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

So...we can shitcan the designers and offload the work to the 10 developers still keeping the lights on?

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

Haha, that's exactly how cc was received initially. It's just autocomplete. It's useless. It can't even x. I tried to y and it gave me z. Over and over all over the internet this was the reaction. Then the bargaining began. Oh, it will maybe speed up some simple things. Like autocomplete on steroids. Maaaybe do some junior tasks once in a while. And so on...

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

I guess I had expected something like Claude Code with visual tools added on top, but that’s not what this is.

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

Well, when you put it that way, that sounds bad for designers, and, by extension, Figma.

ps. I do like commas.

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

At this point, Claude now writes > 99% of my code. I wasn't an enthusiastic early adopter; it took me a while to be willing to let go of the reins. But in tandem with LLMs getting better, I also began to realize that what happens inside the code is very rarely important enough for me to care about. Like, I care that it's secure, and performant where it needs to be, etc. -- but mostly I just care about its outputs. If it does what I want it to do, then how it does this doesn't really matter to me or my clients or my users. On the development side, my attention has focused to writing specifications and monitoring the correctness of the test suite, and > 99% of the time that's good enough. It's been a lesson in non-attachment to let go of lovingly crafting every single line of code, but the tradeoff in terms of productivity has absolutely been worth it.

What makes this viable is the fact that there's essentially a "hidden layer" (the code) upon which Claude can operate. My clients don't actually care about the code, and within certain bounds (correctness, security, performance, extensibility, etc.) it turns out that neither do I. This gives Claude a lot of latitude to solve things in its own way, and I think that's a bit part of its effectiveness.

On the other hand, with design there is no hidden layer. Every single aspect of the design is visible to the user and the customer. So the design reflects upon my work in ways that code does not. This means that the conditions which allow me to relax my grip on coding just don't exist for design. It's very difficult for me to imagine delegating design in the same way that I've become comfortable delegating coding.

That said: I suspect that the use-case for Claude Design will be for applications which today receive very little design attention. There are loads of applications where design is less than an afterthought, and the product suffers terribly for it. Delegating to Claude, in those contexts, would likely be a very big win. But for applications which already have designers obsessing over every pixel, I see a very limited role for this. Figma's market is mostly the latter -- the former, by definition, is not part of the market for design tools -- so I don't see them being threatened by this for a long time.

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

There is a bunch of repetitive work in design as well, once you start working on larger projects. Yes, everything should be setup with components/reusability and what not, but just like programmers take shortcuts sometimes, so do designers, and you have to repeat the same change across many instances/files whenever you have to pay back the "technical debt".

Probably Claude Design could be quite helpful in those cases, and the same goes for other domains too, same happens in video editing and 3D work, probably any creative effort has moments of dull, repetitive "do this change across X" where any automation would be of serious help to reduce that. It seems like a quite good thing to try to address with LLM tooling, still driven by actual humans.

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> People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate. Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs.

Maybe it will replace (a large share of) Figma users.

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

  People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate.

I think the most effective teams will be working within Claude, not within Figma.

For individual creators, this will definitely replace Figma. I bought Sketch for use as an individual creator because I wanted to create mocks before coding them. There's no way I'd make the same purchase today.

Anyways, I'm sure Claude Design will incorporate some of Figma's features such as a company wide design language.