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pilgrim0 2 hours ago [-]
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.
bauerd 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
Big difference between gaining knowledge and building/maintaining cognitive skills.
monarchwadia 1 hours ago [-]
I assure you, working with LLMs is intellectually challenging, and becomes more so as the technology matures.
tempest_ 1 hours ago [-]
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.
nightski 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
baq 19 minutes ago [-]
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.
DaiPlusPlus 7 minutes ago [-]
/s/intellectually/emotionally
qingcharles 2 hours ago [-]
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.
jtbayly 1 hours ago [-]
No. It says much more than that, because it applies to many other tools that aren't AI.
eric_cc 2 hours ago [-]
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?
pilgrim0 13 minutes ago [-]
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!
skeeter2020 1 hours ago [-]
just use clipart & templates and move on then, taking your argument to the extreme and skip the AI tooling.
lyjackal 1 hours ago [-]
I think the larger part implied is the design will be crappy, because the problem was unexplored
apsurd 1 hours ago [-]
your paragraph is parent's point in action.
If only all great works could just be an X post!
timcarlock 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
eric_cc 2 hours ago [-]
> 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?
kbenson 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
idle_zealot 37 minutes ago [-]
> 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 22 minutes ago [-]
> 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 17 minutes ago [-]
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.
apsurd 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jimbokun 20 minutes ago [-]
Then no design is taking place.
nekooooo 2 hours ago [-]
how nihlistic
skeeter2020 1 hours ago [-]
Jobs has entered the chat and has some strong words for you...
MikeNotThePope 52 minutes ago [-]
I see it as a great crutch until I can afford a designer.
yard2010 50 minutes ago [-]
Important take. The same applies to software 1:1
jgautsch 2 hours ago [-]
Extremely well said. This lesson has never been more urgently important than now.
alex_sf 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
AIorNot 2 hours ago [-]
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
mathisfun123 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
moregrist 2 hours ago [-]
> 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 2 hours ago [-]
> 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).
jimbokun 14 minutes ago [-]
So the definition of art is work except you don’t get paid?
mathisfun123 4 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
stackbutterflow 1 hours ago [-]
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.
throwfaraway4 2 hours ago [-]
What a sad take. For the sake of human satisfaction I hope this is a minority perspective.
mathisfun123 2 hours ago [-]
> 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 1 hours ago [-]
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 42 minutes ago [-]
>"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 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ljm 4 hours ago [-]
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.
mjr00 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ezst 4 hours ago [-]
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).
jerf 2 hours ago [-]
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.
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
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.
jimbokun 8 minutes ago [-]
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.
AlienRobot 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
BeetleB 2 hours ago [-]
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 37 minutes ago [-]
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"
bombcar 2 hours ago [-]
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).
cruffle_duffle 3 hours ago [-]
Shadcn and friends are the modern equivalent of old vb custom controls.
Fordec 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jimbokun 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
jrimbault 4 hours ago [-]
> 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 2 hours ago [-]
But it's possible to have usability and a unique design character, if you use a human designer.
whatever1616 27 minutes ago [-]
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 25 minutes ago [-]
If you work with an exceptional one, sure
Thanemate 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
soraki_soladead 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Fordec 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rustystump 3 hours ago [-]
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.
jimbokun 4 minutes ago [-]
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.
whatever1616 19 minutes ago [-]
> 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 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
pc86 59 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
the__alchemist 3 hours ago [-]
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.
enraged_camel 4 hours ago [-]
>> 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 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ilikecakeandpie 4 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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.
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
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.
raffael_de 4 hours ago [-]
there is no problem with yellow, but if everything is yellow then that's a problem. that's the point.
pc86 54 minutes ago [-]
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?
AstroBen 3 hours ago [-]
"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.
levmiseri 4 hours ago [-]
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.
pc86 51 minutes ago [-]
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 14 minutes ago [-]
Thats rather unavoidable to some extent anything thats better is going to be somewhat different
ljm 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Bombthecat 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
slopinthebag 3 hours ago [-]
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.
jjk166 3 hours ago [-]
> 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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
crazygringo 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
thunky 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ljm 4 hours ago [-]
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.
qazxcvbnmlp 4 hours ago [-]
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.
4 hours ago [-]
adriand 4 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
armchairhacker 3 hours ago [-]
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).
threetonesun 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
> 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 4 hours ago [-]
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.
p_stuart82 2 hours ago [-]
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.
carimura 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
nunodonato 3 hours ago [-]
> 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 7 minutes ago [-]
The small web still has a unique soul to it. dimden.dev is a good example.
tcp_handshaker 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 46 minutes ago [-]
Previously you'd buy an admin template from ThemeForest for $10, slap your logo on it and and be done.
4 hours ago [-]
quacked 4 hours ago [-]
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.
rob 4 hours ago [-]
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 1 hours ago [-]
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 21 minutes ago [-]
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.
This aestethic is useful though for SaaS apps and the like that know themselves to be generic.
afavour 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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.
sieabahlpark 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
voidfunc 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Bridged7756 2 hours ago [-]
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.
slopinthebag 3 hours ago [-]
The early web was filled with wacky and unique websites and it's a ubiquitously loved period of the internet.
voidfunc 7 minutes ago [-]
The web was, the desktop... less so. Not until the late 90's when stuff started to get wacky.
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
operatingthetan 2 hours ago [-]
>but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing.
This is most every corporate website.
est 3 hours ago [-]
> how homogenous the internet has become in terms of design
I think it's because Steve Jobs killed Flash.
codegeek 4 hours ago [-]
"Twitter Bootstrap". Havent heard that term for years. The OG of CSS frameworks.
coffeebeqn 3 hours ago [-]
Most companies I’ve worked at still use bootstrap or something that looks very much like it for most internal web tools
volkk 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
By the nature of LLMs, there's no reason to think it would.
rustystump 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Growtika 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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 34 minutes ago [-]
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
GenerWork 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Bilal_io 4 hours ago [-]
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.
qkeast 4 hours ago [-]
>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 3 hours ago [-]
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.
atonse 4 hours ago [-]
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.
EMM_386 52 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
simplyluke 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
> good writing, good art, thoughtful code architecture
If you are talking about a consumer product, one of these is not like the others.
nothinkjustai 3 hours ago [-]
Spending 5 minutes on the most user facing, tactile part of your products? Sounds like less of a builder and more of a slopper to me :)
hugeBirb 3 hours ago [-]
Ah, slopper is hilarious. Too long has the title of builder just been an excuse to make dog shit UI and excusing yourself. If you're going to build user-facing tools, good UI/UX is a requirement not an option. Couldn't imagine this excuse flying in any other industry. Yeah I just made a chair where all 4 legs are different lengths and the back rest is in the middle of the seat, "I'm just more of a builder"
atonse 3 hours ago [-]
Would you like to attempt a more good faith interpretation on what I meant, and address that (you can even imagine doing this in front a user/client and iterating in minutes with them, ultimately getting even better outcomes), instead of inventing the most un-generous interpretation of what I said, that I'm just adding AI slop?
nothinkjustai 2 hours ago [-]
I don’t think I can interpret it in better faith. You’re excusing low quality output by calling yourself a “builder” (meaningless term btw), is “slopper” not an accurate term here? How else would you describe somebody who spends 5 minutes prompting an LLM on one of the most important aspects of a product?
Everyone who creates something is a “builder”, that term doesn’t excuse someone from not putting effort in. I don’t care if you aren’t a designer, it’s about the effort you put into your work :)
dugidugout 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Perhaps this phrasing is what invited the interpretation you seem to be annoyed with.
There is not much to gain by suggesting everyone is simply bad faith.
islewis 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ziml77 4 hours ago [-]
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.
eric_cc 2 hours ago [-]
> 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 1 hours ago [-]
Why can't it replace Figma? Seems like Figma is a thin UI layer on top of Claude Design.
whywhywhywhy 2 hours ago [-]
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.
motoxpro 3 hours ago [-]
Thats like saying Claude Code is targeted at coders who cant code (which I know some poeple believe)
seizethecheese 4 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
> 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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
aurareturn 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe Figma is better for large teams. Even here, teams are getting smaller and smaller.
But for me, I will never use it again.
4 hours ago [-]
3sdfs 2 hours ago [-]
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.
2 hours ago [-]
siva7 6 minutes ago [-]
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?
qingcharles 2 hours ago [-]
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.
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 1 hours ago [-]
Stitch with Google really doesn't work for me. Half created screens, random buttons. Hope Claude does better.
codegeek 4 hours ago [-]
On the other hand, Canva made a genius move to partner with Claude for this. One of my favorite products as a non designer.
AstroBen 3 hours ago [-]
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.
ex-aws-dude 4 hours ago [-]
Isn't this something Figma could easily integrate? Then you'd have the best of both worlds
GenerWork 4 hours ago [-]
You already can use Claude Code with Figma. This is looking more like a Figma competitor than just Claude Code.
ktimespi 3 hours ago [-]
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
chopete3 3 hours ago [-]
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.
_aavaa_ 4 hours ago [-]
I’d be more concerned with the stock’s trajectory (continual decline) since the IPO than with whatever happened since 11AM.
danish00111 3 hours ago [-]
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.
rvz 4 hours ago [-]
This tells me that Lovable is certainly not worth $6.6B.
techpression 2 hours ago [-]
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).
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 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
>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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
taylorlapeyre 3 hours ago [-]
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
bauerd 1 hours ago [-]
They are building infrastructure components that they will soon wire together with an orchestration layer. Managed agents, scheduled tasks, workflow webhook automation.
jjcm 10 minutes ago [-]
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...
taylorlapeyre 1 hours ago [-]
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 37 minutes ago [-]
It would be interesting if they’re dogfooding it by building these research projects on those building blocks
spyckie2 2 hours ago [-]
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.
zormino 2 hours ago [-]
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
aurareturn 2 hours ago [-]
Every Anthropic release uses Claude models.
Not every Google product release used Google search. Some of them were completely outside of Google's domain.
3sdfs 2 hours ago [-]
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.
tomashertus 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
weinzierl 3 hours ago [-]
"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 3 hours ago [-]
how does Opus see the output? via HTML (which Typst can output) or visual tokens?
ossa-ma 3 hours ago [-]
How does it compare to LaTeX?
shrinks99 1 hours ago [-]
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 1 hours ago [-]
It's so fast that the first using it I thought something must have gone wrong, and that was a 40 page document.
ossa-ma 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
> 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 4 hours ago [-]
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.
qkeast 3 hours ago [-]
>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.
pixel_popping 7 minutes ago [-]
why would an AI model not capable of doing something unique? That's literally false.
colonelspace 26 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
toomim 4 hours ago [-]
"An AI model is incapable of that."
"Good designers will reject this."
^ Famous last words.
Sir_Twist 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ossa-ma 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Lalabadie 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ctoth 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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.
3 hours ago [-]
monooso 58 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
Oras 4 hours ago [-]
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.
dayvid 3 hours ago [-]
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
sobellian 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Lihh27 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
recitedropper 4 hours ago [-]
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.
paul7986 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
What career are you aiming to switch to?
itsevrgrn 2 hours ago [-]
i'm also curious what you're switching to
jayd16 4 hours ago [-]
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.
cjf101 3 hours ago [-]
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.
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 !
ej88 5 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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.
roelb 37 minutes ago [-]
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.
hudo 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
Fourth thing in a row they've announced that I wanted to try and couldn't.
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
alpb 4 hours ago [-]
It's rolling out progressively throughout the day.
baal80spam 4 hours ago [-]
Perfect, that's CC design for you :-)
sbszllr 5 hours ago [-]
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.
fassssst 3 hours ago [-]
It’s because they embrace their coding models to ship new things at light speed.
irishcoffee 4 hours ago [-]
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.
embedding-shape 4 hours ago [-]
> 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 3 hours ago [-]
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
4 hours ago [-]
irishcoffee 1 hours ago [-]
Who said I was surprised? :)
embedding-shape 48 minutes ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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?
sbszllr 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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.
xpe 4 hours ago [-]
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)
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 4 hours ago [-]
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
sunnybeetroot 53 minutes ago [-]
Which doesn’t work for a native iOS app, so it’s HTML rendering something that would then be rewritten in iOS I guess.
jayd16 4 hours ago [-]
"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 3 hours ago [-]
Depends of what you prompt it... if you tell it to use react and shadcn, it will use that.
psadri 4 hours ago [-]
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.
cmrx64 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
Do you have examples of "natural" UI that you like?
jayd16 4 hours ago [-]
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.
namanyayg 5 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
12+ hours a day regularly?
What a toxic workplace :/
Sol- 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
Exactly the engineers I've talked to are all so EXCITED
H8crilA 4 hours ago [-]
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.
adrian_b 3 hours ago [-]
"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.
2 hours ago [-]
namanyayg 3 hours ago [-]
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 1 hours ago [-]
Why? Do the extra hours give you more stocks?
namanyayg 25 minutes ago [-]
Some factors to consider are promotions, pip, or just being fired
4 hours ago [-]
wmeredith 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
fg137 3 hours ago [-]
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.
namanyayg 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
I thought that's what their product was for
/s
_the_inflator 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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.
simonreiff 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
Bridged7756 2 hours ago [-]
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.
I'm not a big tailwind fan, but keeping styling in a separate file feels like a net negative
AstroBen 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
sweetheart 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Bridged7756 2 hours ago [-]
Btw are you from Oaxaca? Nice to see another Mexican in here.
necatiozmen 45 minutes ago [-]
https://getdesign.md/ provides more accurate design system extraction than Claude design. Could be use vice-versa
rirze 33 minutes ago [-]
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.
ozten 30 minutes ago [-]
Every day is Christmas. Not enough time to play with our new toys before the next batch drops. Insane.
lmeyerov 4 hours ago [-]
When Anthropic's CPO left Figma's board this week, that was my first question . Oof.
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.
artisin 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
kingofbits 1 hours ago [-]
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
raviisoccupied 1 hours ago [-]
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 1 hours ago [-]
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 37 minutes ago [-]
>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 1 hours ago [-]
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.
jmkni 4 hours ago [-]
Unfortunate that linking code from your computer doesn't work with Firefox
Very interesting though
m_w_ 4 hours ago [-]
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.
atonse 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
Thank you, I should RTFA next time.
maerF0x0 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
reluctant_dev 4 hours ago [-]
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.
39 minutes ago [-]
arbuge 3 hours ago [-]
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.
bilekas 3 hours ago [-]
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.
game_the0ry 2 hours ago [-]
Did anyone see what happened to Figma's stock? Its crazy that just an announcement from Anthropic can move the market.
firefoxd 4 hours ago [-]
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.
aanet 3 hours ago [-]
So.. this is why Anthropic CPO left the board of Figma
mistic92 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Draiken 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
bornfreddy 2 hours ago [-]
Is there a way one can do DTP using LLMs? InDesign only integrates image generating, if I'm not mistaken. .
ben8bit 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
Design is very hard to verbally describe, and AI doesn't have good judgement on what is easy to use or attractive.
ben8bit 2 hours ago [-]
I think it's because it's non-deterministic too. You can't iteratively improve design the same way you can code.
conradkay 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
I'd be very surprised if they're not already doing this.
hooverlabs 2 hours ago [-]
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
tzury 4 hours ago [-]
Anthropic’s roadmap is widely underappreciated; it is the company defining AI productivity today.
max_streese 3 hours ago [-]
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?
PullJosh 5 hours ago [-]
I like their emphasis on quickly prototyping many variations of a design. That seems useful, even for experienced designers.
rvz 5 hours ago [-]
Useful enough to replace Figma.
whywhywhywhy 2 hours ago [-]
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.
causal 4 hours ago [-]
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
giancarlostoro 4 hours ago [-]
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.
htrp 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Had some fun with the wireframe mode, very useful to sketch some interaction concepts
4 hours ago [-]
hmokiguess 5 hours ago [-]
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
recitedropper 5 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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?
3sdfs 2 hours ago [-]
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.
dbbk 5 hours ago [-]
"Who's the end user for this?" obviously people who use figma
young_mete 4 hours ago [-]
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.
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 3 hours ago [-]
you missed that there's an export to canva button. It will funnel users _to_ Canva.
ramathornn 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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 41 minutes ago [-]
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 1 hours ago [-]
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.
semking 2 hours ago [-]
Sorry, I hit my session limit by just reading the title
devmor 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
Claude, add a bit of whimsy to this design.
bryabaek 3 hours ago [-]
such a cheerful background music to celebrate the death of lovable, bolt.new, figma LOL
poly2it 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
jej_FundAlign 2 hours ago [-]
I just started using Claude and its amazing. I cant believe ive waited so long. Looking forward to designing
designwithjawad 3 hours ago [-]
Design industry is shaking right now.
K0IN 4 hours ago [-]
this might be a game changer (for show dont tell), and fast itterations in design meetings, to show what your thinking of.
orbital-decay 2 hours ago [-]
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.
taytus 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
wg0 4 hours ago [-]
How dangerous is this eh?
gnegggh 3 hours ago [-]
no info regarding privacy and data if you connect your repo?
firasd 4 hours ago [-]
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 × 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
teaearlgraycold 2 hours ago [-]
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.
albert_e 5 hours ago [-]
is this the Figma/Canva/Powerpoint/Keynote killer?
alpb 4 hours ago [-]
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.
weatherfun 4 hours ago [-]
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.
diatone 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Boss0565 5 hours ago [-]
Considering Canva collaborated with them, no?
Sol- 5 hours ago [-]
Maybe a collaboration with a metaphorical gun to your head.
frankdenbow 5 hours ago [-]
Canva has more expansive editing tools but I agree, it seems like a frenemies situation.
svnt 5 hours ago [-]
Or one from a place of unfounded hubris.
netdevphoenix 5 hours ago [-]
IBM also collaborated with Microsoft for the OS and we know how that ended.
strickjb9 4 hours ago [-]
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.
...
coffeebeqn 3 hours ago [-]
Claude code also came for us. Is anything sacred? Middle management?
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
RickS 4 hours ago [-]
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
MagicMoonlight 4 hours ago [-]
Interestingly, Claude Design has its own completely separate usage bar.
skwashd 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
sidrag22 3 hours ago [-]
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...
jansan 4 hours ago [-]
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.
LetsGetTechnicl 4 hours ago [-]
Oh great more slop
digitalShield 3 hours ago [-]
I use claude daily
lmf4lol 3 hours ago [-]
the tech is really cool. its amazing.
but i freaking hate this future
quotemstr 4 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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 1 hours ago [-]
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."
sudohalt 2 hours ago [-]
Lol I've vibe coded something identical to this in a day.
cdrnsf 5 hours ago [-]
Now I can visualize my bloated shadcn + Tailwind UI in advance.
lagrange77 4 hours ago [-]
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.
pembrook 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
" 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.
nagaga 4 hours ago [-]
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savanpatel 4 hours ago [-]
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wetpaws 21 minutes ago [-]
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xnx 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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 1 hours ago [-]
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
mikeaskew4 5 hours ago [-]
Thumbs down. Great design is original thought. AI is wholly incapable of that.
Go ahead and roast me.
freedomben 4 hours ago [-]
> 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 3 hours ago [-]
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.
jonlucc 4 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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.
dumfries 4 hours ago [-]
As if original thought occurs out of thin air. AI is definitely capable to take aspects of design and apply it elsewhere.
eloisant 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
IKEA hires many great designers for its furniture though.
criddell 4 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
That’s pretty true. Just look at this sites design
rglover 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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.
garrickvanburen 4 hours ago [-]
My default position: If an LLM can create it, we probably don't actually need it.
t0lo 4 hours ago [-]
If AI can create it- it's probably already been created and thought of before?
cruffle_duffle 3 hours ago [-]
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.
nothinkjustai 3 hours ago [-]
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…
seydor 4 hours ago [-]
Have you seen many original designs in the past 15 years?
cortesoft 4 hours ago [-]
Sure, great design is original thought.
Is there also a place in the world for not-great-but-good-enough design?
chasd00 4 hours ago [-]
> Great design is original thought
not really, great design in a web application is no surprises.
Jtarii 4 hours ago [-]
Great designers will make great designs no matter what tools you give them.
wolttam 4 hours ago [-]
Human inputs their idea. AI helps bring it to light faster. Human iterates.
Still human?
rbtprograms 4 hours ago [-]
i dont disagree. but there is a difference between great design and entirely acceptable and shippable design.
mupuff1234 4 hours ago [-]
Most applications just need good enough design.
subhobroto 4 hours ago [-]
> 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
esafak 4 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
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.
If only all great works could just be an X post!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
...
> 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).
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I understand your feelings but it is extremely tipical in human history to keep remembering "the good old times"
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.
But there's is "pride" in making tools people actually use without issue
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.
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.
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.
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.
Describe the idea of what you want to do, not the inscrutable steps the application requires to get there.
Why ? Since its so notoriously bad why have there been no attempts to improve it ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe it's true that yellow is just the best, and should be used in 99% of circumstances?
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.
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.
But I reckon, nobody cares. Just let Claude decide and go with it... Sad state for UX designers / researchers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is exactly what I want in a UI.
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.
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.
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.
Or “2000s aesthetic” for something before Web 2.0 (although you’ll get a generic 2000s aesthetic unless you provide more detail).
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.
Good for everybody who isn't a large company then?
So it's competent, for sure, but that is damning it with faint praise.
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?
I guess post IPO, after the insiders cash in out of lock period its irrelevant.
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.
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.
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/what_stea...
You might just as well bemoan the homogeneity of Windows 95 apps. All those gray buttons in the bottom right of windows.
This is most every corporate website.
I think it's because Steve Jobs killed Flash.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you are talking about a consumer product, one of these is not like the others.
Everyone who creates something is a “builder”, that term doesn’t excuse someone from not putting effort in. I don’t care if you aren’t a designer, it’s about the effort you put into your work :)
Perhaps this phrasing is what invited the interpretation you seem to be annoyed with.
There is not much to gain by suggesting everyone is simply bad faith.
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.
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.
Not convinced Figma cares about traditional design craft anymore.
How many such people does the world need? Probably less than 1,000. Not a very big market for Figma.
But for me, I will never use it again.
He should probably go and let someone else take the reigns.
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.
They're down 80% over the last year. Ouch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not every Google product release used Google search. Some of them were completely outside of Google's domain.
Keeping the hype alive through to IPO is critical now.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
Which needs to be done intentionally in context, not homogeneously as a rapid output of a generative tool.
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.
"Good designers will reject this."
^ Famous last words.
I will very likely be wrong on the second point.
And no, it doesn't just add ARIA to everything as is so typical by poor practitioners.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Previous comment with the prior 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47794419
I wonder what other features they're cooking right now.
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.
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...
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?
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.
Why would we want to move away from hard fought UX design lessons? Dynamic and fluid UX is infuriating.
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
What a toxic workplace :/
And money aside, it is certainly one of the most exciting companies in the world to work for.
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.
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.
Then look at the changelog of Claude Code. They are releasing daily.
/s
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.
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.
I'm not a big tailwind fan, but keeping styling in a separate file feels like a net negative
A little misleading, as I thought they would showcase different types of site design entirely.
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.
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
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.
Very true.
Very interesting though
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
> 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.
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.
Page not found Claude can help with many things, but finding this page isn’t one of them.
when logged in.
Edit: I see they have a new token tier 'Claude Design' so that's good.
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.
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.
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.
>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/...
I have been doing fine just instructing Claude code to use Tailwind and reference design documents
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.
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 :)
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?
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.
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.
That link is redirecting me to https://claude.ai/404, anyone else?
This app is pretty slick, this will funnel a huge number of customers away from Figma + Canva imo.
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
Just like with code, AI will give you something to start with, but it's still going to require tweaking and manual input.
Deriving a bland average of creativity is the saddest thing you could do. I don’t even enjoy design and I find this offensive.
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.
> 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 × 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
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.
Then Claude came for the designers with Claude Design, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a designer.
...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
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
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
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.
Now its 5 Hour usage, Weekly Usage, Claude Design, Daily Routine Runs, and the Extra Usage portion...
Maybe AI is not good at everything, yet.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Go ahead and roast me.
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.
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.
Ironically I think AI will replace researchers before it replaces artists.
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.
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.
If you treat it like a black box used to outsource your own thinking, you are holding it wrong.
I think we probably need less software, but higher quality, not more. Unfortunately AI only goes in one direction…
Is there also a place in the world for not-great-but-good-enough design?
not really, great design in a web application is no surprises.
Still human?
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
The catch is that the person making the decision might not know or care about the difference.