[HN Gopher] Claude Design
___________________________________________________________________
Claude Design
Related: https://x.com/flomerboy/status/2045162321589252458
(https://xcancel.com/flomerboy/status/2045162321589252458)
Author : meetpateltech
Score : 1181 points
Date : 2026-04-17 15:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anthropic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anthropic.com)
| albert_e wrote:
| is this the Figma/Canva/Powerpoint/Keynote killer?
| Boss0565 wrote:
| Considering Canva collaborated with them, no?
| Sol- wrote:
| Maybe a collaboration with a metaphorical gun to your head.
| svnt wrote:
| Or one from a place of unfounded hubris.
| frankdenbow wrote:
| Canva has more expansive editing tools but I agree, it
| seems like a frenemies situation.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| IBM also collaborated with Microsoft for the OS and we know
| how that ended.
| strickjb9 wrote:
| First NanoBanana came for the artists, and I did not speak
| out-- Because I was not an artist.
|
| Then Claude came for the designers with Claude Design, and I
| did not speak out-- Because I was not a designer.
|
| ...
| yard2010 wrote:
| Great Niemoller paraphrase
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Claude code also came for us. Is anything sacred? Middle
| management?
| alpb wrote:
| This largely appears to be a HTML generator at its core, not
| necessarily what Figma does with layers/canvases etc. There's
| no collaborative nature to it either.
|
| It feels like a lightly designed product that moves claude CLI
| to their backend, generates the HTMLs and renders them in
| browser on claude.ai website for you. Sure, it accepts your
| design system as an input from you or imports from your repo,
| but you could feed the same into claude CLI as well?
|
| I'm curious what exactly it gives besides having claude CLI +
| prompting it well with your design system + skills.
| diatone wrote:
| Yep agree it looks like it's taking the existing generated
| artefact, parameterising it within an inch of its life,
| exposing a pseudo WYSIWYG for the parameters and calling it a
| day with a few export options. Not a huge leap from what
| they've got already but it's a clever adjacent step for sure.
| Same product new chrome.
| weatherfun wrote:
| The IBM/Microsoft analogy is a classic. It's always
| fascinating to watch these 'frenemy' dynamics play out. In
| these cases, the one who owns the direct interface with the
| end-user usually wins the long game, while the
| 'infrastructure' partner risks becoming just another utility.
| Will be interesting to see if Canva can maintain its identity
| or just become a shell for Claude's output.
| PullJosh wrote:
| I like their emphasis on quickly prototyping many variations of a
| design. That seems useful, even for experienced designers.
| rvz wrote:
| Useful enough to replace Figma.
| ej88 wrote:
| This is cool!
|
| Seems like Claude is actually building almost like a layered
| Figma wireframe that you can do fine grained adjustments
| afterwards (e.g. adjust font size).
|
| Interesting that Canva provided a quote of support. I'm not
| familiar with the differentiation, but it seems like this will
| directly siphon customers from Canva, right?
| npilk wrote:
| There's an "export to Canva" button in Claude Design, so
| perhaps they're hoping this will be another entry point for new
| users, or that they'll be able to "lock in" as the default
| design software for Claude users.
| dannyw wrote:
| (I lead AI Products at Canva :)
|
| Our mission is to empower the world to design, and we believe
| in making Canva available in every place where ideas begin.
| Being the most interoperable platform creates mutually better
| products, more value for community, and more value and growth
| for our company.
|
| We've been working closely with Anthropic for many years, and
| we see this as complementary. Our MCP, integrations, and
| plugins have already introduced _millions_ of new users to
| the full power of Canva, and we 're excited to continue
| doubling down here.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| Who's the end user for this? I struggle to relate but then again
| I also don't use Figma so I may not be the target demographic
|
| I have been doing fine just instructing Claude code to use
| Tailwind and reference design documents
| dbbk wrote:
| "Who's the end user for this?" obviously people who use figma
| recitedropper wrote:
| Seems to me like Anthropic is desperately trying to find as
| many product-market fits as possible before they IPO. They're
| reaching a chaotic weekly release cadence--each new product
| chockful of unclear, overlapping capability with their
| previous.
|
| Combine that with the obvious hackernews manipulation that
| somehow gets each and every haphazard release instantly to the
| top, and you can see they're starting to feel some real heat.
| johnfn wrote:
| It's interesting to claim that because everything they do
| goes to the top on hacker news that they must be in trouble.
| I haven't heard that particular chain of effect before.
| recitedropper wrote:
| Feeling some heat != in trouble. Just that the pressure
| cooker is turning to a higher temp.
|
| But, I'll gladly admit that I am bias: I'm tired of seeing
| blatant astroturfing by a company whose main marketing
| tactic is to play on societal fear, while simultaneously
| employing safety theatre to look like the "good guys".
|
| So take my opinion with a grain of salt :)
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| It could also be that this is an exciting new, fast
| changing technology that happens to directly overlap and
| significantly impact the core audience of the site. I
| don't think any form of maliciousness or secret
| astroturfing is required at all.
|
| This stuff has changed a ton of what it means to exist in
| this whole "tech space". The entire software development
| lifecycle got put into a stick blender and is in the
| process of getting mixed up in new and unusual ways.
|
| It's super cool. I haven't been this excited about our
| industry since way back when the universe was just
| starting to get onto dialup and I grabbed my very first
| mp3 or wrote my first shitty program in VB or when AJAX
| was just entering the universe.
|
| I think a lot of people forgot how fast shit changes in
| this industry and how learning new things is one of the
| most important skills to being successful. Everything
| changes all the time.
|
| This is a tech site called _hacker_ news. Where else
| would something like this be constantly discussed?
| recitedropper wrote:
| I think it's probably both in the end. Anthropic has a
| lot of fans, and combine that with excited employees and
| investors, they probably don't need to do much explicit
| astroturfing to reach top of HN.
|
| But they also desperately need users (and the data those
| users bring) to build their products, and the people who
| do have the power to manipulate this site are on their
| team. And it does get tiring to see a new Claude feature
| with like 1 comment and 25 points right at the top,
| multiple times in the last two week. Keeping their needs
| in mind, it has begun to look like manipulation, even if
| the above effect could explain it.
|
| I'm glad the technology foments it excitement for you.
| The idea that we can share intellectual processes broadly
| and implement them without the previously requisite
| skills will obviously change the world. That it could
| change the world for the better, excites me too.
|
| But many of us have our excitement tampered by the
| messaging, the questionable ethics behind how it has been
| done, and the fact that a real % of the space is
| basically driven by eschatological thinking. And it
| especially annoys me that Anthropic is the company whose
| messaging simultaneously encourages that eschatological
| thinking, and preys upon the emotional reactions it
| creates.
|
| I think it is increasingly clear--if you look at recent
| public sentiment and feel what is in the air--that they
| are a villain in this aspect. I don't think we want the
| people who believe they are building the future to be
| doing so both out of fear--of China--and gaining power
| through others' fear of what they are doing.
|
| But villains can ultimately do good in the world, despite
| their villainy. Let's hope that is how it plays out.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| I mean you aren't wrong. It's just I don't think it
| requires any kind of vote manipulation to see why ai
| company releases hit the front page. Back in browser war
| days it was the same thing.
| 3sdfs wrote:
| Correct they're trying to bamboozle the stock market.
|
| Im looking at this product and thinking - so...? Where's the
| vision?
|
| Oh there is none. Its about spraying and praying that the
| hype continues and feeding off analysts who don't really
| understand most of the firms that they spend all day studying
| the valuation of.
| mikeaskew4 wrote:
| Thumbs down. Great design is original thought. AI is wholly
| incapable of that.
|
| Go ahead and roast me.
| dumfries wrote:
| As if original thought occurs out of thin air. AI is definitely
| capable to take aspects of design and apply it elsewhere.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _Great design is original thought_
|
| I don't agree. For novel use cases, yes there's some truth to
| that. But consistency is huge in a UX. If basic controls work
| well for a situation, they should be used. Designers should not
| be getting "creative" or "original" for those sorts of things.
| criddell wrote:
| I don't think you are really disagreeing. I'd guess
| mikeaskew4 would include the constraints of following
| platform conventions / HIGs and using native widgets for any
| GUI. Those constraints do not preclude original thought.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Most applications just need good enough design.
| garrickvanburen wrote:
| My default position: If an LLM can create it, we probably don't
| actually need it.
| t0lo wrote:
| If AI can create it- it's probably already been created and
| thought of before?
| nothinkjustai wrote:
| It's honestly been my experience. I think I've vibe coded
| _one_ thing that I've found to be genuinely useful to me,
| everything else has ended up as useless slop given time.
|
| I think we probably need less software, but higher quality,
| not more. Unfortunately AI only goes in one direction...
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| You can let the LLM create slop for you, sure. But only
| amateurs are using it for that. You'll be much happier if you
| treat it as a tool and use it like any other, a force
| multiplier to take _your ideas and creations_ and pushes them
| further along faster.
|
| If you treat it like a black box used to outsource your own
| thinking, you are holding it wrong.
| criddell wrote:
| Maybe you haven't noticed, but most of the internet doesn't
| seem to care about great design.
|
| Also, a lot of very good software developers are bad at design
| and unwilling or unable to pay for a designer. This will be an
| improvement for them.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| That's pretty true. Just look at this sites design
| rbtprograms wrote:
| i dont disagree. but there is a difference between great design
| and entirely acceptable and shippable design.
| jonlucc wrote:
| Transparently, I'm not a designer, I'm a biologist. That said,
| the things I want designed by Claude don't need great design. I
| need a slide format that is consistent from one study to the
| next so the reader can follow. I need a tool that tracks the
| number of mice in each lab and flags if someone is using more
| resources than we expect. I need a personal site that is easy
| to work with that tracks my pet geckos' feed and environment.
|
| If I have a product out of my lab that makes it to human
| trials, there will be a full team of marketers and designers
| tasked to the brand image.
| nothinkjustai wrote:
| I doubt you'd be singing the same tune if Anthropic released
| Claude Researcher and a bunch of people were saying "I'm a
| designer, not a biologist. I don't need great research. I
| just need X"
|
| Ironically I think AI will replace researchers before it
| replaces artists.
| jonlucc wrote:
| I'm not the one saying my job is uniquely human. Last week,
| I watched a video of a vendor's new facility that entirely
| automates antibody production and screening lab. The
| machines run literally every step from picking antibodies,
| sequencing, scaling up, and in vitro screening without a
| human interfering or donning a labcoat. A machine that is
| essentially a nicer roomba fetches the flask and drives it
| to where the shakers are and puts it on an empty shaker
| spot. I have no doubt the lab tasks I do can be automated.
| Fortunately for me, a large portion of my job at the moment
| is in handling animals, and there are much higher barriers
| there, but again, I don't think that part of my job makes
| me irreplaceable.
| Jtarii wrote:
| Great designers will make great designs no matter what tools
| you give them.
| seydor wrote:
| Have you seen many original designs in the past 15 years?
| rglover wrote:
| You're absolutely correct.
|
| But the mass market (who this is ultimately for) doesn't care
| about great design. They care about "seeing something on the
| screen." If they can get something that looks 80-90% aligned
| with what they observe to be modern design, they won't think
| twice (even if the end result is clunky or not on par with what
| a professional designer would produce). It's the Ikea Effect on
| steroids.
| johnfn wrote:
| Tell this to the 99% of designers who are designing the 5th
| page in some RBAC modal or some obscure settings page. Design
| is like code - there are a few people doing really
| groundbreaking stuff, but vastly more doing the utilitarian
| plumbing everyone depends on.
| wolttam wrote:
| Human inputs their idea. AI helps bring it to light faster.
| Human iterates.
|
| Still human?
| esafak wrote:
| This is just going to chop the bottom end off, same as with
| software. If you are great you get to keep your job.
|
| The catch is that the person making the decision might not know
| or care about the difference.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Sure, great design is original thought.
|
| Is there also a place in the world for not-great-but-good-
| enough design?
| chasd00 wrote:
| > Great design is original thought
|
| not really, great design in a web application is no surprises.
| subhobroto wrote:
| > Great design is original thought. AI is wholly incapable of
| that
|
| This is entirely accurate, _however_ I fear there 's a lack of
| perspective:
|
| If you're in the middle of the desert and need to sit down,
| that random rock looks and feels great because there's nothing
| even close, around!
|
| One issue that a lot of experts fail to recognize is that
| "great" is relative: It's not apparent to the experts because
| they are only pulled in when their expertise is needed. Most of
| the time when experts are pulled in, requirements are clear,
| you have traction, scale and now you need to optimize.
|
| Once you're spoiled for choices, you have lots of options and
| then that random rock doesn't look appealing at all: now you're
| considering other factors like budget - IKEA vs Adirondack.
|
| What AI is making a huge difference are places where "great"
| isnt that valuable:
|
| - people in the desert: Someone wants to track what words their
| toddler is saying or their groceries or how much kitty litter
| they should buy soon and Claude will spit something out
| reasonable even if it makes the skin of experts crawl.
|
| - commodity and bean counters: in cut throat industries like
| power or insurance, it's all commodity services competing on
| price. Most people arent going to pay a premium for a better
| looking, more intuitive insurance app. It just needs to not
| suck and fall over. Or you're making a knockoff of an existing,
| well understood product
| eloisant wrote:
| Having furniture made by a master designer and artisan
| woodworker is great. But sometimes, you don't have the budget
| for that and Ikea furnitures does the job just fine. Most of
| the time, actually.
| nothinkjustai wrote:
| IKEA hires many great designers for its furniture though.
| cdrnsf wrote:
| Now I can visualize my bloated shadcn + Tailwind UI in advance.
| sbszllr wrote:
| It's interesting how OpenAI and Anthropic effectively mass dumped
| a bunch of similar features in the last two days.
|
| I wonder what other features they're cooking right now.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| I think that's the wrong question. What kind of shadow spy
| network must exist around all these companies such that they
| all happen to be working on the same features at the same time.
| sbszllr wrote:
| It's possible and even likely there's industrial espionage
| going on. But imo, you don't need that. I've worked in
| cutting edge industries, and even when you don't know what
| your competition is doing, there are usually only so many
| logical next steps.
| xpe wrote:
| This. / Who remembers the "birth" of crowdfunding? Why did
| so much seem to happen at all once? The most likely
| explanation imo is that it was "in the air" -- we share
| culture and ideas. These ideas don't have to be stolen to
| co-occur... quite the opposite.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > What kind of shadow spy network must exist around all these
| companies such that they all happen to be working on the same
| features at the same time.
|
| Stuff like that happened even before the invention of the
| telephone, humans within the same geographic location is even
| more predicable, so surely this shouldn't come as a surprise.
| clayhacks wrote:
| Yeah the spy network is just all these people living in a 7
| mile radius of each other (San Francisco) and have lots of
| overlap in social circles
| bustah wrote:
| What I find interesting is how rarely people in these
| discussions name the mechanism that makes going back
| hard. It's not just efficiency. There's a feedback loop
| built into AI coding tools that's genuinely dopaminergic:
| tight, fast reward cycles for each autocomplete hit.
| Taking three months off coding by hand is essentially a
| detox. The fact that the author framed it as a deliberate
| experiment rather than just "I prefer vim" tells you
| something. There's a piece at sloppish.com/dopamine-
| loop.html that gets into the behavioral design of these
| tools specifically.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Who said I was surprised? :)
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I mean your initial question kind of implies something
| that is likely to be the wrong answer, so sounds like at
| least someone could potentially be surprised by that :)
| jonlucc wrote:
| Frequently, two movies with very similar concepts drop the
| same year. Is that because they're spying, or because the
| companies make decisions in similar ways based on similar
| input information?
| xpe wrote:
| The human brain strikes again. It is built into our cognitive
| machinery to look for patterns and naively ascribe causation.
| We're not rational beings that sometimes mess up. We're a
| clusterf--k of cognitive biases all the way down.*
|
| Cool pattern! Sure, maybe there is _something_ there.** And
| /or maybe our brain is doing "conspiracy theorizing lite".
| Its all on the same spectrum -- the same flawed cognitive
| machinery trying to operate in a weird modern world quite
| different from where we came from.
|
| A better way: write out your favorite hypothesis. But don't
| stop there... keep going... write out many hypotheses. Then
| find ways to test them. To tap into our best selves, I
| recommend The Scout Mindset (book). Here is an infographic
| summary of part of it: https://imgur.com/qN31PX8
|
| Probably not a better way: float one's first gut feels to the
| Internet phrased as i.e. _the better question_ and feed empty
| calories to our pattern-craving brains. There is reason some
| of our brain functions are considered higher order.
|
| * Maybe I'm overstating this. Let me know? I want to read
| Rationality and the Reflective Mind by Keith Stanovich
| (https://academic.oup.com/book/5930) as a counterpoint to the
| usual suspects (such as Tversky & Kahneman)
|
| ** But _what_ is there. What kind of pattern? What kind(s) of
| causation could be at work? See Judea Pearl 's "ladder of
| causation". Nice write-up here: https://samuel-
| book.github.io/causal_inference_notebook/pear...
| fassssst wrote:
| It's because they embrace their coding models to ship new
| things at light speed.
| namanyayg wrote:
| The Anthropic team looks to be eating all the usecases and
| application layer. I personally know of many figma + AI startups
| that are going to feel shaken up with this launch.
|
| Anthropic has distribution on their side, their engineers are
| excellent (I have ran with them across the ggb in the past and
| they work 12 hours plus a day regularly.)
|
| I think what actually might be slowing them down is the public
| releases and pr lol, not ideas or execution
| subscribed wrote:
| 12+ hours a day regularly?
|
| What a toxic workplace :/
| Sol- wrote:
| They are all very wealthy, or are about to be at the IPO.
| Seems like a worthwhile tradeoff.
|
| And money aside, it is certainly one of the most exciting
| companies in the world to work for.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| It's a horseshoe where the worst companies make you work 12
| hours and the best companies make you want to work 12
| hours.
| namanyayg wrote:
| Exactly the engineers I've talked to are all so EXCITED
| H8crilA wrote:
| Didn't know that anyone needed to hear that, but here it is:
| "hot" companies often have such workdays, especially pre-IPO
| and with such a fast growth.
| namanyayg wrote:
| Yeah exactly, if you're seeing your own stock go up like
| the Anthropic employees are, it's gonna be hard to not work
| 12 hours
| rightbyte wrote:
| Why? Do the extra hours give you more stocks?
| namanyayg wrote:
| Some factors to consider are promotions, pip, or just
| being fired
| adrian_b wrote:
| "Hot" companies with stupid managers often have such
| workdays.
|
| In the case of engineers and programmers, the amount of
| useful completed "work" has only a very weak correlation
| with the length of the workdays.
|
| Good engineers or programmers will think anyway most of the
| time about the problems that they must currently solve,
| regardless whether they are in the office or at home or in
| any other place, and regardless whether to an external
| observer they appear to be "working" or they appear to do
| nothing.
|
| Programmers who spend all day typing lines of code into a
| computer, are more likely to not be competent programmers,
| because otherwise they would have found ways to automate
| such activities that require continuous physical
| involvement, making impossible the allocation of enough
| time for thinking about the right solution.
|
| If whatever they do does not require true thinking, then
| that is the kind of job that can be done by AI agents.
| wmeredith wrote:
| > their engineers are excellent... they work 12 hours plus a
| day regularly
|
| What? In my experience people who are good at their job can get
| it done in a reasonable amount of time. Working 12 hours a day
| is obsession, no competence. There can be overlap, but there is
| no causation.
| namanyayg wrote:
| At a company like Anthropic, which is one of the fastest-
| growing companies in the world, there is more work than
| anyone can reasonably deal with
| anentropic wrote:
| I thought that's what their product was for
|
| /s
| fg137 wrote:
| You can look at the number of github issues on the claude
| code repo and think about how many hours a day people need to
| work to address them.
|
| Then look at the changelog of Claude Code. They are releasing
| daily.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| All their outputs are slop, nobody is actually working to
| address them.
| ljm wrote:
| I reckon something like this has only been possible to develop
| because of how homogenous the internet has become in terms of
| design ever since the glass effect and drop-shadows took over in
| Web 2.0 and Twitter Bootstrap entered the scene.
|
| You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly
| unique or mind-blowing.
|
| Impressive technology, but that old skool artisanal weirdness of
| yore only becomes more valuable and nostalgic.
| quacked wrote:
| I hate it so much. Ah, your website/app/program is comprised of
| rounded-corner cards in four colors (color/pale
| color/white/grey), with a dark theme. Your clickable text isn't
| visually distinguishable from your non-clickable text. All of
| your logos are sans-serif SVGs. Your settings and action menus
| are split across four different primary hidden locations. Your
| scroll bars disappear even when there's text hidden offscreen.
| You try to guess what I want to click on by showing a series of
| competing horizontally-organized pills over the top of the
| content instead of just giving me a consistent set of action
| buttons.
|
| AI companies: "good news, everyone! We've automated all those
| steps so they're even easier to generate!"
|
| I think the same thing is happening in physical construction.
| Ah, I see you've designed a new box with four primary color
| tones and slightly offset vertical lines to break up the
| windows.
| Maxion wrote:
| This aestethic is useful though for SaaS apps and the like
| that know themselves to be generic.
| rob wrote:
| What's great is I can take what you just said now and use it
| as context when generating my new DESIGN.md system and making
| sure it doesn't look like any of the other stuff. Thank you!
| Superpowers will show me all the options in their built-in
| visual companion when brainstorming. :)
| quacked wrote:
| I don't know, I looked at their demo video and it was
| tile/cards all over the place. I haven't seen an old-
| fashioned user interface like the kind we saw before 2020
| in ages.
| ljm wrote:
| There was a screenshot of Valve's front page back when
| Half Life 2 was released in the early 00s[0]. It was well
| laid out, straight to the point, and had design
| flourishes that would have been painful to put together
| at a time where CSS was new and not supported very well.
|
| Obviously a product of its time and laid out similar to
| how it'd be printed in a magazine (the characters
| slightly overflowing the borders and such like).
| Accessibility wasn't a thing back then.
|
| If a different company did that in 2018 you'd be seeing
| the G-man in corporate memphis, downloading about 500mb
| of assets, with 178 separate ad trackers in a consent
| popup, and then you'd be scrolling like mad to get
| through all sorts of animations that hijack the
| scrollbar, in order to get to any useful info.
|
| [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/HalfLife/comments/10sx4ve/wh
| at_stea...
| volkk wrote:
| that's how i've felt about all AI design. the harnesses get
| better and cooler, and the outputs up the baseline of utter
| crap to "whoa that doesn't look bad at all!" which works for
| probably 90% of the web, but anything truly unique still
| requires a lot of human taste. maybe that will change one day,
| but I hope it doesn't.
| ezst wrote:
| By the nature of LLMs, there's no reason to think it would.
| threetonesun wrote:
| I'd argue it's relatively unimpressive given the ability to
| create design systems and apply themes to them to create
| relatively generic content has existed for a long time now.
|
| Sure, some prototypes will be spun up more quickly. But if this
| was a real problem large companies faced it would have been
| solved in software already.
| ctoth wrote:
| > if this was a real problem large companies faced it would
| have been solved in software already.
|
| Good for _everybody_ who _isn 't_ a large company then?
| threetonesun wrote:
| I wasn't suggesting that the problem would be solved by
| large companies internally. If anything this is worse for
| smaller companies, who have already solved this problem for
| decades at this point by simply not caring about design too
| much and using the web UI framework du jour. We've already
| seen with Tailwind that moving to "just put money in the AI
| machine" comes at the expense of open source UI framework
| sustainability, with the upside of being slightly faster at
| making a first-pass boring design.
| thunky wrote:
| > You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing
| truly unique or mind-blowing.
|
| This is exactly what I want in a UI.
| qazxcvbnmlp wrote:
| Exactly. If I am making a tool, I want the users mental
| energy to be spent on their domain, not bespoke weirdness of
| my ui choices.
| ljm wrote:
| The remaining issue is that even an AI-generated UI needs
| considerable UX input in order to work well, especially when
| you have to fit it around domain specific knowledge, use-
| cases, and prior art. Is it for power users or not? All that.
|
| At risk of shifting the goalposts on what I originally said,
| unique here isn't meant to mean quirky or weird but, simply,
| something that hasn't been done before, or hasn't been done
| as effectively.
|
| This is the challenge for B2B startups that are switching to
| LLM-based development and are trying to offer more than the
| reselling of cloud compute at a markup with specialised
| functionality, because AI turns SaaS into a sexy version of
| MS Access.
| mjr00 wrote:
| There's no shame in being homogenous and obvious, though.
|
| If I'm building out an internal tool for, say, a hospital
| lawyer to search through malpractice lawsuits, I _want_ my tool
| to be the most familiar, obvious, least-surprising UI /UX
| possible. Just stay out of the way and do what it's supposed to
| do.
|
| The trick is, of course, that the human is still responsible
| for knowing when homogenous is fine, or when there's real value
| in the presentation. If you're making a website for, say, a VST
| plugin for musicians, your site may need to have a little more
| "pizzazz" to make your product more attractive to the target
| audience.
| Fordec wrote:
| Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no pride.
|
| Standardized interfaces are as exciting as kettle thermal
| switches or physical knobs in cars. Useful, probably optimal
| and will be around for decades to come. Also nobody talks
| about it, treats it with interest, or pays above market rate
| to work on it.
|
| The value becomes the architecture of the value of the tool,
| not the interface. There is still value being generated, but
| the need for a highly paid UX designer evaporates, and is
| ultimately replaced by the above.
| jrimbault wrote:
| > Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no
| pride.
|
| But there's is "pride" in making tools people actually use
| without issue
| lwhi wrote:
| But it's possible to have usability and a unique design
| character, if you use a human designer.
| whatever1616 wrote:
| not only possible but sometimes necessary because
| sometimes you need to sacrifice familiarity and question
| the assumptions we have to truly make meaningful
| improvements
| afro88 wrote:
| If you work with an exceptional one, sure
| Thanemate wrote:
| True, but why would people use yet another lookalike tool
| over the one they're currently using? Or is the
| implication that looks don't matter as long as it works?
| Because if that's the case, Why do we need CSS?
| prmph wrote:
| the beauty is in the consistency.
|
| why do we build with right angles, straight lines,
| regular curves, etc? Why not random angles, crooked
| lines, etc for style and "excitement"?
|
| Why don't we assemble a furniture set from a random
| assortment of pieces from flea markets? People sense that
| that is ugly.
| caseyohara wrote:
| A better example might be why we build stairs with a
| standard riser height and tread run. If you've ever
| accidentally tripped on an unusual or non-standard stair,
| you already know this.
|
| Users don't need to think about how to use them; they are
| ubiquitous and familiar, and therefore intuitive and
| automatic.
|
| If every set of stairs (or, worse, if every stair in a
| set) was radically different, every time you approached
| some stairs you would have to think carefully about how
| to use them so you don't fall.
| prmph wrote:
| Your point is true, but the one I was replying to was
| focusing on the aesthetic aspect. For them, the sameness
| of UIs, while functional, make for a drab experience.
|
| My point is that I don't find this to be case. Rather,
| consistent UIs, while functional, are also beautiful to
| me. The constituents of the UI can be designed with
| aesthetic taste, but the way it is all put together
| consistently and functionally has a beauty all its own.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Wait is this a pro-llm argument
|
| That's fucking funnyyyyyy
|
| The gymnastics keep getting better and better
| prmph wrote:
| what in my comment make you think it is pro-llm?
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no
| pride.
|
| I disagree completely. The pride should come from the value
| that is delivered. Specifically, this:
|
| >> Useful, probably optimal and will be around for decades
| to come.
|
| Is something to be proud of, full stop.
| threatofrain wrote:
| I think there's something nice about the idea of a store
| owner which has unnecessarily decorated the store with
| love, even with the liability of a cat; it's not
| delivering the product better and the cat may actually
| make things worse because of allergies.
|
| A cold American convenience store may be delivering the
| fundamental value at American prices, but there's
| something to be said about that "extra" human or creative
| element. One might say the same thing about the changing
| nature of the web over time, less individual CSS chaos
| and more Facebook aesthetics.
| darth_aardvark wrote:
| There's nothing stopping people from decorating their
| boutique stores (or personal blogs, portfolios, and fan
| websites) the way they want. And that's fun and
| delightful for me, as a visitor, just like boutique shops
| are IRL.
|
| But I really don't need that quirkiness at Home Depot,
| the DMV or my bank (or Amazon, or government websites, or
| my banking site). I'm there to purchase some screws,
| register my car or pick up some checks. I just need a
| storefront (or a website) that lets me do that as fast
| and homogenously as possible.
|
| 99.9% of stores (and UIs) are the latter, not the former.
| soraki_soladead wrote:
| > There is also no pride.
|
| Is the pride not in solving the users' problems?
|
| > nobody talks about it, treats it with interest, or pays
| above market rate to work on it.
|
| Definitely needs a citation for this one. For so many
| products the user isn't paying for standout design. They're
| paying for insight, leverage, velocity, convenience,
| whatever. The market definitely supports this by paying
| above market salaries.
|
| Good design can be a useful differentiator but it isn't the
| only way for a tool or product to "spark joy" and often
| _fancy_ design (not good design) is used as a crutch for a
| subpar product.
| rustystump wrote:
| To prove the above person's point, sap and salesforce
| have some of the most notoriously bad ux in the market
| and yes they make bank.
|
| Design is much harder for power user tools compared to
| consumer. There is far more complexity and the
| expectation often is users must be trained to even use
| the tool.
|
| Design only goes so far.
| whatever1616 wrote:
| > sap and salesforce have some of the most notoriously
| bad ux in the market and yes they make bank.
|
| Why ? Since its so notoriously bad why have there been no
| attempts to improve it ?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Because the people making purchasing decisions for SAP
| and Salesforce are not people who spend any substantial
| share of their time using it directly or care about the
| UX.
| rustystump wrote:
| There have been but the strength isnt in the ux. Both are
| effectively enterprise ruby on rails where you can
| customize and integrate with anything. That is also why
| they are sticky. They become part of core business
| pipelines. It is hilarious because the performance is
| terrible too.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Those are the kind of domains where LLMs as an interface
| should kick ass.
|
| Describe the idea of what you want to do, not the
| inscrutable steps the application requires to get there.
| Fordec wrote:
| > They're paying for insight, leverage, velocity,
| convenience, whatever.
|
| Correct, they are paying for work done by people in other
| roles, who's title isn't UI or UX designer. It's on the
| backend person for velocity, it's for business
| development for leverage, it's on data scientists for
| insight, it's on logistics for convenience. Those people
| will be paid for solving those problems, not for tweaking
| CSS. My team, who falls into this category of more
| invisible work, has not hired UI or UX person at all.
| Which by mathematically speaking by default, is simply
| below the average rate for that work. Meanwhile Apple
| will pay easily mid six figures for someone in a more
| flashy role.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Much of the sadness of the current tech industry comes
| about because the user's problems were solved in the 90s
| but now we need to make up new ones to justify the fat
| salaries, headcount increases, and stock price.
| ItsClo688 wrote:
| the "solving users' problems" framing works for most
| products but gets complicated for developer tools, where
| the design is the interaction model. a CLI that gives you
| typed errors and predictable verbs is design. a confusing
| API surface that makes you guess is also design, just bad
| design. the pride question becomes: did you respect the
| user's mental model?
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I don't take pride in having an original UI for most tasks:
| I take pride in having one that's easy to use and gets the
| job done. I am not disrespecting people who are making a
| creative/artistic UI: That adds fun and life to the world.
| But it's not required for every project.
| pc86 wrote:
| > There is also no pride.
|
| Respectfully disagree.
|
| You should feel pride when you deliver the easiest-to-use
| system that the hospital lawyer has ever used. When you get
| them in and out of the system quickly because it's
| intuitive and has an appropriate architecture.
| ramakrishna2002 wrote:
| > You should feel pride when you deliver the easiest-to-
| use system
|
| If there is no person in the team who prides themselves
| to deliver interesting/elegant product, then it is very
| unlikely the product will be interesting/elegant.
|
| I believe this is not something we want to happen, a
| world with no interesting/elegant products.
| jimbokun wrote:
| I think many companies need a UX professional to stop
| developers from deploying bespoke interfaces and forcing
| them to follow whatever idioms and patterns the users are
| most familiar with.
| ItsClo688 wrote:
| agree that fancy [?] good. some of the most satisfying
| tools i've used look like they were designed in 1995.
| ezst wrote:
| That's why I miss the days of old fashioned GUI toolkits
| (before the web thought of itself as an application
| distribution platform): you would just design any app as a
| bag of typical controls in typical containers, and you and
| your users would live with the expectation that they would
| look and feel just like the rest of the operating system,
| nothing more, nothing less. Frivolity would be generally
| frowned upon, with the result that applications were overall
| more homogeneous, effective, discoverable and efficient (also
| in dev time).
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Shadcn and friends are the modern equivalent of old vb
| custom controls.
| jerf wrote:
| I remember when people would vigorously complain that
| Toolkit X was simply _unsuitable for any task_ because it
| did not conform to the operating system 's standard visual
| appearance.
|
| Now I struggle to even _define_ what an "operating
| system's standard visual appearance" is. Apple's still the
| best but not what they used to be on that front even so.
| bombcar wrote:
| I don't remember people complaining about Winamp being a
| non-standard UI, but if it were _slow_ then there 'd be
| tons of complaints - and many of the "fancy" UIs were
| terribly slow (or the programs were, hard for a user to
| tell the difference).
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| Quite the opposite, people worked very, very hard to make
| Winamp even more non-standard via skinning.
| jbs789 wrote:
| didn't winamp look like an... amp?
| bombcar wrote:
| Skeuomorphism at its prime.
|
| I'm not saying iTunes (Music.app bleh!) would be better
| reimagined as Winamp 2 but I'm not _not_ saying it.
|
| https://webamp.org
| strobe wrote:
| Winamp been really unique, probably because they able to
| combine that unique design with very practical UX. Even
| when better players released a lot of users got hard
| times to switch because of UI, visualizations, skins...
| bombcar wrote:
| It was also much "bigger" on the earlier screens, because
| the resolution just wasn't there (I remember finally
| getting a 1024x768 screen for Windows 95).
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _I don 't remember people complaining about Winamp
| being a non-standard UI, but if it were slow then there'd
| be tons of complaints - and many of the "fancy" UIs were
| terribly slow (or the programs were, hard for a user to
| tell the difference)._
|
| Wasn't Winamp 2 the gold standard? I remember plenty of
| music lovers switching to foobar2000 when Winamp 3 came
| out, because it was, as you said, _slow_ (er).
| 9rx wrote:
| That is in large part because there was no uncanny
| valley, so to speak. Where it was different, it was
| different with a purpose and was intentional about it.
| Where there was no purpose, like in secondary menus, it
| still used native widgets like users expected.
|
| The parent is talking about toolkits like Swing where
| things looked[1] almost, sort of, but not quite like the
| native system. That wanted to be native, but for
| technical reasons fell short. These are what many
| considered to be completely unfit for use. Whereas today,
| designers wouldn't think twice about applying the same
| kind of almost-native-but-not-quite theme to match their
| arbitrary whims and think they are doing the world a
| service by doing so, the UI conventions (to the extent
| that there remains any) of the host system be damned.
|
| [1]
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Gui-
| widg...
| bombcar wrote:
| I still cringe every time I get Minecraft to pop up a
| generic Java UI window on a Mac (of course it now even
| looks out of place on Windows).
| BeetleB wrote:
| I miss the days when there was no "standard visual
| appearance" for the OS (e.g. DOS). I liked the diversity
| of interfaces.
|
| Years ago, I remarked to a friend that I'd spent half of
| my (computing) life post-high speed Internet, yet almost
| all my happy memories are from before that. It was the
| same for him, and we both explored why that was.
|
| The homogeneity of interfaces was actually one of the
| reasons we came up with on why doing work at a computer
| is a lot less appealing.
| gbalduzzi wrote:
| Everyone remembers fondly the time they were young, I
| believe it is more about that then everything else.
|
| I understand your feelings but it is extremely tipical in
| human history to keep remembering "the good old times"
| BeetleB wrote:
| That may be true, and had you asked me half a lifetime
| ago, I would have likely said "The old days were better".
|
| But:
|
| I would have still said I enjoyed using computers. And I
| wouldn't have said "Today's interface sucks" (well, other
| than my HW not being able to keep up with eye candy...)
|
| I simply don't enjoy using the computer these days. And I
| do think the interface sucks. Pretty much anything that
| involves using the web browser sucks - be it a local app
| or a web app.
| andoando wrote:
| I don't either, but I really think Im just burnt out. The
| simplest things piss me off.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| I'll still die on this hill, but I think that the reason
| there's a computer literacy problem is because we moved
| away from following OS conventions (when they existed)
| and into bespoke, branded UIs for everything, and then
| eventually to web where every site and webapp behaves
| differently.
|
| In the early days, if you learned the OS, those usage
| patterns and skilled transferred to every app on that OS.
| They all looked roughly the same, shared the same menus,
| shame shortcuts, same icons, etc. You didn't have to
| learn how to use Apps x, y, and z. You just had to learn
| Windows (to an extent).
|
| Then marketing got involved, and then the web, and then
| suddenly every piece of software had to stand out and
| look and behave as unique as possible, throwing years of
| HIG research out the window.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Not all OS's, unfortunately. I'm on the boat that says
| conforming to Gnome HIG's is a bad idea.
|
| Just today I had the disk usage analyzer (baobab) open
| and I was navigating inside directories so I want to go
| up a directory and clicked on the "<-" left arrow in the
| headerbar, which went "back" a screen, discarding all the
| work done scanning the filesystem.
|
| If this app had a traditional menubar and a toolbar this
| wouldn't have happened.
|
| This is a common type of experience I have every time I
| use a Gnome app. It almost feels like someone
| deliberately researched how to make desktop apps as
| counter-intuitive as possible and implemented that as the
| policy for some reason.
| jg0r3 wrote:
| omg yes, I felt crazy the first time I experienced this
| "feature"
| jampekka wrote:
| To me Gnome mostly feels like someone deliberately
| researched how to make desktop apps as intuitive as
| possible and implemented that as the policy. And I guess
| that's what they did, and they did a good job.
| accelbred wrote:
| I have the opposite experience. I have no trouble
| navigating Gnome apps, and now when selecting an
| application for a task, I'll choose a Gnome or GTK4 one
| first. Other apps implement odd controls that don't mesh
| with the rest of the system.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Notice that several examples in the Claude Design demo
| video are typing in English things that could be
| accomplished through UI controls, if the user only knew
| where to find them.
| gowld wrote:
| All I saw was chaotic high speed zooms and jump cuts.
| sofixa wrote:
| > In the early days, if you learned the OS, those usage
| patterns and skilled transferred to every app on that OS
|
| And locked your thinking into the OS' way of thinking.
| Every software vendor had to do their application a few
| times over with a different release for each OS, because
| the design is completely different.
|
| As someone who uses multiple OSes (work macOS and iOS,
| home Windows and Ubuntu, Android) I hate nothing more
| than apps that behave differently on the different OSes,
| with different logic or features.
| ilikecakeandpie wrote:
| There's a real problem with everything looking the same
| though. For a consumer product, you lose brand recognition.
| For a B2B product, you can confuse your users because Tool A
| and Tool B look exactly the same. You have to look hard at
| the name, kind of like prescription pill bottles.
| Qasaur wrote:
| There is little reason to invent a completely new design
| system if your goal is to encourage brand recognition and
| prevent an operator from confusing tools.
|
| Apple/SwiftUI has accentColor for example where you can
| inject a brand colour. This is subtle but effective for UI
| differentiation - colour is a design primitive that evokes
| subconscious pattern recognition and can be more effective
| than a complicated design framework that forces a larger
| context switch in the user's mind.
| raffael_de wrote:
| there is no problem with yellow, but if everything is yellow
| then that's a problem. that's the point.
| pc86 wrote:
| Why? At the risk of straining the example, "everything is
| yellow" is only a problem if there's a better color for a
| particular problem.
|
| Maybe it's true that yellow is just the best, and should be
| used in 99% of circumstances?
| levmiseri wrote:
| This is reducing the role of Design as some lego-blocks
| assembling process. And higher quality being seen as adding
| 'pizzazz'.
|
| You are right, though. Many products don't need more than
| that. But I fear that this will greatly impact design
| innovation and progress. We might get stuck in the current UI
| paradigm for a long time.
| ljm wrote:
| We can skip Web3... Web 4.0 is twilight gradients,
| glassmorphism, text size xs in tailwind, and cards and
| pills for every UI component. Along with self-explanatory
| help text acting as filler under every header.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| It's no different to people trying to reduce the role of
| Programming to the same lego-block assembling process. And
| I believe the same conclusion follows.
| pc86 wrote:
| Is "design innovation" a thing we really need? I'm not
| trying to be flippant, but every time I've come across an
| "innovative" design the only thing it's done is made me
| spend time learning whatever bespoke conventions the
| designer put in.
| whatever1616 wrote:
| Thats rather unavoidable to some extent anything thats
| better is going to be somewhat different
| slopinthebag wrote:
| The issue is that you actually don't want it to look like the
| modern ubiquitous UI we see everywhere, because it's some of
| the most jarring, least-intuitive crap we could possibly
| design. Even _I_ struggle with it when trying to help my
| parents out, so of course they have no chance, and if they
| have no chance neither does the hospital lawyer. Modern UI is
| garbage, and thus this just outputs garbage. Believe it or
| not, creating good UI takes real skill and experience. You
| can 't just slop it out and expect your tool to do what it's
| supposed to do.
| AstroBen wrote:
| "attractive things work better"
|
| There have been studies showing aesthetics matter quite a bit
| for UX - users perceive things that are attractive as being
| easier to use and less frustrating.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Agreed. I only make internal tools where I work, and
| homogeneity is great here. These apps _should_ be the most
| boring apps, yet clear, easy to use, and importantly,
| consistent across the company.
|
| Bootstrap was great for this. You got a clean web interface
| that was simple, yet didn't have to be completely ugly. Basic
| and functional. A form to submit POs doesn't have to stand
| out, be glassy, or have animations. It needs to be easy to
| parse and stay out of the way.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| There is more to design then just buttons and colour... Like
| menus, options, how, where, when etc.
|
| But I reckon, nobody cares. Just let Claude decide and go
| with it... Sad state for UX designers / researchers.
| thevinter wrote:
| And no-one is preventing you from caring about those
| things. I build UIs with Claude a lot and I still spend a
| lot of the time thinking about the user experience and
| working with Claude to make an app as intuitive and easy to
| use as possible.
| ljm wrote:
| I do similar, but I dislike writing CSS because it's
| practically impossible to keep up with the standards. And
| because I dislike writing CSS I don't feel like writing
| HTML that much either.
|
| Web Components were a bit too slow to take off so the
| mental model of JSX has stuck with me, even if the
| ecosystem with hooks and various approaches towards
| reactive state are in many ways inferior to a problem
| Smalltalk already solved back in the day.
| mbesto wrote:
| > There's no shame in being homogenous and obvious, though.
|
| The real world analog is this...
|
| The reason people (especially Americans) stay in Marriott
| property hotels is because they are homogenous. If all I want
| to do is travel to Phoenix, AZ for work I want to know that
| the hotel room has the same mattress, desk, TV, customer
| service, etc. There is real legitimate value to that. So I'll
| book the Courtyard in Phoenix because I know exactly what I'm
| going to get.
|
| On the other hand, when I'm traveling the Amalfi Coast in
| Italy, I want the Airbnb experience. Sure the bed is stiff,
| there's no A/C, and the 80 year old door frame is hard to
| close, but there is something magical about it.
| 3sdfs wrote:
| Trade-offs.
| sdoering wrote:
| It is actually a rational choice. It is a defense against
| extremely bad experiences.
|
| A personal example from a few weeks back. My SO booked a
| hotel for a weekend as a birthday present. We went there,
| it had a fantastic spa, dinner was delicious, the room
| great, clean, and so on. Individually designed, well
| thought out, friendly staff.
|
| Breakfast came around and the coffee was abysmal. Really
| truly abysmal. What did we do? While eating breakfast we
| looked for a McDonalds, as we know for sure, that
| regardless where you are - you will at least find an okay
| and drinkable coffee at McDonalds. It is not a great
| coffee. And will never be. But the likelyhood is very low
| that you will find a shit coffee.
|
| Marriott is basically the same for hotels. Or MotelOne in
| Germany. It is the power of brand - you get a solid 7 out
| of ten. And to be honest - when I am traveling for work,
| this is all I want. I want to know, that I will have a
| clean room, a bed that is good to sleep in. And the
| knowledge, that I will likely wake up rested the next day
| when I have to be at my best for my clients.
|
| The risk of ending in a shit-hole got smaller because
| nowadays people write their experiences - but on the other
| hand, having seen how many of my reviews were being deleted
| by Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor and the likes because some
| lawyer requested it - I don't give a rat's shit for online
| reviews.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _Marriott is basically the same for hotels._
|
| Marriotts are sadly not the same between countries, and
| that's probably a good thing.
|
| The standard for large chain hotels in the US are much,
| much lower than everywhere else in the world. Full-
| service Hiltons in the US don't even have executive
| lounges anymore.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Full-service Hiltons in the US don't even have
| executive lounges anymore.
|
| Some (at least one) don't even have breakfast
| facilities...
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| > The standard for large chain hotels in the US are much,
| much lower than everywhere else in the world.
|
| this is true for fast food as well. mcdonalds in poland
| and spain were MUCH better than the slop in america. I
| had taco bell here in srilanka recently. it was DELICIOUS
| and tasted like real food. same goes for popeyes and
| pizza hut here. pizza hut in america on the other hand
| tastes regrettable and left me feeling like shit.
| ncphillips wrote:
| KFC in Japan is not fair.
| miki123211 wrote:
| mcDonalds in Poland used to be the luxury brand. This is
| the part Americans don't get.
|
| It used to be the new, western chain that you only saw in
| American movies, and then you could experience it for
| yourself. When I was a kid (middle / solid working class
| family), we'd semi-regularly do mcDonalds trips as a
| treat. The experience of going to mcDonalds because you
| were too poor to do anything else was unthinkable to us.
|
| Other brands that are staples of the American experience
| were also like this. CocaCola definitely comes to mind
| here; most of our tapwater is drinkable, and bottled
| water is much cheaper than coke, so that was the default
| option for most people, along with coffee and tea of
| course.
|
| Somebody did the calculations on Polish Twitter recently,
| and apparently taking a 4-person family to Pizza Hut in
| the early 2000s used to cost more than our average daily
| wage.
| parpfish wrote:
| I have Taco Bell here in the USofA and it is also
| delicious. Delicious slop that has sadly become
| overpriced, but I love it.
| Tepix wrote:
| You didn't talk to the hotel and asked why their coffee
| was so bad?
| Tanjreeve wrote:
| This will do as much to solve your problem as talking to
| Google on why a search result was bad. Even if they
| agreed they won't change their coffee machine while
| you're there and they won't rehire more skilled staff etc
| etc.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I'm guessing if they see McDonalds coffee as "okay and
| drinkable", this might be a different problem than the
| way the hotel makes the coffee. Or maybe the McDonalds we
| have here in Spain is just much more terrible than in the
| US, but I'll take random bar/pub coffee or even machine
| coffee over what they serve at McDonalds.
| runarberg wrote:
| Personally, if I had to go to Phoenix, AZ for work and stay
| at a Marriott hotel, I think I would rather convince my
| boss that this business trip could be a zoom call, and
| during that zoom call I notice that participants have all
| sorts of fun virtual backgrounds, filters, emoji in their
| statuses etc.
|
| Because it turns out, the type who don't want fun little
| differences are exactly the types who will gladly go on a
| business trip to Phoenix Arizona and stay at a Marriott
| hotel.
| tmp10423288442 wrote:
| > all sorts of fun virtual backgrounds, filters, emoji in
| their statuses
|
| I don't want more pieces of flair in my life, thanks
|
| You generally won't get to know someone well enough to
| appreciate their unique aspects unless you see them in
| person at least sometimes, unless that person has the
| habit of letting their freak flag fly in all
| circumstances, which has its own downsides.
| runarberg wrote:
| > I don't want more pieces of flair in my life, thanks
|
| Then don't. My boss didn't require me to put a minimum of
| 15 pieces of flair in my status, and personally I just
| put blur on my background... scrap that, I didn't turn on
| my camera at all and just used my standard avatar (which
| I consider fun in fact).
| teiferer wrote:
| McDonalds. Homogenous everywhere in the world. US, Italy,
| Japan, Brazil, same stuff.
|
| Good pizza in Italy, goos ramen in Japan, grilled Picanha
| in Brazil, that's why you go there and _want_ it different
| /original.
|
| But in software UI this is often overdone. I want the
| pizzazz in my audio software in what it _produces_ , not in
| how the UI _looks_ like.
| gowld wrote:
| McDonald's is homogenous within a country, but very
| different in different countries.
| stevage wrote:
| McDonald's is extremely different around the world.
| Different menu, different price.
| olalonde wrote:
| "extremely"
| ekianjo wrote:
| "extremely different" is an exaggeration. It's mostly the
| same with some local differences.
| solatic wrote:
| Considering that people expect literally the same thing,
| I can understand how even small regional differences can
| seem extreme. Like not finding any beef on the menu in
| India, or any bacon in the Middle East.
| makingstuffs wrote:
| I'd say the only place I've experienced McDonald's to be
| 'extremely' different is in India due to the obvious
| prevalence of vegetarianism and outlawing of beef.
|
| In other countries the do have a lot of additional meals
| which are specific to their local taste (rice/fried
| chicken/different sauces) but the core burgers like a Big
| Mac, mcChicken and sides such as fries are there.
| spockz wrote:
| I second that. There is a mile difference between the
| sorry excuse of a burger that's called Big Tasty and
| McCrispy in the Netherlands versus the already way better
| proportioned and fresher one you get in Germany, up to
| the better ones in Italy.
|
| Besides the bun, it is noticeable in every part. The
| amounts and quality of the sauce, vegetables, and meat.
| And finally how the burger is presented.
|
| So if this difference can occur within 1000km of each
| other in the same continent, I fully accept that it is
| even more varied in the whole world.
| teiferer wrote:
| Maybe your sample size is too small? I've lived close to
| the NL/D border for a while and the McD quality was
| indistinguishable on both sides of the border. The
| variation between restaurants in the same country and
| also between different days/times in the same restaurant
| was much greater than between countries.
|
| Thatis, if you happen to go to a random McD in some
| country and the big mac was great that day and you go to
| a different restaurant in a different country on a
| different day and the big mac was bad, then that
| difference has likely least to do with them being in
| different countries. It's not like they actually use
| different recipes.
| stirfish wrote:
| Counterpoint: winamp was strictly more fun than any other
| audio software
| clbrmbr wrote:
| And all those Delphi programs (ok rn I can only think of
| the crackz but there must have been others).
|
| What made these Delphi programs so unique in their UIs?
| spockz wrote:
| Delphi shipped with its own, pretty complete, library of
| UI components.
| ruszki wrote:
| The American McDonald's is a magnitude worse than the
| European (all of them), Australian or New Zealander. The
| menu is different in every country. However, it's getting
| more uniform. Cheeseburger is the same basically
| everywhere outside of America, but not there. As somebody
| who got used to the European McDonald's and tried it in
| about 30 countries all around the world, American
| McDonald's is inedible. So there are differences. I
| completely understand the American sentiment of it,
| because it's really, really terrible there.
| pedalpete wrote:
| I think this is a fairly limited view of design, that's
| commonality in branding and somewhat layout.
|
| Real design would be changing how beds, showers, toilets,
| keys, etc etc work.
|
| Yes there is familiarity in the truly banal, but progress
| in design happens when we really question how things work.
| pxoe wrote:
| Especially americans? The popularity and demand for
| homogenous american products and services (and other
| similarly homogenous things from other countries) overseas
| shows that it's not just "especially americans". What point
| would that even make? If anything the amount of people and
| customers of such things worldwide could easily outnumber
| just the people who live in one country, even as big.
| Desiring a level of service is not really a "uniquely
| american" thing. Perhaps there's also some impression that
| there's some "international homogeneity" that blurs things
| and makes it seem like it's coming from one place (even
| though it's a mix), but seemingly "cultural and local"
| things in other countries can be no less homogenous. Going
| from one japanese ryokan to another you're gonna experience
| the same level of homogeneity.
| ecocentrik wrote:
| Good homogenous experience is the hallmark of good design.
| There are no surprises with good design. It just works the
| way you expect it to work. Good design should not generally
| challenge your expectations.
| bluegatty wrote:
| The 'real world' analogy is much simpler: standards.
|
| Canonical UX patterns are generally beneficial and most
| 'design' attempts are well-meaning dark patterns.
|
| Xerox figured out windows, scroll bars, buttons, groups in
| the 1970s and most web interfaces are STILL not up to that
| standard!
|
| Heck - they're not as good as Visual Basic apps from the
| 1990s.
|
| Largely due to lack of design discipline.
| philwelch wrote:
| Used to be more true than it is now. I've been in a couple
| really shitty Marriotts.
| lodovic wrote:
| Exactly, these hotel chains guarantee a sort of minimum
| quality level which is sufficient for most people. No
| surprises.
| Gud wrote:
| More important than "same", you don't want any weird shit
| going on.
|
| I travel 300 days a year work for and stay in hotel
| apartments, and I still miss the Hyatt I stayed in
| Manchester in 2021... last place I stayed that had gotten
| everything right.
| doublesocket wrote:
| Am I alone in not wanting banal homogeneity even on a work
| trip?
| password4321 wrote:
| Probably after a certain quantity of work trips/year,
| yes.
| cambaceres wrote:
| Would you like your hammer to have a new and innovative
| design, or do you want it to look exactly like any other
| hammer? The majority of UIs exist for the user to perform a
| task as effectively as possible, and they benefit from
| being familiar.
| a4isms wrote:
| > they benefit from being _familiar_.
|
| "Intuitive Equals Familiar," a classic from Jef Raskin,
| the man who started the Macintosh1 project at Apple:
|
| https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html
|
| ------
|
| 1 Only to have Steve take it away. Jef left and created
| the Canon Cat, an opinionated computer that eschewed the
| WIMP interface in favour of anchoring n incremental
| search. Steve would also leave and create NeXT, and Canon
| would invest in NeXT as well.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > Steve would also leave and create NeXT
|
| More accurate to say that he was forced out. We (Mac
| nerds) were shocked when he came back. My father told me
| that I was super excited talking about his return, though
| I don't remember that. I do remember having a Mac Addict
| magazine with SJ portrayed as a priest on his return.
| Internet Archive ftw.[0]
|
| 0. https://ia601204.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderI
| mages....
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > when I'm traveling the Amalfi Coast in Italy, I want the
| Airbnb experience
|
| Unfortunately, Airbnb itself have turned into an IKEA
| showroom experience ...
| linkjuice4all wrote:
| For internal stuff you're absolutely correct - but using
| "main stream" design language (the current trend of rounded 3
| column AI layouts, corporate Memphis, skeuomorphism, stock
| photos of help desk workers, wordart, etc) that isn't unique
| makes your brand forgettable. Sure it was mind blowing when
| it first came out but it quickly loses its uniqueness and
| starts becoming a sign of
| crapiness/scaminess/enshitificarion.
|
| Your users will never make it to your no-nonsense backend if
| your marketing is completely cookie cutter.
| jakehop wrote:
| I get your point _and_ I do empathise with it.
|
| But that said, for a UX'er I believe there should be a bit of
| shame in just doing the obvious amalgam of whatever 2-3 most
| popular things that already exist.
|
| If you take on the UX lens, there's a lot of flaws in a lot
| of popular products, but they are accepted by the market
| because competition is not perfect. Copying that is not
| great, and I do think there is a point to be made on how
| "fine" shouldn't be the goal.
| makingstuffs wrote:
| Yeah I think the web is more a tool than anything else
| nowadays and it being homogeneous is a good thing.
|
| Think of roads. It's one of few things that humans have
| managed to agree on across the planet and there's a good
| reason for that. The system (regardless of which side you
| drive on) works. Signs, markings and materials are all pretty
| much identical wherever you go.
| aworks wrote:
| Hmm. The design of left turns on "stroads" seems to vary in
| the US. Mostly left-turn/U-turn lights in California, loop
| arounds in suburban Detroit, unprotected left turn lights
| in Kentucky, differs if the route is a national, state or
| local road etc.
|
| On the other hand, right turn on road now seems to be
| universal unless a sign prohibits it. And all states
| apparently enforce slowing down or moving to the adjacent
| lane for stopped emergency vehilces.
| sergiodlopes wrote:
| Yeah. It's kinda funny we read blog posts, or comments
| complaining about the lack of a good consistent UI and then,
| complain that on the web "everything is boring because it's
| homogenous".
|
| If people wanna have fun designing a cool, original website
| design, go for it. But if we need a fast, easy UI for someone
| that just needs get the job done, consistency/familiarity is
| obviously important.
| gdilla wrote:
| absolutely no shame, it's good engineering. it's not even
| about homogeneity, it's about recognizability and lowering
| cognitive load for your users who, let's face it, don't give
| a fuck about how hard you worked on the UI they just want to
| do what they need and return their attention to the 99% of
| stuff that is not-your-app. That's their normal.
| BorisMelnik wrote:
| you are absolutely right, standards are so important in web
| design esp when you take into consideration ppl with ADA
| needs, elderly people having a familiar env etc
| tcp_handshaker wrote:
| So this will turn out to be the most expensive web template
| business. Not really seeing how they expect to make money.
|
| I guess post IPO, after the insiders cash in out of lock period
| its irrelevant.
| ljm wrote:
| It's a legitimate boon for throwing together little internal
| apps, mind.
|
| I can slap something together with Claude over a few evenings
| to fill a gap on tooling, or I can wrestle with Jira and CI
| and all that to tie things together with their own
| integrations.
|
| No thanks, I'll just take the API keys and build on top, to
| my exact specifications, and the interface will be passable
| even if it needs a lot of polish. Tailwind has worked wonders
| for that.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Previously you'd buy an admin template from ThemeForest for
| $10, slap your logo on it and and be done.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Thank you for saying this.
|
| I hear it all the time in the recent two years: web
| development is apparently dead now, because anyone can just
| slap together a web site or build a dashboard in minutes etc.
| because of LLMs.
|
| But that has been true for decades: Templates, component
| libraries and so on.
|
| But I guess it's now easier to adjust them if you're not
| familiar with their configuration or something.
| adriand wrote:
| There are still SO MANY insanely ugly, hard-to-use, absolutely
| horrible apps out there though. Sure, in consumer-focused apps,
| there's a lot of competition and pretty much everything popular
| is well-designed. But in enterprise? My god, it's still a
| massive shitshow.
|
| The hilarious thing is that I would be willing to bet than in a
| decade, it's STILL a massive shitshow in enterprise. That's
| because the problem with enterprise software is not that good
| design is all that difficult to pull off (it just requires
| caring!) It's that the people making enterprise software have
| terrible taste and can't even see (I am convinced) that the
| thing they built is ugly and hard-to-use.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > It's that the people making enterprise software have
| terrible taste and can't even see (I am convinced) that the
| thing they built is ugly and hard-to-use.
|
| Generally the issue with enterprise is that its designed to
| appeal to the stakeholders who will make the purchasing
| decision, not the person who is actually going to use it. The
| people making it may have great taste and know damn well what
| they could do to make it more usable, but if a clean and easy
| tool doesn't match someone's preconceived notion of what the
| purchaser thinks the tool ought to look like then it's not
| going to fly.
| codegeek wrote:
| "Twitter Bootstrap". Havent heard that term for years. The OG
| of CSS frameworks.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Most companies I've worked at still use bootstrap or
| something that looks very much like it for most internal web
| tools
| rustystump wrote:
| I am not so sure. I lean towards client work on
| desktop/mobile/web and while the initial output is workable as
| new requirements come in it starts to fall apart largely
| because the vibe coder doesn't understand design basics. It is
| one of those you dont know what you dont know and not that ai
| cannot write workable css or w/e.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _You 'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing
| truly unique or mind-blowing._
|
| Which is _exactly_ what I want. Do you have any idea how hard
| it is to get a competent UI?
|
| Why do people celebrate consistency and uniformity in desktop
| apps, wanting to crucify developers for not following platform
| idioms and guidelines... and then suddenly want things that are
| "truly unique" or "mind-blowing" or "artisanal weirdness" when
| it comes to a web app?
|
| A competent UI with little effort is a _godsend_.
| allan_s wrote:
| Are these ugly and hard to use website made by people who did
| want to be unique ?
| carimura wrote:
| Music isn't really new either it's just recombining riffs
| already created. But the recombinations create new experiences.
| Might be the same with design?
| ljm wrote:
| AI can already generate music and it stands out a mile both
| in terms of the lyrical content and how middle of the road it
| all is. People will create some slop on Suno and lip-sync to
| it on TikTok because they absolutely don't sound like a
| thousand country singers blended into one.
|
| So it's competent, for sure, but that is damning it with
| faint praise.
| est wrote:
| > how homogenous the internet has become in terms of design
|
| I think it's because Steve Jobs killed Flash.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing
| truly unique or mind-blowing.
|
| 90+% of attempts at making a truly unique or mind-blowing UI
| produce a mind-blowingly bad UI. For 0.5 seconds of wow factor,
| you've added substantial unnecessary friction. Outside of art
| projects where that wow factor is the point, it really should
| not be attempted, most certainly not by someone without the
| appropriate skillset.
|
| The old skool artisanal weirdness was not a purposeful
| stylistic choice, it was a bunch of people trying to do the
| best they could with crappy tools. There may be some je ne sais
| quoi which is lost with the shift to mass adoption, but the
| reason for the mass adoption of these particular design trends
| was that they were objectively superior.
| alberto467 wrote:
| I agree, only the very best designs (and their designers) can
| nicely mix utility and beauty (or the wow factor, it's hard
| to define).
|
| And people sometimes overestimate their designs because
| beauty is subjective, and because all children are beautiful
| in the eyes of their parent.
|
| Also, there's a reason why the mass adopted plastic,
| monobloc, stackable chair design is worldwide common and is
| studied as a cornerstone of design.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| The core principles of interface design (even graphic
| design to a slightly lesser extent) have _nothing to do
| with aesthetics._ People, mostly developers, dick around
| with an interface's aesthetics until they get something
| that looks cool... but the design still sucks because they
| didn't do the actual design parts-- knowing exactly what
| the design communicates to the user about program state,
| available actions, etc etc etc just through things like
| information hierarchy, gestalt, visual patterns, focus
| through visual composition, and things like that. Things
| that are well-designed are easy to make look cool because
| they're sane, organized, and have subconscious meaning to
| the user. A good interface designer will spend as much time
| on aesthetics as a chef spends on plating. It's a nice
| bonus, but you can have beautifully plated food that sucks,
| or horrific-looking food that's phenomenal. I do the
| world's biggest facepalm when I see projects doing things
| like adding customizable color themes in response to people
| saying their UX sucks.
| debesyla wrote:
| But friction can be good, because it makes your offer stand
| out.
|
| Like haggling in the local market, or trying to "catch" that
| successful/awesome person that has limited availability.
|
| Friction makes stuff feel valuable. Of course, not absurdly
| confusing, but just a bit.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Homogenous design is a good thing. The internet isn't nearly
| homogeneous enough actually. The mid-90s desktop apps got it
| right and we've been regressing ever since then because web
| designers are like kids with crayons.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| The early web was filled with wacky and unique websites and
| it's a ubiquitously loved period of the internet.
| voidfunc wrote:
| The web was, the desktop... less so. Not until the late
| 90's when stuff started to get wacky.
| Bridged7756 wrote:
| UI Design is an art. Like any other art, it's bound to have
| constant currents and counter currents. More than the
| designer's whims, it's the population's need for novelty,
| generational differences, and the desire of companies to
| stand out what is driving the wheel.
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| This take is the death of joy.
|
| Look up in an old city, look at the facades of the buildings.
| They have quirks, uniqueness, it makes the city almost a
| living thing. Every time we shave off another edge we lose
| that. Nevermind the fact that shoehorning _everything_ into
| the same patterns is actually an antipattern and very good
| paradigms have been invented after the 90s.
|
| It's not perfect, but I'd rather have a bit of a mess than
| boring emptiness.
| skydhash wrote:
| Facade are to be looked at, not to be used. Most things
| that are to be used in a practical manner has retained the
| same basic form: desks, chair, handle, cart, cup,...
| debesyla wrote:
| Dunno, I have been in IKEA and saw 50 types of drawer
| handles, for example :)
|
| (Same for car interior design, or things like even doors
| that some swivels on one axis, some split on multiple,
| some slide.)
|
| I don't think that us humans really actually like/want
| standarts. We think we do, but there are 100+1+1 standart
| from which to choose. So Claude becoming "standart" is
| just +1 standart to choose from. Unique is fun!
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Did you try asking Claude Design to generate a complex UI with
| lots of custom details?
|
| Or "2000s aesthetic" for something before Web 2.0 (although
| you'll get a generic 2000s aesthetic unless you provide more
| detail).
| afavour wrote:
| That's _good_ design though. Users want consistency. Truly
| unique design is awesome but it belongs with experiential
| stuff, not a CRUD app.
|
| You might just as well bemoan the homogeneity of Windows 95
| apps. All those gray buttons in the bottom right of windows.
| snek_case wrote:
| Sort of. At the moment there is a fad of websites that mess
| with your scrolling and have very low content density. They
| are all trying to imitate Apple's marketing pages. Most
| startup websites do this. It's not at all good design, it's
| user-hostile, but it's trendy and popular right now.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| Nothing screams old school more than 98.css
| https://jdan.github.io/98.css/
| dayvid wrote:
| Twitter Bootstrap did more to elevate design on the web than
| reduce artisinal quality. Most of it was bad and definitely not
| ADA/other compliant
| nunodonato wrote:
| > Impressive technology, but that old skool artisanal weirdness
| of yore only becomes more valuable and nostalgic.
|
| but does it still exists? Even without AI everyone is
| utilizating the same css frameworks, same libraries and
| templates... design is pretty much boring these days. CSS Zen
| Garden anyone?
| gfat wrote:
| The small web still has a unique soul to it. dimden.dev is a
| good example.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| >but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing.
|
| This is most every corporate website.
| p_stuart82 wrote:
| IMO it doesn't flatten design into one thing. it splits it.
| cheap obvious work at scale, and a way smaller premium tier for
| real authorship. the middle is what actually gets crushed.
| wek wrote:
| this is true of AI in general
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Everyone else is already pointing out how competent over unique
| is purely a positive, so I want to criticize the other implicit
| assumption here.
|
| This comment is just a rehash of the increasingly outdated and
| incorrect assertion that LLMs can't possibly exhibit any
| creativity -- and it's also incorrect.
|
| If you're yearning for "old skool artisanal weirdness of yore",
| look up the trend on Twitter a month or two ago of people
| asking Claude to make YTPs. They ended up very weird and
| artisanal in a way distinct from how any human would do it.
| juleiie wrote:
| You know where this is all going ?
|
| In a direction where the AI model basically serves you
| everything live. No sites, no front end, just databases and
| model embodying them.
|
| I mean why even code anything in the future where it is cheap
| and fast enough to just come up with everything each time based
| on each user need.
|
| I am not saying it's good but it's lazy. And if one thing is
| for certain is that laziness prevails. Some even mistake it for
| progress.
|
| But then, is human programming language really the most optimal
| way for an ai to steer the silicon? Some kind of bare AI OS
| with kernel, drivers and there in the middle a fat specialised
| asic ai chip to orchestrate everything.
| codingrightnow wrote:
| I think that's where everything is headed.
| avaer wrote:
| > You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing
| truly unique or mind-blowing.
|
| The shelf-life of unique and mindblowing has reduced to a week
| (being generous) before it's copied by slop artists looking for
| a resume booster or funding, and months tops before it's part
| of training data for everyone. Unless you find it in that small
| time window everything will seem homogenous.
|
| It could just be a systemic result; unless you deliberately
| take the lonely road to parts of the internet where other
| people aren't, you will not see unique and mind blowing things.
| Which by definition you can't source from a place that has a
| lot of users, like social media or popular forums.
| dweekly wrote:
| Having just checked my child in for their doctor appointment,
| 90% of web software would be dramatically improved by using
| very boring best practices and readable and accessible web
| practices.
| josefrichter wrote:
| Design is primarily craft, not art. The designers who believe
| they're artists are often dangerous and toxic, coz they feel
| the urge to inject their "art" into everything they touch. I
| say that as a professional designer.
| evbogue wrote:
| Twitter Bootstrap 2 was the height of web design. If we can go
| back and stay there forever why should anyone fault our
| society.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| > since the glass effect and drop-shadows took over
|
| And rounded corners, of course! :)
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| I know what you mean.. and me as traditional none designer have
| been using bootstrap css since the start. As usually my css
| would look like an engineer trying toso design.
|
| When you say old school artisnal design and weirdness do you
| mean something like this: (shameless plug, but relevant to
| design)
|
| https://swellslots.com (surf forecast site)
|
| The design for this was literally "90s Arcade / street fighter
| 2 look"
|
| Funny enough without AI, i would not have been skilled enough
| to make the graphics (background, logo etc)
| jfoster wrote:
| > ... because of how homogenous the internet has become...
|
| Designs have been settling on a local maxima. If you are aware
| of a better hill to be climbed, please do let everyone know.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| You say homogenous as if it's a bad thing. I look at proper
| desktop app ecosystems, and wish the web didn't try to reinvent
| everything all the time.
|
| It's 2026 and every web application has a different menu
| layout, date picker, etc.
| dilberx wrote:
| but other llm's won't even give good design at all. For low
| effort automated design, being homogenous is not bad right?
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| Now do AI art and music. I think a lot of the same applies
| there.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Screen size is probably responsible for a vast majority of the
| homogeneous of the internet; but that a good thing. The space
| has matured and horrible experiences fewer. There's a fine line
| between creativity and bullshit. Less bullshitting is a good
| thing.
|
| p.s. Perhaps "quirky" is less because it's simply not
| fulfilling? Too often it's visual gaslighting pretending to be
| design?
| michaelteter wrote:
| Most day to day apps and websites should be boring and usable,
| not truly unique or mind-blowing.
|
| In fact, humans waste countless hours trying to figure out what
| is what and how things work, just because there's always some
| designer trying to do something nifty. And by "designer", I
| don't necessarily mean professionally trained designer -
| although the pros can be given to trying to make artistic
| rather than functional interfaces.
| atonse wrote:
| I've been spending the last two days building a large number of
| mockups for a new product. Literally the last two days.
|
| I'm wondering how i can CONTINUE that in this design thing, can i
| import something? Because they show it the other way... you can
| start and edit, and then export to claude code.
|
| Until then, I guess it's back to just using CC
| coder543 wrote:
| From the page:
|
| > Import from anywhere. Start from a text prompt, upload images
| and documents (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX), or point Claude at your
| codebase. You can also use the web capture tool to grab
| elements directly from your website so prototypes look like the
| real product.
| atonse wrote:
| Thank you, I should RTFA next time.
| jmkni wrote:
| Unfortunate that linking code from your computer doesn't work
| with Firefox
|
| Very interesting though
| ossa-ma wrote:
| The more I think about it the more this isn't good for design
| [EDIT], for a few reasons:
|
| - The best design is original, groundbreaking and often
| counterintuitive. An AI model is incapable of that, it's
| uninspired, it will absolutely converge to the norm and
| homogeneity (you see it everywhere now, just scroll on ShowHN and
| take a look at the UIs) and produce the safest design that
| appeals to its understanding of the ideal user.
|
| - Good designers will reject this, they prefer to be hands-on and
| draw from multiple sources of inspiration which is what Figma
| boards and Canva is good for, also mainly for cross-
| collaboration. If you've seen how quickly a great design engineer
| can prototype you'll know that "speed" they advertise in this
| video is not worth the tradeoff.
|
| - Creatives typically have a very very very high aversion to AI.
|
| - Non-designers will not see a purpose for this tool, basic
| design can already be done through Claude Code and Claude.ai, I
| fail to see what this could offer unless they leverage a model
| that is more creative and unique by default (you can not
| prompt/context/harness engineer creativity believe me I've
| tried).
|
| - Design is a lot more than just UI. Tools like this ignore so
| many other important aspects like: motion, typography, images,
| weight, whitespace, sound, feel.
| gpt5 wrote:
| > The best design is original, groundbreaking and often
| counterintuitive
|
| Designing a user inteface involves thousands of small
| decisions. When trading off pros/cons for each of these
| decisions, in 99% of the cases, the right answer is 'optimize
| familiarity.
|
| That's why Android and iOS look the same, and why the small
| differences between them are where contention happen.
|
| If you adopt existing patterns, your users would be instantly
| familiar with your app, and the design will not get in their
| way.
| ossa-ma wrote:
| You're arguing for familiarity in tactful design, while I
| agree that for most users this is a good thing, repeatability
| of existing patterns does create that immediate familiarity.
|
| HOWEVER, that familiarity is only a virtue because someone,
| once, deviated hard enough that their deviation became the
| new familiar. AI can only optimise toward the current
| snapshot of "familiar". It cannot produce the next one. If
| designers outsource all their thinking to a model even in
| tactful design we would never have groundbreaking design
| concepts like "pull to refresh" or the command palette.
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| > someone, once, deviated hard enough that their deviation
| became the new familiar
|
| That's not necessarily what happened though. Apple
| innovated not out of sheer daring but because they also had
| the best metaphysical paradigm for GUIs that people could
| also just intuitively grasp. There was a structural
| correctness to their approach, underlying all the things
| that we find visually appealing. In the beginning, Google
| dared and deviated hard from Apple's design language to
| establish their own unique identity, but anyone who's
| working in the mobile space would Have noticed that Android
| coalesced into roughly the same patterns over time because
| of that structural correctness.
| qkeast wrote:
| >Designing a user inteface involves thousands of small
| decisions. When trading off pros/cons for each of these
| decisions...
|
| Which needs to be done intentionally in context, not
| homogeneously as a rapid output of a generative tool.
| whatever1616 wrote:
| When you aim for familiarity you also make the assumption
| that someone else's judgement and opinion was and is the
| correct one, when you question the assumed only then can you
| make meaningful improvements. See the iphone which was
| totally different to the "standard" phones of its time.
| Oras wrote:
| Data suggest different outcomes, there was always a way to
| standardise interfaces, from Twitter bootstrap, all the way to
| shadcn.
|
| Not everyone is looking for unique design, 70% of the web is
| still using Wordpress. I would say majority prefer familiarity
| and appreciate uniqueness.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _Not everyone is looking for unique design, 70% of the web
| is still using Wordpress. I would say majority prefer
| familiarity and appreciate uniqueness._
|
| Most people using WordPress customise it with many of the
| thousands of plugins available though, and those plugins
| create menu items everywhere.
| toomim wrote:
| "An AI model is incapable of that."
|
| "Good designers will reject this."
|
| ^ Famous last words.
| ossa-ma wrote:
| I will stand by the first point unless models start being
| trained with different objectives instead of RLHF's three
| objectives: Helpfulness, Harmlessness and Instruction-
| following
|
| I will very likely be wrong on the second point.
| Sir_Twist wrote:
| I could see there being an 80/20-style argument for this sort
| of tool being used for more generic usecases, with "good
| designers" using Figma et al. for programs where the UI
| itself is a selling point.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Web design / digital design is a dying field as businesses will
| start paying one person who does 3 to 4 roles (PM, UX Research,
| Design and UI Development - tho why use a design tool for web
| stuff when AI tools generate designs in code), as well now tons
| of ppl can do this work using AI tools. Further, is the future
| of digital experiences user interfaces aka the web or will
| there be an AI Phone where everything is done / seen on the
| lock screen (AI generates the visuals as you text or talk to
| it) and or its more of a text and voice digital experience less
| UI.
|
| Overall after being laid off in January and a 17 year UX
| Research/Design/Dev career Im starting school in my early 50s
| to change careers.
| Uncorrelated wrote:
| What career are you aiming to switch to?
| itsevrgrn wrote:
| i'm also curious what you're switching to
| whatever1616 wrote:
| >AI Phone where everything is done / seen on the lock screen
| (AI generates the visuals as you text or talk to it) and or
| its more of a text and voice digital experience less UI.
|
| I think more expressive UIs are the future but i disagree
| with this sort of thing being accomplished with a non
| deterministic tool such as AI generating UIs, you are
| throwing stability and consistency along with familiarity out
| the window.
|
| The idea of tools being almost UI-less and composable and
| modular has been a "dream" since xerox parc or see for
| example the book "the humane interface" which happens to also
| ahead of its time outline reasons why such generative
| interfaces would be a bad idea especially at such a large
| scale.
|
| AI can potentially relieve some friction with that paradigm
| but definitely not in that way or even that extent.
| ctoth wrote:
| I noticed in your list that you didn't mention accessibility. I
| would personally rather have an accessible design than one
| which is "original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive."
| and here we are.
| ossa-ma wrote:
| I should have mentioned accessibility. It supports my
| argument more than yours. Accessibility like captions, voice,
| keyboard nav, dark mode are all a deviation from the norm by
| a minority (something AI is completely incapable of doing)
| and a fight against familiarity which now serves as a great
| benefit to the majority.
| ctoth wrote:
| This ... This is simply not true. I use a screen reader. I
| am using it right now. I can confirm that AI-generated
| code, by default, is far, far more accessible, cares far
| more about keyboard nav, about DOM order, about using the
| right semantic HTML, about the things that I care about
| than your average human-designed slop.
|
| And no, it doesn't just add ARIA to everything as is so
| typical by poor practitioners.
| ossa-ma wrote:
| I think we're arguing two different points. You're
| arguing about implementation, AI is great at this given
| the existing defaults and the right prompting. AI was
| trained on 30+ years of accessibility standards that a
| minority of great humans fought to establish as a
| familiar practice.
|
| I'm arguing about invention. It is extremely unlikely
| that AI will be the one to invent the next accessibility
| paradigm, because that requires deviating from the
| training distribution, which it CAN'T DO.
|
| I'm also arguing that this homogeneity in design will
| lead to an atrophy in inventive, unique and original
| thinking.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| _It is extremely unlikely that AI will be the one to
| invent the next accessibility paradigm, because that
| requires deviating from the training distribution, which
| it CAN 'T DO._
|
| What is it about our own architecture that lets us
| innovate beyond our training distribution?
| jayd16 wrote:
| You could have said the same thing about powerpoint vs high
| quality marketing departments. The "pros don't want this"
| argument doesn't really hold weight.
|
| This is for non-designers to crank out slop with less effort.
| They can still be swayed by all the shiny knobs to feel in
| control.
| vehemenz wrote:
| What do you mean by "slop?" This word is thrown around a lot
| for relatively competent outputs. It's not 2023 anymore.
| recitedropper wrote:
| Plus: So much of excellent user interface design is done
| through iterating on feedback from live humans testing it with
| their human sensory system.
|
| Until we have embodied AI's with eyes and hands that provide
| good enough approximations, the aspect of design bottlenecked
| on human experience will stay bottlenecked.
| cjf101 wrote:
| I hate to hand anything to Generative AI tools, but
|
| While Great design breaks the mould, Very Good design is about
| surfacing the most expected outcomes for any action which
| reduces friction and lets people get work done. And this
| generation of Generative tools is very good at identifying the
| most common/most expected response to a prompt.
| sobellian wrote:
| IMO AI will make plain the divergence between "good design" and
| what people actually want. You're absolutely right that from an
| artistic perspective, it will produce the heat death of UI. I
| just struggle to think if teams building will actually _care_.
| Boring but polished is completely fine for SaaS.
| dayvid wrote:
| This is a great bridge between non-designers with taste and
| designers who can't fully technically implement their solutions
| (or want to more rapidly prototype their solutions). Well done
| AI implementation is like cosmetic surgery. The trashiest
| implementations you can tell immediately and the more tasteful
| ones are subtle
| Lihh27 wrote:
| > The best design is original, groundbreaking and often
| counterintuitive
|
| most of those "breakthroughs" were just constraint hacks. no
| room for a reload button. no room for another menu.
|
| enterprise buyers don't pay for counterintuitive. they pay so
| the new hire finds save without training.
| monooso wrote:
| > Good designers will reject this...
|
| I have no idea how everything will play out, but this sounds a
| lot like the people saying "good programmers will reject this"
| six months ago.
|
| Quite apart from anything else, it ignores the fact that--
| particularly within large organisations--designers (and
| programmers) frequently have very little say in the matter.
| colonelspace wrote:
| > The best design is original, groundbreaking and often
| counterintuitive.
|
| If you want to talk in absolutes, I'd say the best design is
| the one that results in the desired behaviour of your audience.
| pixel_popping wrote:
| why would an AI model not capable of doing something unique?
| That's literally false.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Why is everyone hell bent on AI replacing the "best" designers
| or writers or coders?
|
| Even the most deluded AI bulls don't say that AI is even meant
| to replace the best that humanity has to offer
| SwellJoe wrote:
| If you want to be creative, you should make art. I love art. I
| think it's a great idea for people to make art.
|
| If you want to make a GUI, it should be familiar. Extremely
| familiar. It shouldn't invent new ways to interact most of the
| time.
|
| It is well-known that "intuitive" in UX almost always means
| "what I'm used to". If you're regularly "innovating" in UI
| design, you may be making the product harder to use, maybe much
| harder to use.
|
| It certainly isn't unheard of for new ways to interact with
| computers to be better than the old, but they are usually tied
| to new physical aspects of our tools: Touchscreens needed new
| ways to interact, and maybe there's still some room for
| creativity there, but not much. The mouse obviously required
| innovative ideas for several years. But, also, the odds of your
| wacky new idea being the right way to change how people
| interact with computers are pretty low, unless you're working
| at FAANG and have a UX research team and budget to test it.
|
| You can get creative in how it looks, but you cannot get
| creative in how it _works_.
| docmars wrote:
| I agree somewhat, there's a common language for building
| products that most people understand and expect.
|
| Innovation comes from the ways people differentiate, without
| straying too far from the tried-and-true patterns. It's the
| tiny decisions that situate UI elements and yes, reinvent the
| wheel sometimes, that can tip users over to whatever you're
| building because you did it better, or in a way "most" (the
| average) never thought of.
|
| If people aren't creative in how it works, then really
| they're all just making the same, boring products, without
| truly competing against anyone in a meaningful way in the
| problem space. Visual appeal isn't a sole differentiator.
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| > The best design is original, groundbreaking and often
| counterintuitive.
|
| You're talking about art, not design.
| azan_ wrote:
| > The best design is original, groundbreaking and often
| counterintuitive.
|
| I guess that kind of thinking got us liquid glass - which
| everyone hates.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _I guess that kind of thinking got us liquid glass - which
| everyone hates._
|
| Except, ironically enough, enough people involved with both
| macOS and iOS at Apple _didn 't hate it enough_ -- until it
| made it to launch.
|
| Either there's a massive hierarchy issue there, or Apple is
| starting to suffer from groupthink that negatively affects a
| lot of their customers' experiences.
| raincole wrote:
| > The best design is original, groundbreaking and often
| counterintuitive.
|
| Jeez I hope fewer designers think like this (and if it's a
| traditional wisdom among designers, I hope fewer designers in
| general.) Perhaps web apps will stop moving their icons and
| buttons around every six months.
| hudo wrote:
| 404 Page not found when clicking on their link
| https://claude.ai/design at the end of the article! Vibe coding
| to prod, gone wrong?
| anonfunction wrote:
| Fourth thing in a row they've announced that I wanted to try
| and couldn't.
|
| Previous comment with the prior 3:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47794419
| baal80spam wrote:
| Perfect, that's CC design for you :-)
| alpb wrote:
| It's rolling out progressively throughout the day.
| mpeg wrote:
| It's rolling out progressively, it works for me - it actually
| seems very polished, the examples are really good; and it lets
| you create your design system from your codebase
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| It's working now, try it again.
| anonfunction wrote:
| Start designing at claude.ai/design.
|
| That link is redirecting me to https://claude.ai/404, anyone
| else?
| addandsubtract wrote:
| It works for me. Check again?
| ngoquocdat wrote:
| Have same issue, it redirect to
| https://claude.ai/login?returnTo=%2Fdesign then back and
| redirect to https://claude.ai/login?returnTo=%2Fdesign again,
| looping...
| jansan wrote:
| Well, after having high expectations from watching the intro the
| actual result of a simple prompt "Bear on a bicycle" is very
| underwhelming.
|
| Maybe AI is not good at everything, yet.
| firefoxd wrote:
| I've been using stich from Gemini, and just plain zAi for helping
| redesign my website. You can use the generated code to copy and
| paste the design to fit your own templates, but that's a pain.
| Unless you are ok with using tailwind and the dozen or so classes
| on every element and don't want to edit anything.
|
| What I found valuable is the design.md that was produced. It's a
| guide for building each component. So using these tools becomes
| akin to PSD to html we used do. At least that's when I find them
| most effective.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| And another step toward a world, where product
| managers/owners/whatever and other boring people can generate
| what they once needed creative, passionate and skilled people
| for. Go ahead, its just the natural evolution of extreme
| capitalism.
| ramathornn wrote:
| It's funny seeing the Co-founder of Canva commending the product.
| Yikes!
|
| This app is pretty slick, this will funnel a huge number of
| customers away from Figma + Canva imo.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| you missed that there's an export to canva button. It will
| funnel users _to_ Canva.
| ramathornn wrote:
| Why would they need to back to Canva? If teams are working
| within claude already I think they will just offboard
| canva/figma tasks into claude.
| ativzzz wrote:
| Non designers will vibe-design a prototype with claude,
| export it to canva and let the designers finish it up
|
| If code doesn't go this direction soon, I'd be surprised.
| PM builds a prototype with claude, or designer designs
| something in figma/canva - claude vibe codes 70% of the
| solution using your company's frameworks and design system,
| then hands it off to the developer who finishes it and
| productionizes it
| addandsubtract wrote:
| Developers (and designers) need to be involved in the
| prompting phase. Handing off half-assed designs and code
| is just a recipe for disaster.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| This is like claiming that Claude Code will siphon users
| away from their editors.
|
| Just like with code, AI will give you something to start
| with, but it's still going to require tweaking and manual
| input.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| When Anthropic's CPO left Figma's board this week, that was my
| first question . Oof.
| SpyCoder77 wrote:
| Yeah, I saw that too
| https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/anthropic-cpo-leaves-figma...
| GenerWork wrote:
| If you look at Figmas stock price, it started falling right at 11
| AM as this news was released.
|
| Anyways, this is 100% a shot at Figma, but also catching Lovable
| in the crossfire. If anybody from Anthropic is reading this, if
| you keep developing this with features in Figma and other design
| tools, you'll have a major hit on your hands.
| ex-aws-dude wrote:
| Isn't this something Figma could easily integrate? Then you'd
| have the best of both worlds
| GenerWork wrote:
| You already can use Claude Code with Figma. This is looking
| more like a Figma competitor than just Claude Code.
| luckylion wrote:
| figma has figma make to do these things, and it's much worse.
| It can only generate react code, even if you ask it not to.
| claude design worked great on the first attempt for me, miles
| ahead of what figma make does.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| The folks at Wall Street do not understand this does not
| replace Figma.
|
| Figma is targeted towards designers who create thoughtful
| design systems and cohesive UIs and who don't code, while this
| is targeted towards vibe coders who can't design. Two different
| circles that intersect to some level.
|
| But like you said, if anthropic adds the tools in Figma, only
| then they can can take customers from Figma IMO.
| atonse wrote:
| Tools like Figma are for an era (and persona) who still wants
| to have all the various knobs and dials to dial in exactly
| what they want. And that is one way of working if, like you
| said people are trying to be more thoughtful and know exactly
| what they want.
|
| But for the other 95% of people, being able to just say "ok
| can you make it look more modern" and have 4 variants in 5
| mins, (like me) Figma will lose users like me.
|
| But then again I was never a "designer" - more a builder.
| simplyluke wrote:
| I'm much closer to your persona than a professional
| designer. 5 years ago if I was going to spin up a landing
| page for a side project I was probably getting something
| mediocre together with bootstrap or material UI. Today I'd
| probably get something marginally better together with a
| tool like this. In both scenarios I'd end up with an
| undifferentiated but acceptable end state.
|
| I've never paid for a figma seat. A couple of employers
| have so that I can collaborate with designers in the
| product, but I don't think this changes that.
|
| In an era where it's _cheaper_ and more common to end up at
| that undifferentiated state, the ability for companies to
| make their products go above and beyond it is _more_
| valuable, not less.
|
| I see this across the board with AI. It lowers the bar to
| get to passable, but as slop fills the internet we're
| already seeing people place _more_ value in good products,
| good writing, good art, thoughtful code architecture, etc.
| Everyone and their cousin 's uber driver is vibe coding a
| SaaS startup no one's going to pay for right now.
| prescriptivist wrote:
| > good writing, good art, thoughtful code architecture
|
| If you are talking about a consumer product, one of these
| is not like the others.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > Tools like Figma are for an era (and persona) who still
| wants to have all the various knobs and dials to dial in
| exactly what they want
|
| The Anthropic video on that page at 0:53 literally shows
| them clicking a "knobs" button and adjusting the pixel CSS
| value.
|
| I know it's not exactly the same ... but it has that
| functionality to a degree.
| consumer451 wrote:
| > But then again I was never a "designer" - more a builder.
|
| Same here. I work in Claude Code all day long on slightly
| complex b2b apps, and the builder MVP for what I want to do
| with Claude.ai, to work on ideas is far simpler.
|
| I just want to be able to create a React artifact prototype
| on claude.ai, then share it privately with a stakeholder
| (internal or external.) I want to allow those users to
| prompt changes, then see their changes in the artifact.
|
| The bespoke design is not what I am really worried about at
| this phase. For b2b prototype stuff, claude.ai already does
| an excellent job with just a bit of project-specific
| prompting.
|
| Why is this shared artifact building not yet doable? This
| seems "so simple." Yes, maybe some shared artifact specific
| git to allow version control is required, but is my ask
| really that hard, or unique?
| ziml77 wrote:
| I think they understand that the people running businesses
| are going to look at this vs a human who uses Figma and
| realize how much more cost and time efficient it is to pay
| for a machine than a human.
| qkeast wrote:
| >Figma is targeted towards designers who create thoughtful
| design systems and cohesive UIs and who don't code, while
| this is targeted towards vibe coders who can't design. Two
| different circles that intersect to some level.
|
| The challenge is that this sets an expectation of what
| "design" is, de-valuing the former and shifting us culturally
| towards the latter and a space where "design" is seen as a
| subjective visual exercise with little intrinsic value.
| jug wrote:
| I think there's a parallel here in advertising and what AI
| has done there. It's clearly used nowadays, a seasoned user
| can probably spot it straight away even if it gets harder
| over time. Still, it's deemed "good enough". The savings
| versus having a team and shooting on location etc. can be
| enormous. Even before this launch, I see it on the web.
| It's already happening.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| Just last week, I asked the designer on my team to try
| working in Codex instead of Figma. It's just not a great
| workflow to pass a figma file to a developer to implement.
| She hasn't wanted to go back yet...
| xnx wrote:
| > Figma is targeted towards designers who create thoughtful
| design systems
|
| How many such people does the world need? Probably less than
| 1,000. Not a very big market for Figma.
| 0gs wrote:
| how do you define "need?" by my estimation, there are more
| than 1000 software products in the world, so i do not think
| 1000 is anywhere near enough.
| motoxpro wrote:
| Thats like saying Claude Code is targeted at coders who cant
| code (which I know some poeple believe)
| alvah wrote:
| Isn't it, at least partially?
| islewis wrote:
| > Figma is targeted towards designers who create thoughtful
| design systems and cohesive UIs and who don't code, while
| this is targeted towards vibe coders who can't design. Two
| different circles that intersect to some level.
|
| this overlap has been widening incredibly quickly. lots of
| designers are now writing code with the help of cursor,
| claude code, etc.
|
| even if you believe "real designers" wont ever use this
| product, it's not hard to see how a low barrier-of-entry tool
| could affect Figams bottom line. slowing down Figma's
| adoption from the new wave of entry-level designers who dont
| already have muscle memory would not at all surprise me at
| all.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Will the designers vibe code coders out of a job before
| coders vibe design designers out if a job?
| bdangubic wrote:
| Claude with "out of a job" coders and designers and
| carpenters and plumbers... :)
| aurareturn wrote:
| Maybe Figma is better for large teams. Even here, teams are
| getting smaller and smaller.
|
| But for me, I will never use it again.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| All Figma has spent the last 2 years doing is trying to get
| designers to use their Cursor/Claude Code text to code app.
|
| Not convinced Figma cares about traditional design craft
| anymore.
| aniceperson wrote:
| Figma was never needed. they were useful when enterprises
| allowed people with no coding experience to mandate how ui
| should look. It is the powerpoint of dumb people that
| wanted a career in tech. happy to see it dying.
| docmars wrote:
| Hard disagree. There's more to UX than pushing pixels
| around. Usability, accessibility, and capturing the
| broader customer experience at 40,000 ft isn't a trivial
| process when you're designing a large product (or suite
| of products) especially.
|
| These areas obviously tie into engineering very closely,
| but the thinking that goes into them happens at the
| design stage, at a lower cost than starting with
| engineering. AI models suck at getting every facet of
| this process right, because designers are achieving a
| balance between branding, usability, standards, taste,
| and differentiation -- the exact opposite of a model
| trained to reach for the most average outputs.
| docmars wrote:
| I'm not sure they don't care anymore, as much as they
| experienced the same pressure every company faced when AI
| went mainstream.
|
| Had they not included support for it, where would they be
| now? I'd wager a critical mass would be screeching to High
| Heaven for integrations, seeing as a Figma document is
| effectively a config file that can be translated to real
| code.
| gck1 wrote:
| My SO is a UX designer and uses Figma. She wanted to try
| out Claude integration there, but was frustrated by
| limitations - like why she can't export interactive
| elements to Figma file format so that they can be edited
| further.
|
| So I helped her look into it and I was shocked to find out
| that it just a react slop generator, not a Figma file
| generator. And extremely limited at that, too.
|
| Who is Figma targeting with this exactly? Developers, who
| are interested in react apps will simply use claude code,
| and UX designers don't really care for react apps.
| 3sdfs wrote:
| Nevertheless, Dylan has done a bad job in communicating stuff
| about Figma to the stock market and why it won't get toppled.
|
| He should probably go and let someone else take the reigns.
| eric_cc wrote:
| > does not replace Figma
|
| Not entirely but I would use this and not Figma. I am
| passionate about system design not visual design so I don't
| want to waste time in figma.
| RigelKentaurus wrote:
| Why can't it replace Figma? Seems like Figma is a thin UI
| layer on top of Claude Design.
| aloknnikhil wrote:
| You could have stopped at
|
| > The folks at Wall Street do not understand
| docmars wrote:
| I think the target market for this is small businesses
| wanting to throw together quick concepts without needing to
| hire a contractor necessarily. This smells more like
| Squarespace and what they did for brochure websites /
| portfolios than anything else, but perhaps more general
| purpose.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _this does not replace Figma_
|
| It probably reduces the tasks which customers might engage an
| agency using Figma, though. Down the line, creeping onto
| Figma's turf absolutely becomes a strategy for Anthropic.
| fleeting900 wrote:
| Design systems are a means to an end. They're as much about
| enabling delivery without requiring a designer to design
| every feature from scratch each time as they are about
| ensuring cohesive overall design. I can see this being a
| viable alternative path to the first if you're happy with a
| slight hit to the second.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Tailwind is for those who could code but can't design.
|
| Figma is for those who could design but can't code.
|
| This is for those who could neither design nor code.
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| This take might have sounded convincing a year ago. Now it
| just sounds foolish. The best coders on the planet are
| using AI. Why wouldn't they use this?
| democracy wrote:
| "Use AI" sounds like "programmers use a machine that can
| be programmed to automatically carry out sequences of
| arithmetic or logical operations" - without the details
| or context how they use it, what tools and for what tasks
| - doesn't mean anything and also sounds foolish, sorry.
| gls2ro wrote:
| Tailwind has nothing to do with being able to design.
|
| Tailwind is an abstraction on top of CSS and you can create
| with it whatever website you want (almost).
|
| I understand the idea behind your comment but feels to be
| that it sound better than it is true :)
| mrbombastic wrote:
| Finally a product for me!
| democracy wrote:
| 100% this, Figma is more than just a "design" tool. Same as
| jira is not just a crud app for tasks. It is integrated in
| pipelines, people's expertise, CVs and CTO's minds. And to
| bet on AI company building a competitor to Figma - good luck
| with that. Just a pilot project for PR, nothing more than
| that. Sora 2.0 basically.
| thr0waway001 wrote:
| > vibe coders who can't design
|
| That's meeeee.
| samrus wrote:
| The bulls' theory is that right now the person who doesnt
| know how to design pay a designer that will use figma, but
| with something like claude design they can just vibecode the
| thing without having to get a designer involved.
|
| Its making alot of bold assumptions, but we live in
| interesting times so thats par for the course
| RayVR wrote:
| As with anything, it depends on the quality and skills of the
| people doing the designing. I have yet to really work with a
| designer that embedded themselves enough in the UX to design
| anything I thought was good.
|
| Granted, I have not worked with that many designers so it's
| maybe small N problem.
|
| The gap between figma and where our front end teams work and
| design is still too large.
|
| I think the more likely result of this is fewer designers and
| more work for developers with some design skills.
| rvz wrote:
| This tells me that Lovable is certainly not worth $6.6B.
| techpression wrote:
| That valuation is more insane than most, I would've loved to
| hear the arguments for it, it was a given they would have to
| compete with the companies who provides them with the models,
| anyone who thought they would just leave that market alone is
| a damn fool (the vendor lock-ins are great too, add some
| hosting, domain selling, etc and you got free money).
| codegeek wrote:
| On the other hand, Canva made a genius move to partner with
| Claude for this. One of my favorite products as a non designer.
| paduc wrote:
| Canva will be next to go.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| I'd be more concerned with the stock's trajectory (continual
| decline) since the IPO than with whatever happened since 11AM.
| ktimespi wrote:
| Is this really that big of a moat for Figma to cross though?
| They would have a much easier time integrating AI than the
| other way around
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| They have integrated AI already, but clearly a half-assed
| attempt. I tried it and it's totally useless.
| danish00111 wrote:
| I started using Pencil for my UI designs and they just
| introduced animations and I was like they just kicked Figma and
| now this. Figma might just become another Blockbuster.
| AstroBen wrote:
| Figma's stock has been on a sharp downward trend over the last
| year. This isn't a notice-able change to their stock price at
| all. They're down 30% just in the last month, with many days
| being -5% to -10%.
|
| They're down 80% over the last year. Ouch.
| chopete3 wrote:
| We all hope this to be easy but it is extremely difficult to
| get 2 departments with different reporting structure work
| together. Getting 2 companies work together for mutual benefit
| is like asking 2 political parties to work together.
| qingcharles wrote:
| This is 100% a response to "Stitch With Google" which has been
| doing amazing work in this space for a long time now, and is
| Google's answer to Lovable.
|
| https://stitch.withgoogle.com/
|
| I'm now pasting all my Stitch output into Claude Design to see
| what happens.
|
| edit: First impressions are great. It asked me a ton of really
| great questions about my design aspirations and direction,
| which were incredibly relevant and insightful. Waiting to see
| what it makes.
|
| edit2: It did astonishingly well with the first design pass.
| Really outstanding. This is probably going to be my primary
| prototyping tool until the Next Best Thing(tm) drops in a few
| weeks.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Stitch with Google really doesn't work for me. Half created
| screens, random buttons. Hope Claude does better.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I too use Stitch, seems like not many have heard of it.
| Stitch also asks good questions, do you have any examples of
| both side by side with the same prompt or idea?
| qingcharles wrote:
| Really annoying but I can't figure out how to share a link
| from Claude Design? It seems to only allow you to share the
| design with other people on your account? It'll let me
| export all the HTML and assets, but that's a bit rough to
| have to download it all and upload it to a host somewhere
| just to send it to a client for review or something. On
| Stitch you can just grab a link to the design.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Can you post an imgur link of the output? Just wanted to
| see the designs versus what it'd be in Stitch.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I got you, send me an email on my profile.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Just sent
| dannyw wrote:
| If you use Canva, you can send to Canva and then publish
| it as a website (public web URL) in a couple clicks
| EdvinPL wrote:
| I tried stitch. Overall preplanned sections. Issue is... You
| can't wellllll stitch! E. G. Take section1 migrate mix with
| section 2 etc. Good idea - but still a mess!
| siva7 wrote:
| If we expect Anthropic not only trying to replace just all
| software developers with Claude, but also all software product
| companies with Claude, then i really wanna know why the fuck
| are we cheering here for Anthropic on Hacker News? What kind of
| dumb sheep would do this?
| solenoid0937 wrote:
| Automation allows us to do more.
| bensons1 wrote:
| Up until you feel automated.
| solenoid0937 wrote:
| I am okay with being automated. I'll try to go up the
| next abstraction layer or do something else.
|
| I also understand that our wonderful quality of life is
| due to automation, and sometimes that means I draw the
| short straw. That's okay.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Yes; more depression and anxiety about an uncertain future.
|
| The SWE people I know at SW companies now heavily using
| these agents complain to me how their workday is nothing
| but code-reviews of the agents output and tedious prompting
| to prod it back into line; they say they don't get to
| actually write code until they get home to work on their
| personal projects.
|
| 3 years ago I never would have believed this capability was
| possible; I've since adjusted my expectations to now assume
| that in another 3 years the models/agents will have
| improved enough to reduce the amount of code-review
| required, leaving us with precious little else to do for
| our shareholders, or the opposite: they don't improve and
| we're stuck doing thankless PR reviews until the end.
|
| Please tell me where and how in this future I'm supposed to
| find satisfaction and pride in my work when what-gets-
| produced isn't my own work anymore?
| twobitshifter wrote:
| After it all is done, what is left to do, but find more?
| Why don't we rest, relax, and enjoy our few passing years?
| democracy wrote:
| It's good to have a discussion here so I am ready for all the
| dumb peer chats I am going to have in the next few weeks with
| people who don't use these tools but rely on Linkedin wisdom.
| docmars wrote:
| Judging by Anthropic's track record for sloppy, buggy software,
| I can't see this taking off quite as well as people might
| think, when compared to Figma and its captive customer base.
|
| Figma actually put the work in to make a great product that
| performs well and offers anything you could imagine to design
| just about anything you need, with AI integrations and deep
| manual editing to sweat the details.
| brikym wrote:
| As far as I can tell these tools have quite a low ceiling.
| Great to start off with but but at some point I just find it
| easier to express myself with bezier curve handles than
| prompting. Canva, and Stitch (and maybe Claude Design) don't go
| that far.
| dear_prudence wrote:
| I would love to see a day when adobe's product features come
| into anthropic's products
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Exactly, most SAAS tools out there are going to be fighting off
| AI based alternatives popping up or being integrated into
| general purpose tools. The people using the old tools will be
| switching to tools that offer them better productivity. For
| this particular tool, that means designers and frontend
| developers.
|
| Design work is already under a lot of pressure. I work with
| somebody that has an industrial design background and he's
| having a lot of fun with AI tools. There is still a need for
| good designers. But not to do a lot of the low end design work
| that has been common in a lot of front end teams. That stuff
| was always a bit questionable in value. I know some decent
| designers that were actually getting bored with that type of
| work. It's very repetitive.
| psadri wrote:
| What's interesting here is that with AI, all our interfaces
| should evolve away from previous generation rigid forms / buttons
| / tables etc. towards something more fluid / dynamic / "natural".
| Yet all the AI coding is geared towards producing more of the
| former.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Why would a remix engine move away from what it was trained on?
|
| Why would we want to move away from hard fought UX design
| lessons? Dynamic and fluid UX is infuriating.
| cmrx64 wrote:
| i think of them as tiers of expertise-- need to master the
| basics of structure and form before the robot has the learned
| representations to competently model user interactions with
| more fluid instantiations (by downprojecting into the
| overlearned fixed-semantics)
| xpct wrote:
| Do you have examples of "natural" UI that you like?
| apt-apt-apt-apt wrote:
| Mind-reading brain implants. That's what he wants.
| psadri wrote:
| Most of the software we interact with is at the end of the
| day some db tables, queries to read/write, and some ui to
| read/write. There have been so many times I wished I could
| just do my own db joins on the underlying db to get the views
| I wanted. But I can't - because the app has pre-defined
| ui/query paths.
|
| With AI, I should be able to ask for things the product
| designers didn't anticipate or left out and the system could
| query, create ui on the fly, etc...
| firasd wrote:
| This seems a bit fiddly... I gave it the ChatGPT iframe html for
| my (not yet released) Liveclip MCP server that's like tables
| [https://x.com/firasd/status/2039926453408776649]. And I had this
| chat in the sidebar and it popped up some questions in a form
|
| > do you see our current html
|
| Hi-fi design Interactive prototype html
|
| > do you see our current html
|
| Hi-fi design Interactive prototype html
|
| * Claude Yes -- I can see your html/ folder. It has 7 files:
|
| files-list.html math-result.html rows-view.html table-view.html
| text-editor-doc-view.html trending-topics.html unique-result.html
| Want me to open them up and take a look at what's in there? And
| what would you like to do -- polish them, turn them into an
| interactive prototype, build something new on top, or something
| else?
|
| > yeah in table view i'm thinking about how to deal with cells
| that may be big. i guess we want to do something different than
| excel or sheets in that auto expand rows with cells that contain
| big values. we can show like the first -- what does twitter show,
| 280? so we can show 280 chars and then [...]
|
| * Let me take a look at the current table view to understand what
| we're working with.
|
| Got it -- I see the current table view. Right now every cell is
| clamped to max-width:220px with white-space:nowrap and text-
| overflow:ellipsis, so long values just get cut off at whatever
| ~30 chars fits the column. You're thinking about the opposite
| end: what if a cell genuinely holds 2,000 chars of text? Neither
| pure clip nor Excel-style row expansion is quite right.
|
| Before I start sketching, a few quick questions so I don't guess
| wrong:
|
| > Questions answered: - truncation_threshold: ~280 chars (new
| tweet) - expansion_ux: nothing right now -- it's not interactive
| - row_height_policy: Grow freely like Notion/Airtable -
| content_types: Not sure yet - indicator_style: [...] at the end
| of the text - newlines: Render them (row grows) -
| copy_affordance: no interaction right now - column_width: Fixed
| width, all columns equal - variation_count: 2 variations -
| aesthetic_direction: Same bones, but let you push it a bit
|
| * Got it -- so: non-interactive, rows can grow freely, 280-char
| cap with [...], newlines render, same bones but push it a bit, 2
| variations. Let me sketch this out.
|
| Set up variations file with two table treatments V1:
| Notion/Airtable-style free-grow with [...] cap V2: pushed
| aesthetic variant Wire both to the same sample data w/ long cells
| Let me peek at a couple of the sibling files so the variations
| stay in-family with the rest of the widget set.
|
| Good -- now I have the visual family. The shared vocabulary
| across widgets:
|
| #f5f5f3 page, #fff card, #d0d0cc borders, #f0f0ec headers System
| font, 12-14px Subtle alternating row tints, no drop shadows, flat
| corners Color used sparingly; #666 for secondary text My plan for
| the two variations (side-by-side in a canvas so you can compare
| on the same rows):
|
| V1 -- "Notion-ish, stay in family"
|
| Keep current palette, borders, zebra striping Rows grow
| vertically as needed; white-space: pre-wrap so newlines render
| Cap each cell at 280 chars; if longer, slice to 280 + [...]
| inline Same fixed column widths, everything else identical V2 --
| "Same bones, pushed"
|
| Tightens the grid (hairline borders instead of panels, more
| whitespace, denser typography) Column rail with sticky row
| numbers Soft fade on the bottom of ultra-tall cells instead of
| mid-text [...] when content is really long (hybrid: char cap +
| visual) Monospaced tabular digits for row numbers; type column
| [?] / # markers subtly hinting content type; column width
| slightly wider for breathing room Let me build it.
|
| Now let me build the two variations. I'll set up realistic sample
| data with a mix of short values, tweet-length values, long-long
| values, and ones with newlines, so the behaviors are visible.
|
| Now the two table components.
|
| Clean. Two variations on the canvas, both rendering the same 7
| rows so you can compare directly:
|
| V1 -- in-family. Your current widget, with white-space: pre-wrap
| so rows grow, newlines render, and a soft grey [...] appended
| when a cell goes past 280 chars. Row 3's summary (double-long
| prose) and row 4's URL show the cap. V2 -- same bones, pushed.
| Hairline borders instead of filled header panels, monospaced
| tabular row gutter, column letters as uppercased small-caps above
| the header names row, tighter typographic rhythm, cells > 280 -
| [...] legend in the footer. Row 7 shows how newlines render
| naturally. Both slice at the nearest word boundary when one is
| within ~40 chars of the 280 cap, otherwise hard-cut -- so [...]
| never lands mid-word.
|
| A couple of things worth calling out, not changed:
|
| 280 is pretty generous when a row has multiple long cells side-
| by-side -- row 3 is ~2 cells x 280 = a very tall row. If that
| ends up being painful in real usage, dropping to ~180 or adding a
| per-row max-height with fade might be worth a follow-up. Neither
| variation is interactive per your answer; there's no click-to-
| expand, hover, or copy. Easy to bolt on later. Fork verifier
| agent Both variations are live on the canvas. Let me know which
| direction feels right and I'll fold it back into html/table-
| view.html." -----
|
| It's basically similar to their Artifacts system in a harness I
| guess
| m_w_ wrote:
| Really interesting response to Google's Stitch - and seemingly a
| better alternative given some of the features shown in the video.
| If everything actually works at least close to how it's
| advertised, this'll be useful. I'm sure it's no Dieter Rams, but
| it wouldn't be a surprise if it's already better than many devs
| at design work.
| causal wrote:
| Will give it a try but my experience with Claude and browser use
| so far is that it's extremely lazy: it rarely notices or cares
| when something doesn't look right, it needs lots of pointing out
| "hey you ignored that broken render" etc
| devmor wrote:
| This stuff is the antithesis of what I want to see AI used for.
|
| Deriving a bland average of creativity is the saddest thing you
| could do. I don't even enjoy design and I find this offensive.
| jonlucc wrote:
| Claude, add a bit of whimsy to this design.
| jayd16 wrote:
| So how much of this is fully generated vs AI running through all
| the knobs on template widgets?
|
| Is that globe made from whole cloth or is there a bespoke
| "telecom globe" widget that it dropped in? Could I ask for mock
| up of molecules with the same fidelity of knobs, down to nucleus
| size and such?
| mpeg wrote:
| It's generated, when you try it you can see this is mostly a
| harness around claude opus 4.7 that helps it create a good
| design plan, it also supports asking you questions as it goes
| along, letting you review and feedback on mockups, etc, but
| ultimately if you look at what it's generating as it does it -
| it's just code
| jayd16 wrote:
| "Its just code" is meaningless to me. Is the code its
| generating using mostly well known widgets with predefined
| knobs, or is every element completely custom and the knobs
| are created on the spot with slightly different naming and
| function every time?
|
| I actually think I would prefer the more boring "it composes
| well known widgets" because then there's a chance I could
| just use this to generate a presentation layer and integrate
| it instead of new blobs of code I need to essentially reverse
| engineer or remake.
| mpeg wrote:
| Depends of what you prompt it... if you tell it to use
| react and shadcn, it will use that.
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| Which doesn't work for a native iOS app, so it's HTML
| rendering something that would then be rewritten in iOS I
| guess.
| martinald wrote:
| Interesting! I wrote this approach up (more or less - extract
| design system -> make templates -> export) some time ago and I've
| found it unbelievably powerful:
| https://martinalderson.com/posts/how-to-make-great-looking-c....
|
| I use it all day every day with Claude Code. I sometimes wonder
| past code if this has had the biggest impact on my day to day
| productivity, either having to make do with semi-bad looking
| reports or have a designer design them (which is slow).
|
| Sort of feel sorry for Figma in a way though, given all the
| "partnerships" (highlighting their MCPs) and case studies they've
| done with Anthropic and then they release this. I note there
| isn't a testimonial from them this time.
|
| I'm surprised how poorly Figma have used "AI" in general - given
| they were the "gold standard" in taking emerging technologies
| (WASM etc) and making an incredible product. The Figma Make thing
| was incredibly underwhelming, I managed to extract the system
| prompt out and it's basically just Gemini 3 Pro with a design
| prompt. Perhaps the original team has left?
|
| They are extremely exposed imo. While all the UI/UX designers
| will continue using it for the forseeable, I strongly suspect a
| lot of their (A/M)RR was coming from extra seats for PMs,
| developers, etc to view and export and do commenting on the files
| - not core designer usage. I think a lot of this just won't
| happen on Figma as much.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| I think you hit the nail on the head - I bet Adobe and Figma
| get most of their sold seats from people who don't really need
| the full tool and are basically just using it as a viewer and
| to make very small adjustments or notes
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >I strongly suspect a lot of their (A/M)RR was coming from
| extra seats for PMs, developers, etc
|
| their seats system has always been brutal it's extremely easy
| to have the seats balloon if you're not careful and if they're
| yearly there is only a 30 day window a year where you can
| cancel them when the banner to do so appears.
| aurareturn wrote:
| I tried Figma again after a few years expecting that they'd
| surely have a tool that lets me describe a design and then it
| generates a Figma design file.
|
| Nope. Figma Make first renders an HTML/React app with your
| design. Then you could convert to a Figma design file if you
| have a pro plan. Extremely underwhelming.
|
| There's hardly any difference between using Figma and just
| designing it with Codex and Claude Code. And now, Claude Design
| seems to get it right.
| deaux wrote:
| > Sort of feel sorry for Figma in a way though, given all the
| "partnerships" (highlighting their MCPs) and case studies
| they've done with Anthropic and then they release this. I note
| there isn't a testimonial from them this time.
|
| Those partnerships and the MCP were intentionally always
| watered down. It was purely a play for some cheap exposure
| without providing anything meaningful.
|
| The very obvious thing for the MCP to expose, that everyone
| asks for, is to be able to create and edit Figma designs. You
| can't, likely because they're scared it will kill their
| product. It's one way: Figma->Agent, no Agent->Figma. They will
| come around to this one day, potentially when it's already too
| late. Will be interesting to see how long they wait.
| tzury wrote:
| Anthropic's roadmap is widely underappreciated; it is the company
| defining AI productivity today.
| K0IN wrote:
| this might be a game changer (for show dont tell), and fast
| itterations in design meetings, to show what your thinking of.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Interestingly, Claude Design has its own completely separate
| usage bar.
| sidrag22 wrote:
| that usage page is getting really cluttered, really fast. Two
| months ago, mine was simply a 5 hour usage window, and the
| extra usage portion.
|
| Now its 5 Hour usage, Weekly Usage, Claude Design, Daily
| Routine Runs, and the Extra Usage portion...
| skwashd wrote:
| I'd be pretty annoyed if it was burning my Claude Code quota.
|
| So far it's burned through 45% my design quota. On a positive
| note, I finally have my fonts rendering. I'm still waiting for
| it to figure out how it mangled the SVG versions of my logo.
| I've watched it trying a lot of stuff for 20 minutes and now
| I've got something that's not my logo.
| young_mete wrote:
| Will be taking this for a spin imminently. What seems to be very
| unique here vs other canvas tools are the generative UI controls.
|
| If you're confused about why everyone is shipping their own
| canvas tool - this is what I wrote when I reviewed Stitch from
| Google in my newsletter:
|
| "every SOTA (State-of-the-Art) model can already do this. Give it
| a prompt, it'll spit out an HTML design. Ask for 10 responsive
| variations, you'll get them. Stitch is a Ul and context harness
| on top of Gemini, in the same way Claude Code is a harness on top
| of Claude's models. This means every Al lab will likely ship
| their own version, and they'll all interoperate because at the
| end of the day it's all HTML and markdown."
|
| More generally, this is a competition of where the product
| development work starts and lives. The business value will accrue
| to those who become a destination, not a plugin.
|
| AI can now power a new sort of tool that supports the _entire_
| process (not just coding or just design). So there's no reason
| for Anthropic or any other lab to give that up to another tool.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Postmodernists are annoying because they are right about design.
| "Taste", aesthetics, design, vibes they're all as socially-
| constructed and post-truth as that annoying sophomore says
| everything is. The world is design is an isekai manga in which
| Derrida's delusions are the rules of physics. It's weird.
|
| Part of this weirdness is the continual relativism of design. A
| taste-meme is good or cringe only relative to the prevailing
| social environment, never itself. An AI can never do "design",
| properly understood, because design is the work done by a
| reluctance motor, spinning endlessly in a Sysphean quest to align
| itself with a moving magnetic field and producing torque by side
| effect.
|
| All efforts like this can do is capture the field alignment at an
| instant in time. It cannot do work. It cannot produce _motion_ ,
| not as long as its weights are as fixed as the field lines of a
| neodymium magnet. The instant AI design is good, it becomes bad
| through the act of becoming good.
|
| Producing work through motion of taste may be one of the last
| human endeavors to be absorbed.
| xpct wrote:
| I agree with what you're saying, but I imagine products like
| this one aren't aimed at replacing this. LLMs are partially a
| dashboard business, and this is just one tool to aim at your
| boring business data
| pembrook wrote:
| Interesting take and I pretty much agree (also, I find it funny
| that now the only interesting comments on HN are all found at
| the bottom).
|
| However, there is of course a raw mechanical side to design
| that comes more into play on practical applications like a
| software UI vs. pure play memes/vibes like branding or a
| landing page.
|
| Think hierarchy, leading, kerning, scale, contrast, balance,
| etc. These things remain constant throughout trend cycles and
| can absolutely get you half way there. Then aesthetic memes can
| be sprinkled on top by a human to make people believe "this
| feels cool."
| hellohello2 wrote:
| Interesting take. What do you think of using AI exploitatively?
| I have no doubt it can easily generate drafts or copy the style
| of one thing onto another, letting us rapidly try out ideas.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Nothing wrong with that. My point is that AI, for this
| purpose, is a passive component. Passive components are often
| essential parts of active machines.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| We used to have RAD based IDE's and now I guess with AI we're
| going full circle, I'm curious how their mobile thing works, if
| its just React Native based or what.
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| Oh great more slop
| wg0 wrote:
| How dangerous is this eh?
| RickS wrote:
| lmao at the idea of figma integrations, categorically. I don't
| ever want to look at figma again in my life. figma is what people
| used to ideate quickly because they couldn't build directly in
| the browser. we can now ideate quickly while working directly in
| the browser. figma's entire raison d'etre is dinosaur tier over.
|
| With that said, this seems like it's just claude code +
| simplified devtools in a container? Will need to spend more time
| with it to see how EG commenting influences things, but 5 minutes
| in, this seems like it's needless formalization on top of how I
| already used claude for deisgn
| reluctant_dev wrote:
| Maybe I am using it wrong but it feels much closer to Lovable
| than Figma. I was expecting this to feel like the two products
| combined. Certainly better than Lovable though, but a little
| disappointing.
| aanet wrote:
| So.. this is why Anthropic CPO left the board of Figma
| xnx wrote:
| The faster we commodify design the faster we can get back to some
| sane consistent normal interfaces. Only the very biggest
| platforms (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Apple) should be spending any
| time on "design systems".
|
| Imagine if a designer were hired to custom design the
| lightswitches in every building. We need to get back to off-the-
| shelf interfaces and stop wasting smart people's time reinventing
| UI widgets.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Designers are hired to make sure those light switches are put
| in the right place. Much of the time, it's pretty obvious. But
| sometimes...
| decidu0us9034 wrote:
| I think a big part of the reason AI is so divisive and only
| declining in popularity, is because much of the discourse is
| shaped by mid to senior career SWEs who fantasize about putting
| everyone who's not a mid to senior career SWE out of work.
| People who want to replace everything we like with streamlined
| slop and want everyone we love struggling to get by. Everyone
| is inessential except the guy who just sits there telling
| Claude "can confirm, looks good ship it" who of course isn't
| deserving of even a paycut
| xnx wrote:
| Is AI declining in popularity? There are some surveys where
| people say they don't like AI, but datacenter construction
| and utilization tell a very different story.
| whatever1616 wrote:
| > Only the very biggest platforms (e.g. Google, Microsoft,
| Apple) should be spending any time on "design systems".
|
| Like what they have some superior knowledge or ability to
| design ?
|
| Let me remind you they weren't always tech giants, what if we
| said lets stop innovating before apple or any of these became a
| thing.
| xnx wrote:
| > Like what they have some superior knowledge or ability to
| design ?
|
| No, but they have the scale where that level of specialty
| makes sense. McDonald's has food chemists on staff, but the
| local burger joint does not.
|
| > what if we said lets stop innovating before apple or any of
| these became a thing
|
| It's important for any organization to know what its
| competitive advantage is and where to spend its innovation
| tokens. D.R. Horton is the number one homebuilder in the
| United States, but they don't make their own light switches.
| htrp wrote:
| Reminder that Claude's own AI design skill (which is probably
| incorporated directly into this product) says things like
|
| >NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font
| families (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color
| schemes (particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds),
| predictable layouts and component patterns, and cookie-cutter
| design that lacks context-specific character.
|
| > Interpret creatively and make unexpected choices that feel
| genuinely designed for the context. No design should be the same.
| Vary between light and dark themes, different fonts, different
| aesthetics. NEVER converge on common choices (Space Grotesk, for
| example) across generations.
|
| [1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-
| code/blob/main/plugins/...
| gnegggh wrote:
| no info regarding privacy and data if you connect your repo?
| bryabaek wrote:
| such a cheerful background music to celebrate the death of
| lovable, bolt.new, figma LOL
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > voice, video, shaders, 3D and built-in AI.
|
| As someone who's thinking about side project-ing a game, this
| caught my eye.
|
| I am curious to explore what Claude can yolo in terms of a retro
| style indie game... One who's audience might only be me.
| digitalShield wrote:
| I use claude daily
| lmf4lol wrote:
| the tech is really cool. its amazing. but i freaking hate this
| future
| taylorlapeyre wrote:
| It really feels like Anthropic's product area is extremely
| overextended at this point. If they want to extend themselves
| horizontally in an unlimited fashion, they will need unlimited
| focus, and agents can't supply that. Things will fall through the
| cracks. Why should I believe that Anthropic will care about this
| product in 2, 3 years? Whereas I firmly believe that Figma will
| care greatly about its product in that time
| tomashertus wrote:
| Are they, though? My thinking is that their roadmap is heavily
| focused on the SDLC and solving problems related to software
| development, so their model will be optimized for that domain.
| That leaves room in the market for models that are specialized
| in other areas of expertise.
| throwaway041207 wrote:
| Agree. I'm building a software factory at my job right now
| that leverages Claude Code. It seems like almost daily
| Anthropic is releasing new products or features on existing
| products that seem to overlap with the factory I'm building.
| I still think my project provides a more coherent workflow
| from a SDLC standpoint, bringing an idea to a ticket, to a
| prompt, to a plan, and finally coding and creating a PR, but
| it definitely feels like Anthropic is heading in that
| direction as well. It'll be interesting if they eventually
| bring all of this together into a single uber tool.
| taylorlapeyre wrote:
| If that is what they are optimizing for, then they are not
| doing a great job on that either. Their latest model is more
| expensive and less impressive, their downtime is abysmal by
| any comparison, their "Dispatch" product is unworkable -
| conversation threads don't sync properly, the UX is quite bad
| -, their Desktop app is slow and clunky, Cowork is by all
| accounts mediocre.
| spyckie2 wrote:
| It is officially the 2010 Google era at Anthropic (the era
| where Google released tons of new products and spread
| themselves too thin).
|
| Anyone remember Google's social media platform??? Google Plus?
|
| This is a good era to be in! Its the era of product
| experimentation.
|
| As long as you realize that 90% of the products will not be
| supported long term if it doesn't contribute to bottom line
| revenue, then just appreciate it for what it is, a bunch of
| smart people trying to create useful products.
|
| Just don't be surprised if Anthropic goes the Google route,
| which is shutting down the majority of the products that are
| too small / not successful enough to impact their revenue.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Every Anthropic release uses Claude models.
|
| Not every Google product release used Google search. Some of
| them were completely outside of Google's domain.
| zormino wrote:
| You mean you aren't still using Google Duo and Allo? Google
| Reader? Playing games on your Stadia? I'd be worried about
| really locking into a specific Anthropic product at this
| point other than Claude Code
| lunarboy wrote:
| I still fondly remember playing cyberpunk 2077 on release
| date with no download time. What the future could have been
| . Probably would have become economically infeasible
| regardless with GPU prices due to AI though
| maronato wrote:
| I never recovered from Inbox being killed.
| 3sdfs wrote:
| Ultimately OAI and ANthropic are destined to crash and burn -
| they have gambled a lot on LLM's paving the way toward
| accelerated research, discovery etc etc. But its not happened
| and its not happening - the only 'large' revenue stream they
| have all converged on is selling tokens in relation to software
| production. Which is pretty anti-climatic given all the hyping.
|
| Keeping the hype alive through to IPO is critical now.
| bauerd wrote:
| They are building infrastructure components that they will soon
| wire together with an orchestration layer. Managed agents,
| scheduled tasks, workflow webhook automation.
| taylorlapeyre wrote:
| The infrastructure piece is what they do best. I'd be happy
| if Anthropic became the AWS of AI. But this product is just a
| mediocre shot at Figma, when no such shot is strictly
| necessary for them. These kinds of consumer products are not
| what they do best.
| bauerd wrote:
| It would be interesting if they're dogfooding it by
| building these research projects on those building blocks
| jjcm wrote:
| Unifying experiences and tying them together is always harder
| than net new. It's the GRRM problem - expanding out the
| universe is easy, wrapping it up on the other hand...
| mocamoca wrote:
| I feel like it's a good way to build the best PoC in any
| vertical. Either they create a product, or the big players will
| but Anthropic can provide them with the infra.
| alwillis wrote:
| > Why should I believe that Anthropic will care about this
| product in 2, 3 years?
|
| There's no reason to believe Anthropic will stop caring about
| this product--they're not Google [1] after all.
|
| > It really feels like Anthropic's product area is extremely
| overextended at this point.
|
| I don't think so. They have one core product: the Claude model;
| they're enabling different ways of accessing it. Claude Code
| for developers, Cowork for general business tasks, and chat for
| consumers.
|
| This is their first graphic design product, but it fits nicely
| because once you create a prototype, you can hand it over to
| Claude Code to make the website, mobile app, or whatever.
|
| The advantage Anthropic has is their ecosystem. A Claude user
| will be way more productive using Design because all of their
| context is with Claude; other AI tools don't "know you" the way
| Claude does. Claude already knows your style and your
| preferences; it's much more likely to create designs you'd
| like.
|
| When you go to an AI you don't normally use, you essentially
| have to start from scratch.
|
| [1]: https://killedbygoogle.com
| gck1 wrote:
| OpenAI and Anthropic have realized that their entire business
| is exactly one open weight model drop away from Chinese labs
| that matches Opus 4.5 performance.
|
| They realized they have no product or ground to stand on. Once
| such model drops and once chip manufacturers catch up with
| demand, they are dead, if their only product is inference.
|
| So OpenAI decided to do weird things like buying up all the
| hardware that exists or will exist in the next 2 years to buy
| time to build the product. Then launch things like Sora,
| ChatGPT shopping, ads etc. They seem to be struggling with
| this.
|
| Anthropic, being late to the game of hoarding up all the
| hardware, decided to "buy time" by hiding CoT, implementing KYC
| (especially for Chinese users), to delay the efforts of
| distillation. The products they build in the interim are SaaS
| clones designed from the POV of AI agents and tight
| integrations with their models.
|
| And it seems like Google is just sitting aside, watching things
| unfold, since their business model doesn't stand on inference.
|
| The most likely scenario is that OpenAI and Anthropic will
| still crash and burn when such open model is released.
|
| Figma's survival is still questinable though. Most likely
| scenario is likely that there's going to be an open source
| alternative that has AI integration at the core level, rather
| than an afterthought.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| Exactly this. There are now many great open source coding
| agents. All we lack is a good model to point them at.
|
| Models are going to commodities - just switch the most
| affordable.
|
| Longer term, running models locally is going to be
| increasingly available.
| wraptile wrote:
| Locking into products with such low entry cost for 2-3 years is
| an outdated pov. It's not photoshop that you need to spend
| months to retraining yourself - the entire selling point of AI-
| powered software is that you can pick it up in a week and
| replace or just compliment your existing tools with almost no
| added effort.
| Growtika wrote:
| For my agency this won't replace Figma or designers. It's just a
| really useful tool to express yourself and communicate intent.
|
| Before these tools, when a client wanted a specific section
| built, we'd spend hours hunting references across the web. The
| output always ended up feeling like a mesh of 2-3 sites, never
| fully unique. Then we'd burn more time explaining the intent to
| the client's designers and devs, usually with multiple rounds
| because words don't convey layout well.
|
| Now we throw a quick mockup together in Claude or Lovable and
| send it. The designer gets the idea in 30 seconds instead of a
| 45-minute call, then pushes it further with their own taste and
| the client's branding.
|
| It's not replacing designers. Most clients don't know what they
| want until they see it. These tools collapse that feedback loop
| from weeks to minutes, so the designer actually spends their time
| on the parts that need human taste, not on decoding a vague
| brief.
| mickeyp wrote:
| Indeed. Kitbashing is a thing, and it was always a thing.
| Designers I worked with would spend hours doomscrolling
| pinterest, google images, etc. looking for their, uh... 'spark'
| when they were given a briefing.
|
| This is just a really cool way of building.
|
| I'm impressed. I tried Google Stitch but it was slow and
| useless. Sad, because Gemini has a pretty good creative flair,
| ironically enough.
| MisterPea wrote:
| Stitch has been very good for me to prototype some designs,
| and the exporting design feature is great.
|
| But jeez, is it buggy, slow and unintuitive at times.
|
| Complete shift in google's old engineering culture of high
| quality - they seem to be shipping quickly in favor of
| stability
| chrisweekly wrote:
| "in favor" is hard to parse; "instead"?
| WarmWash wrote:
| That culture died forever ago, google has been launching
| half-baked shit that they kill in 18 months after no
| updates for a decade now.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > It's not replacing designers.
|
| Except it is. Plenty of places will say this is all good enough
| and not hire, or even lay off, the UI/UX person. I've seen this
| firsthand.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Yeah, agreed. And realistically they are correct. I'd argue
| that "good enough" is how most things are done.
| jameslk wrote:
| I have seen this as well, except the UI ends up all looking
| similar, because the harness prompt and training data doesn't
| change much
|
| The average becomes the same shade of gray. Familiarity
| breeds contempt. New types of design will emerge that are
| expensive to copy, because differentiation drives competition
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| Which is perfectly adequate for 95% of applications. Hell,
| it'd probably improve most applications if they adopted
| some proven shade of gray.
|
| Why do people feel that each and every tool they use needs
| its own unique look and feel? And why are people willing to
| pay more for that? In some cases, sure. For my smart
| sprinkler app.. I don't give a damn if it looks like 1000
| other apps.
| bdangubic wrote:
| I'd actually prefer if all of them looked and worked the
| same, especially useful if you have elderly family
| members you need to teach how to use app for XYZ. all
| government websites (especially functional ones that
| citizens use to do something on) for instance should be
| exactly the same
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| Y'all would have much more productive conversations about
| AI if you were even for a second able to differentiate the
| aspects of $x that you care about as a craft via which the
| majority of people care about. HN has truly become the
| embodiment of the "this is fine" meme.
| rukuu001 wrote:
| Especially if you're working on an established product with
| an existing design system. New features / layouts are really
| easy now.
|
| These tools don't solve big design problems, but they do
| resolve all the little design decisions often left up to devs
| at implementation time.
| baxtr wrote:
| In those cases you've seen firsthand, who is actually using
| Claude design (or similar tools) to create the good enough
| design?
| stringfood wrote:
| The important point is that 2 years ago these AI tools were
| like 20% percentile for UX designers, today it is as good
| as a junior or normal UI UX Developer, 2 years from now it
| will be in 90th percentile, etc
| altmanaltman wrote:
| And then in 2 years after what, what will happen?
| stringfood wrote:
| 99% of UX Designers will be out of the job apparently
| baxtr wrote:
| But again: who is actually using/commanding the tool to
| create the designs?
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Someone who is wearing more hats than they used to.
| pknerd wrote:
| Especially when the recession is around the corner. Thanks,
| Uncle Trump
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| That's how I see most of the system design capabilities of
| Opus. I've been an engineer for 15 years. It's so nice to
| describe what you want, it gets you in the ballpark, and you
| can refine and tweak to get it just right. Sometimes it's fun
| to have it design crazy stuff so you can play out a crazy idea
| without wasting too much time. I can see how it could easily
| translate to the visual design space.
|
| Now, if I could only get a model to draw arch diagrams....
| solatic wrote:
| There's multiple tools that generate architecture diagrams
| from text/code (Mermaid, LikeC4...). You start using one and
| tell the model to generate the text for the architecture
| diagram and it'll do it. Stuff like https://erode.dev tries
| to use LLMs to keep it in sync.
| alchemism wrote:
| Spec-mode in the Kiro IDE generates requirements and design
| docs for a feature; the design always contains one or more
| Mermaid diagrams of the arch in the feature.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| 1. This workflow is beneficial for a per design pricing model
| not hourly.
|
| 2. Long term you can expect the minimum bar for aesthetically
| pleasing design to be raised and there to be overall less
| demand for human produced generic design.
|
| 3. This will mean all designers get pushed into the same corner
| or complex, unique, uninferable design and trying to fight it
| out.
| fortzi wrote:
| > this won't replace Figma or designers
|
| If every designer takes less time to do their job, you need
| less designers. There's no getting around that simple math.
| democracy wrote:
| As if designers spend most of their time actually
| "designing". Same flaw of thinking with programmers and AI
| replacing their jobs. As if the main problem (and a major
| time waster) is actually programming and not dealing with a
| million of other things.
| vanviegen wrote:
| But AI _is_ replacing programmer jobs. AI is taking on a
| part of those 'million other things' as well, and if you
| can shrink your organization due to AI use, many of those
| other things just go away.
| wiz21c wrote:
| The job of the programmer/Designer will be to answer
| questions about what the program can do/not do and tweak
| it outside of Claude's abilities. To be able to answer
| those questions (like: can we do this ? will it fail
| under pressure ? etc) requires a deep understanding of
| the programs which you only have if you actually build
| them (with or without AI).
|
| So, less jobs for sure, but not like 50% less jobs.
| democracy wrote:
| But it is not replacing programmer jobs, it's a fantasy
| world
| kavok wrote:
| I don't know a single engineer that has been terminated
| and replaced with AI. I know lots of engineers that were
| terminated due to shifting jobs offshore for cost
| savings, over hiring during COVID, and a poor economy.
| portly wrote:
| Except there is getting around that simple math. Did you
| consider Jevons paradox? If design becomes more efficient, it
| will be used in more cases, and in return there will be more
| demand!
| alex_sf wrote:
| Which is why compilers decimated the software industry.
| cyptus wrote:
| which makes the output of designers more cheep. which leads
| to an higher demand in sense of quantity and quality. which
| requires more designers.
| cambaceres wrote:
| ...assuming all design needs are currently being met.
| Countless companies would benefit greatly from hiring a
| designer but haven't been able to, because the cost has been
| too high relative to the gain. If design becomes cheaper and
| faster, those companies enter the market -- so lower cost per
| project doesn't necessarily mean fewer designers overall.
| josefrichter wrote:
| I'd be curious to hear from you in 3 months whether or not it
| ended up replacing designers at your agency, and why. Perhaps
| you could commit to answer?
| democracy wrote:
| You replace designers with who? Who is the magic person (who
| is not a designer) doing the work? CEO? CTO? I heard these
| stories when Midjourney started and everyone on gamedev
| channels where screaming how artists/graphic designers would
| be irrelevant... I was always puzzlde by who is going to be
| doing their work if they are gone...
| ehnto wrote:
| I think the long term idea is that AI becomes continuous in
| the sense that it behaves like a regular employee, not
| something you have to prompt. So at a mid sized company say
| 100 "entities", the CEO has directors still, they have
| managers, but the managers are managing AI agents not
| humans.
|
| But I don't think that's how it plays out. I think you
| still need to imbue talent, skills and direction into these
| tools and I don't see management, who did not have the
| skills initially, being able to do that task across
| multiple business aspects and agents simultaneously.
|
| I think for now and perhaps until/if AGI, the sweet spot is
| having skilled individuals with experience using the tools
| to known good results. You still can't really delegate to
| the tools, you have to work with them. The benefit to
| management that a human has is they can delegate to a
| human, even when they completely lack the skillset they are
| delegating.
| vanviegen wrote:
| Whoever used to assign tasks to the designer might now be
| able to assign them to a bot instead.
|
| Or the design may be part of a larger task that has been
| delegated to a bot.
| democracy wrote:
| It's a pipe dream sorry
| josefrichter wrote:
| I'm not saying it will replace all designers immediately.
| But same as with developers: it may kill many junior
| positions quite quick. That's why I'm asking the guy to
| share his experience 3 months from now.
| mettamage wrote:
| > Most clients don't know what they want until they see it.
|
| This is also true for entire applications. I vibecode apps in 2
| days then say: is this what you want? Then they are
| enthusiastic and I will say that it will take 2 to 4 weeks to
| properly create it. They are always confused and then I start
| teaching them the conceptual basics of how apps are built and
| what corners are cut. Clients usually listen because they know
| we're near the finish line
| _the_inflator wrote:
| Lovable was a TailwindCSS recombinator, that's it.
|
| Lately it is more and more ShadCN as well.
|
| TailwindCSS is a masterpiece but ironically doesn't really get
| its fare share while "Build on top of TW" frameworks make money.
|
| TailwindCSS is the final evolution after all other frameworks
| always had its benefits but also massive limitations.
|
| BEM anyone?
|
| TW is really elegant a new paradigm in its purest sense and
| brilliantly executed. No wholes could be poked in it for years
| and the extensibility shows, how brilliant it is.
|
| Bootstrap will always be held dearly but it was about browser
| quirks etc first. Important milestone but stands no chance
| against TW.
| oaxacaoaxaca wrote:
| Am I the only one who doesn't like Tailwind? The way it totally
| pollutes your html makes it seem like, while the benefits are
| impressive, they're not worth the collateral damage.
| sweetheart wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. Tailwind always seemed insane to me,
| even after really giving it the benefit of the doubt and
| trying it out. I use it now only because its so easy for the
| LLMs to use, so I don't need to actually interface with it at
| all.
| AstroBen wrote:
| Yeah I'm not a huge fan of it, either. Well organized CSS is
| much nicer to work with. On the other hand, I'd prefer
| Tailwind to badly organized CSS.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| You are not the only one. I also dislike it immensely. For a
| framework that established itself as "for developers who
| don't know or want to learn CSS", polluting the HTML in the
| manner you describe makes no sense. And no company I've
| worked at figured out how to prevent it from becoming a
| bloated, impossible-to-maintain mess.
| Bridged7756 wrote:
| It's pretty much all personal preference. You can do anything
| with css modules, or use any other CSS extension.
|
| I don't ever recall hearing about the specific, tangible
| benefits tailwind brings. Just a loose "it's faster", or
| "it's easier". It just feels like one of those things, in
| front end development, that are just hype-driven rather than
| actually bringing any ostensible benefit.
| Bridged7756 wrote:
| Btw are you from Oaxaca? Nice to see another Mexican in here.
| conradkay wrote:
| https://htmx.org/essays/locality-of-behaviour/
|
| I'm not a big tailwind fan, but keeping styling in a separate
| file feels like a net negative
| simonreiff wrote:
| Tailwind is fantastic precisely because the biggest benefit
| (tree-shaking to minimize the CSS that ships) massively
| outweighs the fact that Tailwind syntax "looks like" an anti-
| pattern and makes your code "look" ugly. Also, you get used
| to bundling your styling and JS code in one place with any
| component-driven framework like Next.js/React, and Tailwind
| works seamlessly with all of them. I guess I just prefer the
| benefits to the alternative, and I feel like the collateral
| damage of the alternative is definitely not worth trying to
| make front-end design code look simpler.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| style="color:red" is back in fashion?
| brikym wrote:
| The idea of style being separate from content is great for
| something like a blog or a wiki article but when you're
| building an app each design needs completely different html
| and then it makes sense to couple. No naming. No hunting down
| styles. The html is your ccs. You get a formatter to sort the
| classes and it will compress away all the repetitive junk.
| Besides who looks at code much these days anyway.
| anonyfox wrote:
| personally I went back to bootstrap when LLM vibecoding took
| over. 10yo old patterns and even weak model can oneshot
| anything blindly, at scale. react+bootstrap is kind of cheat
| mode for frontend dev now with zero confusions about specific
| classes or api version changes of selectors and what have you,
| this is stupid solid after all this time.
|
| As a dev manually typing I loved tailwind for sure, with LLMs
| not so much, and bootstrap in particular nails it the best IME.
| and yeah one can customize bootstrap quickly to look however it
| should, just tell your frontier LLM of choice your wishes.
| arbuge wrote:
| They state the link is claude.ai/design, which currently goes to:
|
| Page not found Claude can help with many things, but finding this
| page isn't one of them.
|
| when logged in.
| weinzierl wrote:
| _" create polished visual work like designs, prototypes, slides,
| one-pagers, and more."_
|
| I use Opus to generate Typst for that and I'm already pretty
| happy with that approach. It gives me a degree of control I do
| not have with other methods, because
|
| 1. Typst is really powerful
|
| 2. Opus is really good at surgically modifying Typst
|
| I basically never look at the Typst code for this. Telling Opus
| visually what I want changed is usually good enough.
| moelf wrote:
| how does Opus see the output? via HTML (which Typst can output)
| or visual tokens?
| ossa-ma wrote:
| How does it compare to LaTeX?
| shrinks99 wrote:
| It compiles almost instantly which makes this visual design
| by Claude instruction viable. That alone is pretty neat.
|
| It can't render all your math in exactly the same way. If you
| need it to do that, it may not be for you.
| weinzierl wrote:
| It's so fast that the first using it I thought something
| must have gone wrong, and that was a 40 page document.
| pilgrim0 wrote:
| Typst is unfairly good for doing systematic designs. I wrote a
| template system for a complex product catalog in a couple days.
| Then I modeled the clients products list (exported from their
| ERP) to the schema and generated a hundred pages catalog
| instantly with flawless layout. Traditional catalog design in
| InDesign is extremely prone to errors and inconsistencies, not
| to mention time consuming if done by hand and very brittle if
| done with the native automation, which does not handle tabular
| data very well, requiring arcane non-UTF8 encodings. With
| Typst, if done right and input data is properly treated once,
| you can wholly skip the review phase which is represents a
| massive cost reduction. IMO doing this kind of parametric
| design from a DSL, either for print or digital, is something
| massively underrated. Surely feels like cheating. Organizing
| the media files is a bit more time consuming, though, even with
| automation. But once you organize and standardize the media
| repo you're set, as you just need to do the plumbing once.
| designwithjawad wrote:
| Design industry is shaking right now.
| i_love_retros wrote:
| I think we will have maybe 5 to 10 years of all this crap,
| devaluing human made art and human made products, vibe coding
| everything. But eventually it will all fall apart. Long term only
| a minority will be happy seeing AI generated crap everywhere and
| most people will pay for quality human made goods.
|
| Unfortunately it's going to be a tough few years until that
| happens, where it really does feel like the idiots are winning.
|
| THE IDIOTS ARE WINNING
| pythontongue wrote:
| where would these unemployed people find money for quality
| human made goods
| i_love_retros wrote:
| Universal Basic Income. Or from the job they get after
| attending a government provided green tech retraining
| program. Which will both happen after the revolution. Which
| will probably be televised, on Netflix.
| max_streese wrote:
| One thing I am wondering: How much logic (in the programming
| sense) is there in this product and how much of it is ,,just" a
| lean wrapper around the LLM?
| pembrook wrote:
| I disagree with most of the takes here. The reason this will fail
| has nothing to do with design, designers, or taste.
|
| This will fail because it's already a forgotten side project
| within anthropic, and anthropic also has pretty bad product DNA
| as a company. Their headcount is already too large and the
| culture is already set. They grew revenue so fast they speedran
| the stage at which you could build software product chops into
| the company culture (think Google circa 2008 vs. Google circa
| 2018).
|
| They should focus on what they're good at: the actual AI models
| and B2B sales. Let OpenAI play early Google and churn through 100
| different consumer product experiences to see what sticks,
| they're better positioned for it anyways.
| 3sdfs wrote:
| " the actual AI models and B2B sales."
|
| Maybe they realised its actually a dead-end? Why else would you
| not double-down and concentrate resources? This would be an
| amateur error if it turned out to be true.
| bilekas wrote:
| Google ai studio has been doing this pretty well for mockups for
| me at least. I do see people running out of their already limited
| tokens using this though, unless they silo them to another
| collection of tokens.
|
| Edit: I see they have a new token tier 'Claude Design' so that's
| good.
| ben8bit wrote:
| Unless you want something that looks like it's designed by
| Anthropic, this is still pretty shit. Amazingly "AI" hasn't
| replaced the very first target on their radar - design.
| AstroBen wrote:
| Design is very hard to verbally describe, and AI doesn't have
| good judgement on what is easy to use or attractive.
| ben8bit wrote:
| I think it's because it's non-deterministic too. You can't
| iteratively improve design the same way you can code.
| conradkay wrote:
| If they wanted couldn't they do something like RLHF?
| Instead of humans picking the best of 2 text outputs, they
| pick the best rendered design
| AstroBen wrote:
| I'd be very surprised if they're not already doing this.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| ultimately if it's so close to the finished product you may as
| well just do it in cursor rather than have an extra step.
|
| The design problem to solve post-ai isn't this it's how the space
| for thinking fits into all this, getting to the end result slower
| so human ideation can play out. This is just optimized for the
| first generic output + tweaks.
| sudohalt wrote:
| Lol I've vibe coded something identical to this in a day.
| jej_FundAlign wrote:
| I just started using Claude and its amazing. I cant believe ive
| waited so long. Looking forward to designing
| khalic wrote:
| Had some fun with the wireframe mode, very useful to sketch some
| interaction concepts
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Just started messing around with this but I like it. It produces
| better results than just using Claude Code on its own. The
| initial output has a lot of junk that needs to be removed (just
| like anything LLMs generate). I suspect it's only good at
| reproducing content that is relatively cookie-cutter and
| prominent in the training data. But still, as a non-designer this
| produces better results than I can and in line with the level of
| quality of many paid templates.
| hooverlabs wrote:
| I thought polymet did a pretty good job of creating mobile app
| designs and component libraries when I tested it. Winder how this
| will compare
| ttul wrote:
| I threw my sales deck at it and asked it to implement our brand
| guidelines (attaching that as a PDF). It did a great job and then
| began giving me internal server errors... I'm going to assume
| this part of their model farm is totally overwhelmed.
| semking wrote:
| Sorry, I hit my session limit by just reading the title
| pilgrim0 wrote:
| On Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Alexander defines design as
| the rationalization of the forces that define a problem. You'll
| won't find a better definition. But people tend to think design
| is the synthesis and its results. This misunderstanding of the
| role of design and the designer is responsible for all the unfit
| designs we encounter on a daily basis. Anyone equipped with a
| synthesis tool and feeling empowered to quickly and cheaply
| generate forms will almost inevitably become blind to the very
| nature of the underlying problems they set to solve. They'll be
| fitting the problem to the available forms. They'll skip the
| understanding, the conversations, the conflicts and
| disagreements, and happily and wrongly assume a design problem
| can be solved hermetically, in isolation. They'll think quality
| is a factor of aesthetics, when in truth, aesthetics is an
| effect; nevertheless these effects is all they'll have control
| over, as it's all the tool can do. The tool will hinder their
| ability to be rational; to see the inner structures; to find the
| hidden but essential semantics; to create the ontologies that'll
| support not only the immediate synthesis, but that will sustain
| the evolution of the design over its lifetime. They'll be denied
| the enlightenment that comes with gradual, slow construction; the
| only place and moment where innovative ideas reveal themselves.
| They'll be impoverished and confuse output with agency. I feel
| sorry for anyone that will think using tools equals doing design,
| because of the truly marvelous human experiences that they'll
| miss, and that could never be replaced by the shallow pride of
| empty achievement.
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| > because of the truly marvelous human experiences that they'll
| miss
|
| when people wax philosophical/poetical about what is
| essentially capital production already i'm always so perplexed
| - do you not realize that you're not doing art/you're not an
| artisan? your labor is always actively being transformed into a
| product sold on a market. there are no "marvelous human
| experiences", there is only production and consumption.
|
| > They'll be impoverished and confuse output with agency
|
| ironic.
| throwfaraway4 wrote:
| What a sad take. For the sake of human satisfaction I hope
| this is a minority perspective.
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| > What a sad take.
|
| just repeating the same mistake as op: sadness/happiness is
| completely outside the scope here. these are aspects of a
| _job_ - "design" explicitly relates to _products_ not art.
| and wondering about the sadness /happiness of a job is like
| wondering about the marketability of a piece of art - it's
| completely besides the point!
| textadventure wrote:
| OP never talked about art. Design is not art, it's
| problem solving. And good design according to Dieter
| Rams:
|
| 1. Good design is innovative 2. Good design makes a
| product useful 3. Good design is aesthetic 4. Good design
| makes a product understandable 5. Good design is
| unobtrusive 6. Good design is honest 7. Good design is
| long-lasting 8. Good design is thorough down to the last
| detail 9. Good design is environmentally friendly 10.
| Good design is as little design as possible
|
| Generative AI just tries to predict based on its training
| data.
| whatever1616 wrote:
| >"design" explicitly relates to products not art
|
| a product can be a piece of art and design can and does
| in practice often go hand in had with art, practically
| most designers also other than the utilitarian role
| practice the artistic one, wether you would want to group
| art within design as one is a matter of definitions
| pjmorris wrote:
| Whatever the merits or demerits of 'marvelous human
| experiences' are from the point of view of production and
| consumption, the OP's conclusion leaves out the important
| point that Alexander's 'rationalization of forces that define
| a problem' produces designs that come closer to solving real-
| life problems (even in production and consumption) than
| simply putting attractive lipstick on an economic utility
| pig. If production isn't solving real human problems,
| consumers will go elsewhere.
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| > If production isn't solving real human problems,
| consumers will go elsewhere.
|
| of course but that's well within the scope of the whole
| paradigm (as opposed to how it is originally phrased it in
| relation to a loss of "marvelous human experiences"): if i
| use a bad tool to solve my customer's problems in an
| unsatisfactory way then my customers will no longer be my
| customers (assuming the all knowing guiding hand of the
| free market). so there's no new observation whatsoever in
| OP.
| moregrist wrote:
| > your labor is always actively being transformed into a
| product sold on a market. there are no "marvelous human
| experiences", there is only production and consumption.
|
| The first time I used Mac OS/X, circa 2004-2005, I was blown
| away by the design and how they managed to expose the power
| of the underlying Unix-ish kernel without making it hurt for
| people who didn't want that experience. My SO couldn't have
| cared less about Terminal.app, but loved the UI. I also loved
| the UI and appreciated how they took the time to integrate
| cli tools with it.
|
| I would say it was a marvelous human experience _for me_.
|
| Sure it was the Apple engineers' and designers' labor
| transformed into a product, but it was a fucking great
| product and something that I'm sure those teams were very
| proud of. The same was true with the the iPod and the iPhone.
|
| I work on niche products, so I've never done something as
| widely appreciated as those examples, but on the products
| I've worked on, I can easily say that I really enjoy making
| things that other people want to use, even if it's just an
| internal tool. I also enjoy getting paid for my labor. I've
| found that this is often a win-win situation.
|
| Work doesn't have to be exploitive. Products don't have to
| exploit their users.
|
| Viewing everything through the lens of production and
| consumption is like viewing the whole world as a big
| constraint optimization problem: (1) you end up torturing the
| meaning of words to fit your preconceived ideas, and (2) by
| doing so you miss hearing what other people are saying.
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| > Sure it was the Apple engineers' and designers' labor
| transformed into a product, but it was a fucking great
| product and something that I'm sure those teams were very
| proud of. The same was true with the the iPod and the
| iPhone.
|
| ...
|
| > Work doesn't have to be exploitive. Products don't have
| to exploit their users.
|
| bruh do people have any idea what they're writing as they
| write it? you're talking about "work doesn't have to be
| [exploitative]" in the same breath as Apple which is the
| third largest market cap company in the world and who's
| well known for exploiting child labor to produce its
| products. like has this comment "jumped the shark"?
|
| > Viewing everything through the lens of production and
| consumption
|
| i don't view _everything_ through any lens - i view work
| through the lens of work (and therefore production
| /consumption). i very clearly delineated between this lens
| and at least one other lens (art).
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| Maybe you'll dismiss it as another poetic waxing but what
| I understand they're saying is that capitalism hasn't yet
| captured all the inefficiencies of the human experience.
| jimbokun wrote:
| So the definition of art is work except you don't get
| paid?
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| The guy in Cupertino aren't the ones behind bars so they
| can't jump their deaths; for someone who supposedly
| "clearly delineated", you sure are mixing up those who
| are being exploited with the people who benefitted.
|
| Ultimately the exploitative pyramid always terminates in
| a peak, and the guys working up there can for sure be
| having a hecking great time doing their jobs.
| bauerd wrote:
| This is a really verbose way to say that using generative AI
| has a detrimental effect on the user because one deprives
| themselves of the learning experience.
| nightski wrote:
| Agreed on your take on the parent, although I have to say I
| feel that AI has had the opposite effect for me. It has only
| accelerated learning quite significantly. In fact not only is
| learning more effective/efficient, I have more time for it
| because I am not spending nearly as much time tracking down
| stupid issues.
| CaptWillard wrote:
| Big difference between gaining knowledge and
| building/maintaining cognitive skills.
| monarchwadia wrote:
| I assure you, working with LLMs is intellectually
| challenging, and becomes more so as the technology
| matures.
| tempest_ wrote:
| It really really really depends on how you are using it
| and what you are using it for.
|
| I can get LLMs to write most CSS I need by treating it
| like a slot machine and pulling the handle till it spits
| out what I need, this doesnt cause me to learn CSS at
| all.
| baq wrote:
| This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I know a little css
| and have zero desire or motivation to know more; the
| things I'd like done that need css just wouldn't have
| been done without LLMs.
| nightski wrote:
| I find it a lot more useful to dive into bugs involving
| multiple layers and versions of 3rd party dependencies.
| Deep issues where when I see the answer I completely
| understand what it did to find it and what the problem
| was (so in essence I wouldn't of learned anything diving
| deep into the issue), but it was able to do so in a much
| more efficient fashion than me referencing code across
| multiple commits on github, docs, etc...
|
| This allows me to focus my attention on important
| learning endeavors, things I actually want to learn and
| are not forced to simply because a vendor was sloppy and
| introduced a bug in v3.4.1.3.
|
| LLMS excel when you can give them a lot of relevant
| context and they behave like an intelligent search
| function.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Indeed, many if not most bugs are intellectually dull.
| They're just lodged within a layered morass of cruft and
| require a lot of effort to unearth. It is rarely
| intellectually stimulating, and when it is as a matter of
| methodology, it is often uninteresting as a matter of
| acquired knowledge.
|
| The real fun of programming is when it becomes a vector
| for modeling something, communicating that model to
| others, and talking about that model with others. That is
| what programming is, modeling. There's a domain you're
| operating within. Programming is a language you use to
| talk about part of it. It's annoying when a distracting
| and unessential detail derails this conversation.
|
| Pure vibe coding is lazy, but I see no problem with AI
| assistants. They're not a difference in kind, but of
| degree. No one argues that we should throw away type
| checking, because it reduces the cognitive load needed to
| infer the types of expressions in dynamic languages in
| your head. The reduction in wasteful cognitive load is
| precisely the point.
|
| Quoting Aristotle's _Politics_ , "all paid employments
| [..] absorb and degrade the mind". There's a scale,
| arguably. There are intellectual activities that are more
| worthy and better elevate the mind, and there are those
| that absorb its attention, mold it according to base
| concerns, drag it into triviality, and take time away
| away from higher pursuits.
| skydhash wrote:
| I agree with your definition of programming (and I've
| been saying the same thing here), but
|
| > It's annoying when a distracting and unessential detail
| derails this conversation
|
| there is no such details.
|
| The model (the program) and the simulation (the process)
| are intrinsically linked as the latter is what gives the
| former its semantic. The simulation apparatus may be
| noisy (when it's own model blends into our own), but
| corrective and transformative models exists
| (abstraction).
|
| > No one argues that we should throw away type
| checking,...
|
| That's not a good comparison. Type checking helps with
| cognitive load in verifying correctness, but it does
| increase it, when you're not sure of the final shape of
| the solution. It's a bit like Pen vs Pencil in drawing.
| Pen is more durable and cleaner, while Pencil feels more
| adventurous.
|
| As long as you can pattern match to get a solution, LLM
| can help you, but that does requires having encountered
| the pattern before to describe it. It can remove
| tediousness, but any creative usage is problematic as it
| has no restraints.
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| Yes but that's why you ask it to teach you what it just
| did. And then you fact-check with external resources on
| the side. That's how learning works.
| xienze wrote:
| > Yes but that's why you ask it to teach you what it just
| did.
|
| Are you really going to do that though? The whole point
| of using AI for coding is to crank shit out as fast as
| possible. If you're gonna stop and try to "learn"
| everything, why not take that approach to begin with?
| You're fooling yourself if you think "ok, give me the
| answer first then teach me" is the same as learning and
| being able to figure out the answer yourself.
| tevli wrote:
| This exactly. My css designs have noticeably gotten
| better without me,the writer getting any better at all.
| sanex wrote:
| I would consider this a benefit. I've been a professional
| for 10 years and have successfully avoided CSS for all of
| it. Now I can do even more things and still successfully
| avoid it.
| unsignedchar wrote:
| But were you trying to learn CSS in the first place?
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| /s/intellectually/emotionally
| leptons wrote:
| I find it _intellectually exhausting_ to describe to a
| machine what I want, when I could build something better
| in the same amount of time, and it isn 't for lack of
| understanding how the LLM works.
|
| It takes a lot of cajoling to get an LLM to produce a
| result I want to use. It takes no cajoling for me to do
| it myself.
|
| The only time "AI" helps is in domains that I am
| unfamiliar with, and even then it's more miss than hit.
| skydhash wrote:
| > I find it intellectually exhausting to describe to a
| machine what I want, when I could build something better
| in the same amount of time, and it isn't for lack of
| understanding how the LLM works.
|
| I don't even bother. Most of my use cases have been when
| I'm sure I've done the same type of work before (tests,
| crud query,...). I describe the structure of the code and
| let it replicate the pattern.
|
| For any fundamental alteration, I bring out my vim/emacs-
| fu. But after a while, you start to have good
| abstractions, and you spend your time more on thinking
| than on coding (most solutions are a few lines of codes).
| vehemenz wrote:
| My experience is mostly the opposite. Provided the right
| context and prompt, CC will generally produce code, even
| in domains I know, 10-20x faster.
|
| Quality is a different issue, sure.
| system2 wrote:
| It is better than doomscrolling on Instagram for hours
| like the new generations. At least the brain is active,
| creating ideas or reading some text nonstop to keep
| itself active.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Agree on that too. And I use these as tools. I don't think
| I'm missing out on anything if I use this drill press to
| put a hole through an inch of steel instead of trying to
| spend a day doing it wobbly with a hand-drill.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > I have more time for it because I am not spending nearly
| as much time tracking down stupid issues.
|
| It is a truism that the majority of effort and time a
| software dev spends is allocated toward boilerplate,
| plumbing, and other tedious and intellectually
| uninteresting drudgery. LLMs can alleviate much of that,
| and _if used wisely_ , function as a tool for aiding the
| understanding of principles, which is ultimately what
| knowledge concerns, and not absorbing the mind in ephemeral
| and essentially arbitrary fluff. In fact, the occupation
| hazard is that you'll become so absorbed in some bit of
| minutia, you'll forget the context you were operating in.
| You'll forget what the point of it all was.
|
| Life is short. While knowing how to calculate mentally
| and/or with pen and paper is good for mastering principles
| and basic facility (the same is true of programming, btw),
| no one is clamoring to go back to the days before the
| calculator. There's a reason physicists would outsource the
| numerical bullshit to teams of human computers.
| nightski wrote:
| Just wanted to say you put it really well, that's exactly
| how I feel.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Are you sure that is not the illusion of learning? If you
| don't know the domains, how can you know how much you now
| know? Especially consider that these models are all Dunning
| Kruger-inducing machines.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Sounds like you're talking about research AI and not
| generative AI. You can't learn artistic/creative techniques
| when you're not practicing those techniques. You can have a
| vision, but the AI will execute that vision, and you only
| get the end result without learning the techniques used to
| execute it.
| apsurd wrote:
| That's a really useful distinction to have explicitly
| articulated. It's also why plan mode feels like a super
| power. Research vs Generative AI are different: I'm going
| to use this.
| nightski wrote:
| I guess I was more referring to just using generative AI
| when learning new subjects and exploring new ideas. It's
| a really efficient tutor and/or sidekick who can either
| explain topics in more depth, find better sources, or
| help me explore new theories. I was thinking beyond just
| generating code, which is incredibly useful but only
| mildly interesting.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Okay, this is a pet peeve of mine, so forgive me if I
| come off a little curt here, but-- I disagree strongly
| with how this was phrased.
|
| "Generative AI" isn't just an adjective applied to a
| noun, it's a specific marketing term that's used as the
| collective category for language models and image/video
| model -- things which "generate" content.
|
| What I assume you mean is "I think <term> is misleading,
| and would prefer to make a distinction".
|
| But how you actually phrased it reads as "<term> doesn't
| mean <accepted definition of the term>, but rather
| <definition I made up which contains only the subset of
| the original definition I dislike>. What you mean is
| <term made up on the spot to distinguish the 'good'
| subset of the accepted definition>"
|
| I see this _all_ the time in politics, and it muddies the
| discussion so much because you can 't have a coherent
| conversation. (And AI is very much a political topic
| these days.) It's the _illusion of nuance_ -- which
| actually just serves as an excuse to avoid engaging with
| the nuance that actually exists in the real category.
| (Research AI _is_ generative AI; they are not cleanly
| separable categories which you can define without
| artificial /external distinctions.)
| javier2 wrote:
| Well, the research is sometimes 10x quicker with AI
| assistant. But not always. Building phase is maybe
| 20-100% quicker for me at least, depending on the
| complexity of the project. Green field without 15 years
| of legacy that is never allowed to break is many times
| faster, always has been.
| eric_cc wrote:
| What if you're a musician and use design as part of your
| marketing? Why should a musician deep dive design when they
| really only care about music?
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| just use clipart & templates and move on then, taking your
| argument to the extreme and skip the AI tooling.
| pilgrim0 wrote:
| The argument is not that only designers can design, nor
| that everyone should design like a designer. It's to not
| confuse shopping for or generating generic solutions with
| the activity of problem solving. Per Alexander, trivial
| problems, those that can be solved without balancing
| interactions between conflicting requirements, are not
| design problems. So, don't worry and just pick what you
| need and like!
| gretch wrote:
| Presumably you care about the quality of your marketing.
| Otherwise why do it at all. Worst case scenario, your
| marketing turns people off to your music, who would have
| otherwise been listeners.
|
| Actually there's some interesting problems here because a
| huge part of music marketing is in a visual medium, like a
| poster or album cover. It is literally impossible to
| include a clip of your sound.
|
| So you should be really interested in how to capture the
| "vibe" of your music in a visual medium.
|
| But if you don't care at all whether ppl actually listen to
| your music, then yeah you don't have to deep dive.
| 3sdfs wrote:
| "Actually there's some interesting problems here because
| a huge part of music marketing is in a visual medium,
| like a poster or album cover. It is literally impossible
| to include a clip of your sound."
|
| The term you are looking for is 'aesthetic'.
|
| And indeed.. music is far more than just a sound or
| whatever simple thing one tries to boil it down to.
|
| Im convinced many (especially here) really dislike that -
| they want it just be a case of typing in a few things in
| an LLM and bam... there you go. They have zero clue about
| the nature of the economy, what's really going on in
| various markets etc etc.
| apsurd wrote:
| your paragraph is parent's point in action.
|
| If only all great works could just be an X post!
| lyjackal wrote:
| I think the larger part implied is the design will be crappy,
| because the problem was unexplored
| jtbayly wrote:
| No. It says much more than that, because it applies to many
| other tools that aren't AI.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Well, you know what they say about our current attention
| spans. If it's not a slogan it's already too long!
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| Was thinking similarly... Without the friction, you're unable
| to explore the space, the space doesn't even exist at all...
| So it's not even clear where you're going from or where
| you'll arrive at.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| And, anyone who reads your comment will be deprived of the
| experience of learning why your comment makes so much sense.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Not really. It's saying that most people in tech have no
| fucking idea what designers do, but somehow feel qualified to
| evaluate their output, and think tools that make things that
| look nice are designing things. What you reference is one
| effect of what the comment is about. Another effect is
| developers, combining this with engineer's disease, being
| incredibly irritating to work with because they constantly
| make reductive comments that completely miss the point while
| other developers nod and say "yeah that sounds right." I was
| a developer for ten years-- I've seen this from both sides.
| akiarie wrote:
| "Verbose" is the wrong adjective. Yours is a terse projection
| into a lower space, valid in itself, but lacking the power
| and precision of its archetype.
| jppittma wrote:
| I think that the beauty of the human experience is that all
| you need to learn is to practice. You automatically improve
| at what you're doing. The kinds of skills that atrophy when
| you use AI are skills that AI can already automate. And
| nobody is going to pay you to do slowly what a machine can do
| quickly/cheaply.
|
| When you deploy AI to build something, you wind up doing the
| work that the AI itself can't do. Holding large amounts of
| context, maintaining a vision, writing apis and defining
| interfaces. Alongside like, project management. How much time
| is spent on features vs refactoring vs testing.
| fortzi wrote:
| I don't know.
|
| With the core programming skills atrophying, who's going to
| have the skills to audit AI's work?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _using generative AI has a detrimental effect on the user
| because one deprives themselves of the learning experience_
|
| Or it lets folks focus. My coding skills have gotten damn
| rough over the years. But I still like the math. Using AI to
| build visualizations while I work on the model math with
| paper and pen is the best of both worlds. I can rapidly model
| something I'm working on out algebraically _and_
| analytically.
|
| Does that mean my R skills are deteriorating? Absolutely. But
| I think that's fine. My total skillset's power is increasing.
| airstrike wrote:
| Your point is maybe 25% of the original, so no, it's not just
| a really verbose way to say the same thing.
|
| In fact, there's a palpable irony in your decision to make
| that comment, which only reinforces the OP.
| eric_cc wrote:
| > I feel sorry for anyone that will think using tools equals
| doing design, because of the truly marvelous human experiences
| that they'll miss, and that could never be replaced by the
| shallow pride of empty achievement.
|
| What if you don't give a shit about design and it's a means to
| an end for a project that involves something different that you
| do care about?
| nekooooo wrote:
| how nihlistic
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Jobs has entered the chat and has some strong words for
| you...
| apsurd wrote:
| > what if you don't give a shit about design and it's a means
| to an end...
|
| the parent's point is that it doesn't work that way. The
| point is self reinforcing. Design is not a thing. it's the
| earned scars from the process. Fine to disagree but it
| reinforces the point.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| > What if you don't give a shit about design and it's a means
| to an end for a project that involves something different
| that you do care about?
|
| Thank you for so succinctly demonstrating the problem with
| using AI for everything. You used to have to either care
| enough to do the design yourself or find someone who cared
| and specialized in that to do it for you. Now you quickly and
| cheaply fill in the parts you don't personally care about
| with sawdust, and as this becomes normalized you deprive
| yourself and others from discovering that they care about the
| design part. You'll ship your thing now, and it'll be fine.
| The damage is delayed and externalized.
|
| I won't advocate against use of new technology to make
| yourself more productive, but it's important to at least
| understand what you're losing.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _You used to have to either care enough to do the design
| yourself or find someone who cared and specialized in that
| to do it for you._
|
| You think most UI/UX designers, or the artists creating
| slop for content marketing spam factories for the past
| decades, cared? Some, maybe. Most probably had higher
| ambitions, but are doing what actually pays their bills.
|
| It's similar to software developers. Most of those being
| paid to code couldn't care less, they're in there for the
| fat paycheck; everyone else mostly complains the work is
| boring or dumb (or worse), but once you have those skills,
| it makes no economic sense to switch careers (unless, of
| course, you're into management, or into playing the
| entrepreneurship roulette).
| jimbokun wrote:
| I do think they cared.
|
| The paychecks weren't great. Everyone was offering to pay
| designers with "exposure". If they didn't innately care
| about the field they would have done something more
| lucrative.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| I think the more you industrialize a process, the more
| those involved become cogs (or get replaced with actual
| or metaphorical cogs in a machine). This is fine, even
| desirable, for anything we can produce en masse and apply
| quality control to. I do not mind that my rivets and
| screws are not artisanal. We figured out how to make a
| useful and reliable widget and can churn them out on an
| industrial scale no problem. I do not see the value in
| doing the same with software. We already get mass-
| production for free because the product is bytes. Why are
| we industrializing the process of making millions of
| variations of the same thing? Surely the effort would be
| better spent finding the "screw" of software, perfecting
| it, and making it trivial for users to accomplish
| whatever task they want without having to generate the
| gaps between with untested code. I want modularity and
| better design, not _automated_ design.
| eric_cc wrote:
| > You used to have to either care enough to do the design
| yourself or find someone who cared and specialized in that
| to do it for you.
|
| Or worse, you gave up because you did not have the time to
| learn the skill or the money to hire somebody. In this
| case, your dream just died.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Who says the world where dreams went unrealised is the
| worse one?
|
| If Grok didn't create the fake nudes users were dreaming
| about but couldn't create with Photoshop,
|
| would my headstone crumble down?
|
| As "intel" dashboards stay a dream,
|
| the Hollywood wind's a howl
|
| As photos are just still
|
| The Kremlin's falling
|
| As Einstein is not wrong
|
| Radio 4 is static
| kbenson wrote:
| I think maybe how you are conceptualizing design and how the
| GP meant it are not in agreement, and if you came to
| agreement on what it meant you wouldn't really disagree about
| the point either.
|
| For example, I think design, as they mean it, could be
| described as "how to get that thing we care about". The
| correct amount of design depends on how exacting the outcome
| and outputs needs to be across different dimensions (how
| fast, how accurate, how easy to interpret, how easy to
| utilize as an input for some other system). For generalized
| things where there's not exacting standards for that, AI
| works well. For systems with exacting standards along one or
| more of those aspects, the _process_ of design allows for the
| needed control and accuracy as the person or people doing the
| work are in a constant feedback loop and can dial in to what
| 's needed. If you give up control of the inside of that loop,
| you lose the fine grained control required for even knowing
| how far you are away from theoretical maximums for those
| aspects.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Then no design is taking place.
| pilgrim0 wrote:
| Balancing requirements to achieve something you care about is
| doing design. I take that by "design" here you mean perhaps a
| particular interface or media, and you reckon that such
| element is not critical to your solution. If that's the case
| then there's no conflict at all. By reaching that conclusion
| you isolated what's important and are correctly applying
| energy where it matters. This happens a lot in design, where
| producing or perfecting media interfaces is not necessary.
| switchbak wrote:
| Man so much of this thread is full of such high minded
| philosophizing, it's like we're debating wine instead of
| talking about interfaces for doing things.
|
| Like, maybe I just want to make an interface to configure my
| homemade espresso dohickey, do I have to wear a turtleneck
| and read Christopher Alexander now? I just wanted a couple
| buttons and some sliders.
|
| We don't all have to be experts in everything, some people
| just need a means to an end, and that's ok. I won't like the
| wave of slop that's coming, but the antidote certainly isn't
| this.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Why do you want sliders when a config file would do the
| same just fine?
|
| It's true that design theory writing is annoyingly verbose
| and intangible, but that doesn't make it _wrong_. Give
| someone a concrete language spec and they will not really
| know how it feels to _use_ the language, and even once they
| do experience its use they will not be able to explain that
| feeling using the language spec. Invariably the language
| will tend to become intangible and likely very verbose.
|
| But to answer your question: no, it's of course perfectly
| serviceable to just copy the interface others have created,
| and if the needs aren't exactly the same you can just put
| up with the inevitable discomfort from where the original
| doesn't translate into the copy.
| dwb wrote:
| Don't be so anti-intellectual, there's enough of that
| around. A simple problem is going to have a small set of
| simple design solutions; the philosophising readily admits
| that. Nothing's getting in your way.
| AIorNot wrote:
| Creativity is a very big part of design, these Gen AI tools
| allow for stepping through a lot of variations and creative
| ideas very quickly, even creating working artifacts and
| protoypes on the fly and iterating rapidly
|
| This speed and variation wins for me. But yes without a
| designers eye laziness can get lost in slop design too..
|
| To me the value of Gen Ai is an accelerant (not slop factory)
| for ideation and solutions not a replacement of the human
| owning the process.. but laziness ususally wins
| jgautsch wrote:
| Extremely well said. This lesson has never been more urgently
| important than now.
| MikeNotThePope wrote:
| I see it as a great crutch until I can afford a designer.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Important take. The same applies to software 1:1
| alex_sf wrote:
| Most people just want something that looks nice. I understand
| it's deeper to someone really into it, but the rest of us are
| fine with it.
| ModernMech wrote:
| That's mostly a matter of aesthetics, not design.
| timcarlock wrote:
| I agree, though I'd offer a counter-point to the implied idea
| that tools like this stifle exploration and creativity.
|
| I'm an engineer who also loves design. I've read a lot of the
| books (including the one referenced), I know some concepts and
| terminology, and I understand the general process -- but I'll
| never be a professional designer. My knowledge is limited, and
| I find most design tools so complex they actually get in the
| way of problem exploration and creativity.
|
| For people like me, this tools removes the friction which
| actually prevents me from being more focused on the valuable
| parts of the design process. I can more easily discover and
| learn new concepts, and ultimately spend more time being
| creative and exploring the problem space.
| pilgrim0 wrote:
| There's no conflict here. Using a tool to automate what you
| have validated to be the trivial parts of a production
| process is the proper use of the tool. Professional designers
| also use this bias. For instance, I might recognize that
| creating a custom font or illustration is not core to my
| solution, so I can employ an off the shelf font or
| illustration and focus, say, in the written content. Same
| principle. The problem is most people won't even acknowledge
| or validate the essential aspects of the solution and just
| iterate mindlessly.
| skydhash wrote:
| The issue is that UI design has different constraints
| compared to general graphic design, just like product design
| is not sculplture. Most UI designers only care about the
| visual aspects while neglecting the interactive aspect.
|
| A whiteboard or a wireframing software would be better,
| because it lets you focus first on the interactive part. And
| once that's solved, the visual part is easier.
| akiarie wrote:
| This is such a beautiful distillation of everything I believe
| about the dangers of over-reliance on AI. I implore thee, good
| sir, to write a longer essay on this.
| throwaway041207 wrote:
| Dawg, I'm just trying to keep my managers happy so I can get a
| paycheck and have health care and hit the trails on the
| weekend.
| fortzi wrote:
| I agree with all of that.
|
| However, that's not to say that many designer jobs will be
| going away, simply because for many cases, cost beats quality.
| We'll just have more things with a much lower quality.
|
| You can compare it with mass manufacturing. While some things
| are better had than not, even with low quality, we'd probably
| be better off with some things made to last, in lower quantity.
| But for 99% of the population, e.g. low quality clothing is the
| norm.
| samrus wrote:
| The tool just allows them to synthesize an implementation, but
| if its designed badly then it will fail and they will have to
| get better at design anyway. I dont see how that itself is the
| problem. The tractor didnt make farmers worse at farming even
| if they lost the strength to work an old school plow
|
| I think the challenge will be everything else the person will
| be doing. Will this person also try to coding? And financial
| management? And marketing? And operational planning? Just
| because there are tools out there for them to synthesize
| implementations of that. If so then they wont be able to get
| good at any of those. But i think the backwards pressure from
| failing at those things will bring it back to a stable
| equilibrium where you have specialists who are good at the
| abstract ideas of their field leveraging these things as a new
| abstraction layer of work, analogous to the compiler
|
| I think itll be fine
| eecc wrote:
| Well well well, that was nice read thanks!
|
| And if it's LLM the prompt or the rework were very good because
| I really liked the flow and clarity. That, or you're a really
| good writer ;)
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Until the large model output variety/mode collapse is solved,
| tools like this one will be generating monotonous slop. Very few
| people using it will be specifying each detail of what they want.
| mistic92 wrote:
| This Ai will help vibe coders but won't be better than UI/UX
| designer with experience. We saw huge difference in our app when
| we have started working with one.
| artisin wrote:
| Having generated ~250k web design images the past few months,
| I've concluded generative models, circa 2026, still suck at it.
| Presumably because the difference between an 'OK' design and a
| 'Great' one is pretty darn small and far too nuanced. That said,
| Imagen easily takes the cake for workable design creativity, but
| even then, it takes 1000ish gens to get something decent, maybe
| 200 if you aren't too picky.
| 3sdfs wrote:
| I personally dont think Anthropic thinks this is a hit product
| per se. Its all about keeping the hype alive - we all saw what
| 'SaaS-polcalypse' did.
|
| The amount of hype is too much for me - its smoke and mirrors.
| A firm that knew it was on track to change the world (as much
| as they have been boosting) would not do this. Much like how
| Apple kept complete silence about the iPhone and then shocked
| the world.
| taytus wrote:
| Anthropic is making the exact same mistake OpenAI did: lack of
| focus. Release, release, release, all good apps, all full of
| bugs. This is a massive mess and people aren't talking enough
| about how bad all of this is.
| 3sdfs wrote:
| I think its hilarious.
|
| BUt what it really shows is there's no vision. If you had a
| vision and coherent strategy you'd concentrate resources - not
| dilute them across a myriad of projects.
| 9rx wrote:
| To be fair, the vision isn't achievable yet. More training
| data is needed. These projects spring up to try and compel
| users into offering up training information in the niches
| that need more data. They don't really have to be good, or
| even long-lasting, if they satisfy the goal of getting the
| data sought after.
| boc wrote:
| I think you're missing the larger point: software is about to
| be insanely easy to generate. Anthropic is churning out new
| products because they can basically spin these things up in a
| week, so there's really no "cost" to them in a traditional
| strategic sense.
|
| The US had the atom bomb for a few years before anyone else had
| it. Anthropic has mythos now before anyone else - they are
| probably using it to churn out as many software clones as
| possible before someone else catches up.
| SpyCoder77 wrote:
| This explains why Mike Krieger left the board of Figma
| (https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/anthropic-cpo-leaves-figma...)
| SilverElfin wrote:
| Wow. So he was on their board, learning all about how their
| business works and what they're working on, and then launches a
| competitor? Is that really legal?
| nevir wrote:
| Especially considering this is very very similar to Figma
| Make
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Is there a way one can do DTP using LLMs? InDesign only
| integrates image generating, if I'm not mistaken. .
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| LLMs still seem to really struggle with layout. These design
| tools seem to work well for designs that flow naturally like
| webpages.
|
| But try and design say an "An A4 poster with a hero image, main
| text saying this, details next to the image and fine print at
| bottom" and you end up with pretty poor results.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| Did anyone see what happened to Figma's stock? Its crazy that
| just an announcement from Anthropic can move the market.
| raviisoccupied wrote:
| I am not an engineer, I can't look at code and determine if it is
| good, performant, or elegant. However, I can look at designs and
| make a judgement. I'm curious to see how Claude Design changes
| how I think about AI and its capabilities.
| hkpack wrote:
| If you are not a software engineer you can judge code the same
| way as you can judge design while not being a designer.
|
| It is that in one case it is obvious for you that you don't
| understand what you are looking at, and in another, for some
| reason, it is not.
| raviisoccupied wrote:
| >If you are not a software engineer you can judge code the
| same way as you can judge design while not being a designer.
|
| Very true.
| khoury wrote:
| To people saying its replacing Lovable. It's still missing the
| ability to deploy right from the app with a backend ready to go.
| I'm sure it will get there tho.
| stopachka wrote:
| Here's a 2-line prompt that gives Claude Design a backend:
|
| ```
|
| <YOUR APP IDEA HERE>
|
| ----
|
| To get your credentials and learn about InstantDB, fetch this
| URL:
|
| https://instantdb.com/llm-rules/create-app/AGENTS.md
|
| ```
|
| Every cURL request to AGENTS.md spins up a new backend and
| splices in the credentials.
|
| I used it to build this multiplayer pelican game:
|
| https://349b7470-3747-49e7-8ece-960a45b0b2da.claudeuserconte...
|
| Disclaimer: I am the founder of InstantDB
| khutorni wrote:
| Curious to see it, but the linked page says "authentication
| required".
| kingofbits wrote:
| Hmm.. i don't like prompting my way to fix pixel decisions.
|
| Fed it my figma file to it and creating a design system. And
| yeah, it looks like it, but it's still wayyy off at the same time
| poly2it wrote:
| I'm not sure if I'm holding it wrong, but at these usage rates, I
| can hardly see this being useful for designers in their daily
| work. In two prompts using the Max 20x plan, it consumed 11% of
| my weekly limit for Claude Design, which is separate from your
| normal limits. A day of work would exhaust over four weeks of
| usage. Is this meant for intermittent use only? Lately I've been
| getting the feeling that Anthropic is forgetting how absurdly
| much we are already paying for these tools, compared to
| conventional development tools, or even competing inference
| providers.
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| Same for me. It jumped to 11% on the first prompt and now
| increasing steadily. I think I will hit the limits without
| seeing a hi-fi version.
| raphman wrote:
| Yeah. I'm only on the Pro plan and immediately reached my
| weekly Claude Design quota by having it create a slide template
| (with much too small text) and three versions of a system
| dashboard design (rather nice). No iterations.
|
| Another thing: I realized how much I hate waiting for Claude to
| finish its thing. With UI designs, a quick interaction loop
| between tool and user feels much more important than with code.
| luckylion wrote:
| 11% of $50 -- did you get $5.50 of value out of it? Would a
| designer have charged you more then $5.50 to create the same?
| necatiozmen wrote:
| https://getdesign.md/ provides more accurate design system
| extraction than Claude design. Could be use vice-versa
| rirze wrote:
| The sites seem to be all of the same format-- with different
| color palettes as the main offering point here.
|
| A little misleading, as I thought they would showcase different
| types of site design entirely.
| roelb wrote:
| Let's not fool ourselves: their goal isn't to build a design
| tool, it's another training tool for a field where training data
| is hard to collect. We collectively reinforce predictions to
| sharpen the models. The pattern is clear across all their
| products. This is training for future one-shot generative UIs.
| UIs are already generative; this will scale that up to a world
| where applications are mostly UI-less.
| bobkb wrote:
| The design process was completely dictated by Figma. After the
| demise of Adobe XD, Invison etc they were the only option. Happy
| to see alternatives entering to save us from the curse of Figma !
| Draiken wrote:
| Nice video but the expectations vs reality is brutal: provide it
| with an actual PDF with a design system, wait for 30min and the
| entire thing is stuck.
|
| You talk to it, it consumes "usage" and no design system created.
|
| Had a similar experience with their online code sessions.
|
| All this slop generated code is so freaking bad. We'll get
| drowned in so much slop code that at some point only these
| garbage machines will be able to "work" with it.
| ozten wrote:
| Every day is Christmas. Not enough time to play with our new toys
| before the next batch drops. Insane.
| florakel wrote:
| For me it was the missing piece when working with Claude Code. I
| am a PM by formation so neither do I know how to design nor do I
| know how to code but I am pretty good at describing what I want
| and why. I just played with Claude Design for a while and it made
| it really easy to explore different solutions, reorganize the
| interface, adjust little detail with the "comment" function, move
| buttons around, etc. Then export to Claude code including the
| design system, and I spend way less time writing a spec and can
| focus more on corner cases and the ugly details. 2 years ago I
| still had to hire a freelance designer and a developer for small
| projects, now for the fraction of the cost I am totally
| independent and can iterate as much as I want. We always mention
| that "the design is not unique" or "the software architecture is
| not clean and the code to verbose" - I get it I managed Series C
| startup product teams before I got sick of the VC shit show. Now
| I am working mostly with lifestyle businesses and SMBs that have
| the ambition to be profitable - and average is good enough for
| them. They gain access to custom designed software for specific
| use cases which was completely out of reach for them 3 years ago.
| Custom solutions meant working with mediocre, overpriced agencies
| creating "solutions" with Wordpress. Anything I can do with the
| Claude stack is on higher level at a fraction of the cost. And as
| long as it works and looks good those business don't give a **
| about unique design and scalable software engineering.
| nektro wrote:
| oh. i was expecting this to be like claude's brand guidelines
| mbesto wrote:
| Why on earth is Canva parternering here? This is literally eating
| their world.
| saxelsen wrote:
| Agree, but maybe they worry they'll be even more irrelevant if
| they don't partner? Keep your enemies close...
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| Because it will eat their world either way?
| lukev wrote:
| I would bet that Canva's bet is that companies will always want
| a "last mile" of manual control, even if only for the Queen's
| Duck effect. If Canva is the default, zero friction path for
| that, great for them.
|
| The alternative is to not hop on the AI bandwagon, or run an
| "also ran" AI story, and both those scenarios (I expect) game
| out worse given the current zeitgeist.
| howdareme wrote:
| Does anyone know how they turn html to enable powerpoints so
| seamlessly?
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| So I guess I should just give up on my dream of having a useful
| AI assistant for day to day "human" tasks. We're just hell bent
| on replacing humans in jobs.
| justonepost2 wrote:
| "human in the loop" is downstream of what nature does already
|
| nature beckons its creatures to become whatever they must
| become to be useful in the greater living ecosystem (the loop)
|
| when you can't be useful in the loop you get flushed out of
| existence
|
| humans who can't be useful will also thus be buffered out of
| existence
| zahlman wrote:
| Am I the only one who gets annoyed at "design" being used to mean
| specifically _UI_ design without qualification or warning?
| tristanb wrote:
| My feedback for whatever it's worth as a 25yr design veteran.
|
| * Massive token usage, some small tasks burned through $50 of
| credits and did not offer $50 of value.
|
| * Terrible at logo work. Comically bad. This is something that is
| "hard" so it could add great value if it could deliver.
|
| * Repeatedly forgot prior feedback - when iterating it would re-
| implement prior iterations after being told why we didn't want
| that result which made for a very frustrating UX.
|
| * Prone to adding visual clutter - kept adding extra elements
| that look "pretty" but add no value to the user.
|
| * Seems better at "pretty" vs user focused / UX.
|
| * Did not do a good job at using my existing design / UI library
|
| * REALLY wanted to start from scratch. Could not be coaxed into
| designing part of an application, it wanted to redesign the whole
| thing.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > * Terrible at logo work. Comically bad. This is something
| that is "hard" so it could add great value if it could deliver.
|
| OK but what we really want to know, what's it like when it
| comes to drawing pelicans riding on bicycles?
| tristanb wrote:
| To be fair, i did not ask for a logo with a pelican in it.
| gck1 wrote:
| I'm curious, is there anything out there that will get you the
| 80% of logo work? Claude opus always came closest to me as a
| non-designer, but it was always still something far from
| usable.
| tristanb wrote:
| Haven't found it yet. The component parts seems to be close.
| Opus is much better at drawing SVG than it used to be.
| dagss wrote:
| Get the draft using pixel generators and convert the end
| result with svgai.org.
| Sateeshm wrote:
| Just curious, what $ would you have considered worth it for the
| output you actually got?
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I think it's clear that Anthropic are leading the industry right
| now and I believe it's because they are better at using their own
| tools to develop software than anyone else. I suspect that trend
| will accelerate.
| davebren wrote:
| Remember, every product they release expands the scope of their
| non-compete clause, and they like their lawsuits.
| timsuchanek wrote:
| Rate exceeded.
| einrealist wrote:
| Good for crunching out some prototypes, ideas and getting
| inspirations I guess. Two prompts - the initial one and one
| refinement - took about ten minutes and used up 90% of the token
| budget. I wonder what the real costs are. After the IPO, they
| will no longer be able to subsidize token costs. The question
| will then be whether it's still cheap enough just for prototypes,
| ideas and inspiration.
| anonu wrote:
| As long as tokens cost less than humans people will pay for
| them. If you're human you need to differentiate yourself bigly
| from what will quickly become mainstream AI slop.
| einrealist wrote:
| True. I didn't expect it to provide novel designs. Maybe
| Anthropic should find a better replacement for 'Design'.
|
| In my example, I expected it to create UI elements for a
| business application / expert system. And it did fine. In
| fact, I believe its perfect for creating average and
| functional designs. Its a better way to test variations of
| UIs for expert systems. But I want to know what the actual
| costs are.
| stephencoyner wrote:
| The labs team absolutely cooked with this. As a designer who's
| been using Claude Code a lot to make better prototypes, I still
| go back to mockups for comparing many iterations, collecting
| precise feedback with comments, and documenting decisions for
| decks or sharing with other departments like product marketing.
| This seems to solve for all of these use cases (or at least start
| to).
|
| It's also just a beautiful product. The interaction model,
| styling and integrations via exporting is all super thoughtful
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Sigh, same old, rusty design.
| preston-kwei wrote:
| I think UI quality is going to stop being as important when
| anybody can just generate an "average" UI that is good enough in
| minutes.
|
| Ultimately, this really just shifts the focus towards product
| design and ideation rather than UI design.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| Wonder how Canva were roped into this, Claude Design will just
| replace them from what I read?
| bibimsz wrote:
| nice!
| Aperocky wrote:
| Isn't this just going to be AI slop but on a design level?
|
| It's not X, it's Y! all over again?
| eagerpace wrote:
| Very mid. If you have any experience building your own UI kit,
| this will just slow you down.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| I'm quite successful doing UI with a proper design system,
| variables.css, atoms, molecules and organisms and constantly
| sticking to that. Claude seems to work well with it.
|
| I explore designs in Claude Desktop, and once I'm satisfied,
| I'll let Claude desktop handover prompts for Claude Code.
| Claude Code makes a review harness inside the actual
| application for each atom, molecule and organism, and I accept
| each of them one by one.
|
| I wonder if this is something similar, but makes the whole
| process smoother. As someone who's not particularly good at
| frontend, I'm quite happy with what all this accomplishes.
| eagerpace wrote:
| You have a great process. I'm doing something similar, fine
| with Tailwind as a base and just build my own components from
| there. I think this will help entry-level people develop a
| similar process so perhaps it's great for that.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| I just gave Claude Design a whirl. I'm not impressed,
| compared to what I was using: it actually seems less
| structured than what I need.
|
| What I _really_ don 't like is that this tool maintains its
| own "state": I want everything as markdown files in my git
| repo, not as some arbitrary black box blob inside
| Anthropic's cloud.
| d_silin wrote:
| I tried and not impressed. Even latest and greatest LLMs still
| have very poor understanding of geometry and numbers.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Anything but solve real problems
|
| Anything but that
| crambelsoupy wrote:
| I'm a max plan customer, use Anthropic products A LOT and am
| generally impressed with Claude Code. But this is not even close
| to being ready for release. Below is the transcript of me trying
| to initialize a design system. Pretty disappointing, this clearly
| wasn't tested by humans.
|
| Exact Transcript as follows:
|
| -- Claude: Let me fix these precisely: <empty>
|
| -- Me: ok
|
| -- Claude: <empty>
|
| -- Me: hello?
|
| -- Claude: <empty>
|
| -- Me: there's still some issues with 01 live and 02 - your
| business.
|
| -- Claude: <empty>
|
| -- Me: hello?
|
| -- Claude: Sorry about that. Let me look at those two and figure
| out what's still wrong. <empty>
|
| --- Me: hello?
|
| -- Claude: Screenshot _illo_check.html Viewing image
| illustration-pillar-1.svg Viewing image illustration-pillar-2.svg
| <empty>
| afro88 wrote:
| I got a lot of <empty> as well. But was able to get a slide
| deck out of it before that happened, and it was reasonably
| good. Not 1-shot good, but better than what I have gotten out
| of Opus 4.6 with a skill previously
| alunchbox wrote:
| I don't really care about the web builder, a better slide deck
| creator I'm down for with MCP capabilities, pulling in things
| like Atlassian & Dyantrace metrics for slides would be nice
| including github issues etc.
| melbourne_mat wrote:
| I see a lot of responses here taking the purist line: that it's
| not real design and customers will know the difference. I suspect
| it's close enough in many cases that customers won't know or
| won't care. Likely it will have a big impact on design
| employment.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| Reading, writing, thinking, code, design jobs are gone. Looks
| like only onlyfans remains. How long before AI can take over
| onlyfans?
| xandrius wrote:
| If you think like that, you're already gone.
| josefrichter wrote:
| well, the AI models are already a thing and you can't tell it's
| AI. so maybe they're already taking over and nobody noticed.
| speak_on wrote:
| OF will be replaced before all the other jobs in this list.
| OF's main "product" is fantasies. A fast, local, uncensored,
| tunable video model will end it.
| sizzle wrote:
| Grok already proved it was possible to replace that nsfw genre
| Strom wrote:
| OnlyFans already has a lot of AI generated content. If you look
| at the usual scammer gathering places, you'll see a bunch of
| dudes discussing the latest trends in polishing their virtual
| OF models.
| josefrichter wrote:
| Import/export _anywhere_ not including Figma is diabolical.
| Otherwise it looks fantastic!
| tiberriver256 wrote:
| This thing is... not great...
| jweir wrote:
| This but attached targeting a 3D printer.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| Modern Figma design libraries are one of the best things to
| happen to product teams in the last 20 years.
|
| Reusable components. Shared styles. Auto layout. Variants. Design
| tokens. So many useful plugins! Interactive prototypes. Dev mode
| handoff. Versioned libraries. A single source of truth keeping
| designers, engineers, and PMs speaking the same language.
|
| It's fucking bliss when you use it right. And best of all, anyone
| on the team can build with the legos the designers gave us!
|
| Teams finally started treating the design system like
| infrastructure instead of decoration.
|
| Then Figma Make showed up.
|
| It generates pages that ignore your components, skip your tokens,
| and treat every screen like a fresh snowflake. Looks fine in the
| mockup. Lands like a brick on the dev team. Now every page is
| bespoke and every handoff is a rebuild. Fucking sucks.
|
| We had it all figured out, then we fucked it up.
|
| AI was supposed to accelerate momentum. But it just so completely
| lacks maturity. AI Tools are dragging teams back to 2010, when
| every page was a Photoshop file (with way too many layers and
| shitty names for them) and none of the designers can agree on
| what radius to assign to their buttons.
|
| Good design systems are a discipline. If your AI tool doesn't
| respect the library, it's not a designer. It's an intern with a
| Molotov cocktail waiting to destroy your productivity.
|
| I haven't used Claude Design yet, I'll try it, but I LOVE Figma,
| and I hate Figma Make. I don't have high hopes for Claude here.
| Sateeshm wrote:
| I've been building a similar tool since Tuesday with CC and got
| very far, More thought out features and interface then this.
| Applications have no moat, when you can build it in a week.
|
| Really hope Anthropic didn't notice my ingenious work and quickly
| copy it.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| Why doesn't it have an "Export to Figma" button?
| Unsponsoredio wrote:
| the real unlock here isn't the design output. it's that non-
| designers can now have a visual conversation instead of writing a
| 3 page spec that nobody reads.
|
| half the design problems I've seen weren't bad taste. they were
| bad communication between the person who knew what they wanted
| and the person who could build it.
| DecoPerson wrote:
| This isn't going to replace Figma. It's going to replace the
| people who use Figma.
|
| My 76yo Dad just used Claude Design to make a simple commercial
| tenancy/lease management CRUD app. We handed what he built to
| Claude Code to implement within my existing business tech stack.
| It perfectly followed my coding & testing playbooks (basically a
| multi-file CLAUDE.md with prompt & command hooks to evaluate
| conformance). It works... exactly as my Dad imagined.
|
| Now, mind you, my Dad had some outdated UI expectations (he asked
| Claude Design to style use a Windows 98 aesthetic!), but my point
| is: we just built a fully-functional, deeply tested, domain-
| expert-designed app, in less than a day.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| I don't like the "I canceled my x subscription" hype posts, but
| I did cancel Figma today. We've barely used it in months and
| this was the nail in the coffin.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I've said it many times since 2022: Many wrapper startups and
| even billion dollar companies are living on borrowed time, until
| the big dogs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) simply release their
| products as a built-in function.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Also, I'll echo some of the other users here: I think some of
| these AI-giants are going for the Google route, where they
| launch a wide range of products to lock in users to their
| suite. Switching between models by provider is quite fluid
| these days. Becoming reliant on a product suite is much more
| sticky.
|
| The big question is, of course, how invested will they (the
| companies) be in their products? Will it be a re-run of Google
| where far too many products end up being scrapped after a year
| or two?
| FrankRay78 wrote:
| I wonder if this is the death of true design.
| vaguemit wrote:
| works crazily
| britannio wrote:
| 12 prompts and my weekly usage on the 5x Max plan is up :(
| paustint wrote:
| Are you sure? I looked at my Claude usage dashboard and design
| has its own usage bucket not tied to anything else.
|
| Design usage shouldn't impact code usage.
| gcanyon wrote:
| A lot of people here are saying this will never replace human
| creativity. It's difficult to know ahead of time which things AI
| (or more broadly, technology) will succeed at and which it will
| (for now) fail at. So it's good that people are _trying_ to apply
| AI to everything: some things will fail, but some we expect will
| fail will not, and if we had followed our intuition we wouldn 't
| have tried and never would have succeeded.
|
| Semi-relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1425/
| m3kw9 wrote:
| People often confuse UI with UX, LLMs are very often severely bad
| at UX.
| grimm8080 wrote:
| Huh
| mysh wrote:
| The big question is - why did they call it omelette internally?
| justinhj wrote:
| Figma is the eggs maybe
| NotGMan wrote:
| Claude used 65% of my Design budget for one run: a website (4 ref
| images and ~3 pdfs).
|
| Can't even test two designs. No idea if PDFs used up so much
| budget.
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