etc.
So I can't wait for these tools that are html behind to catch up, even more if we can have the prompt with it. (As a developer I never got to see the prompt the product manager made to the UX guy)
I was wondering if PenPot (https://penpot.app) might be sitting pretty in this new agentic era, considering that they took the direction of designs being actual markup, unlike the canvas approach in fig - if that’s even something that interests them.
But the fundamental problem is that it’s hard to get a design system right long-term, especially because it’s so intertwined with your code and whatever component library you use, which is a layer your designer will never touch. I don’t really see Claude Design fixing the fundamental Storybook hell of designing reusable and pretty components and layouts, but I don’t see Figma or any other tool solving it either.
What’s the solution? It feels like something that needs to be fixed more deeply at the component level.
Maybe you could make it work if everyone agrees on a base set of headless components to use, but we seem to be moving in the opposite direction with things like ShadCN.
FWIW Claude Code is decent at scaffolding those out if you have a good set of examples for it to work from.
But the argument is that is unneeded as we move forward as making changes and extracting things and such becomes basically "free". I'm not so convinced, but I do see the argument.
This article is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the design space, and figma as a company.
Just a few of my thoughts:
- Figma was always about building a successful company over a successful product. Figma started with a much more ambitious aspiration, and had the ability to deliver through talent like Evan Wallace. A lot of it started with showing how capable webgl was in the browser. And yet, a lot of things like 3d features don't exist because they had the awareness to really hone in and focus on building a specific thing that made them money because everybody in the company ended up with an expensive seat price.
- Seriously, Figma is a company that's about design tool second, and about getting a product that businesses use first. To that end, it's already succeeded through the IPO, subsequently, who knows what the market is going to look like. Figma having a war chest is in many ways much better than having a technically impressive demo that might evaporate.
- People at Figma, 100%, know everything in this article. And not just figma people, like anybody and everybody that's tried to build a design tool has had these thoughts. It's very obvious that ui/ux is the interesection of design/dev/pm. It's also very obvious that it should stick close to the source of truth, to something like code. - The problem is, that it's almost underselling it to say that it's MASSIVE challenge to execute on these ideas because of how easily it bleeds into building not just a design tool, but a coding, data management, architecture, etc. tool
- I could talk at length about all the challenges and potential solutions, but that's neither here nor there.
- On AI, I guess other people's guess is as good as mine, but my gut feeling is that while data is important, SOTA AI is generalist enough that the base models, the thinking they're able to do, is better than having a lot of custom data. Especially because ui design is front-facing - you can just scour the web in contrast to private financial documents, or legal documents for example.
We've got an LLM using CSS and emojis and maybe pelicans riding bikes (SVGs).
I'm actually glad they're focusing on code, and code adjacent tooling only.