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.
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.
> There's no shame in being homogenous and obvious, though.
The real world analog is this...
The reason people (especially Americans) stay in Marriott property hotels is because they are homogenous. If all I want to do is travel to Phoenix, AZ for work I want to know that the hotel room has the same mattress, desk, TV, customer service, etc. There is real legitimate value to that. So I'll book the Courtyard in Phoenix because I know exactly what I'm going to get.
On the other hand, when I'm traveling the Amalfi Coast in Italy, I want the Airbnb experience. Sure the bed is stiff, there's no A/C, and the 80 year old door frame is hard to close, but there is something magical about it.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But that said, for a UX'er I believe there should be a bit of shame in just doing the obvious amalgam of whatever 2-3 most popular things that already exist.
If you take on the UX lens, there's a lot of flaws in a lot of popular products, but they are accepted by the market because competition is not perfect. Copying that is not great, and I do think there is a point to be made on how "fine" shouldn't be the goal.
Yeah. It's kinda funny we read blog posts, or comments complaining about the lack of a good consistent UI and then, complain that on the web "everything is boring because it's homogenous".
If people wanna have fun designing a cool, original website design, go for it. But if we need a fast, easy UI for someone that just needs get the job done, consistency/familiarity is obviously important.
> 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.
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?
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.
Having just checked my child in for their doctor appointment, 90% of web software would be dramatically improved by using very boring best practices and readable and accessible web practices.
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.
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.
I know what you mean.. and me as traditional none designer have been using bootstrap css since the start. As usually my css would look like an engineer trying toso design.
When you say old school artisnal design and weirdness do you mean something like this: (shameless plug, but relevant to design)
Everyone else is already pointing out how competent over unique is purely a positive, so I want to criticize the other implicit assumption here.
This comment is just a rehash of the increasingly outdated and incorrect assertion that LLMs can't possibly exhibit any creativity -- and it's also incorrect.
If you're yearning for "old skool artisanal weirdness of yore", look up the trend on Twitter a month or two ago of people asking Claude to make YTPs. They ended up very weird and artisanal in a way distinct from how any human would do it.
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.
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?
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.
Design is primarily craft, not art. The designers who believe they’re artists are often dangerous and toxic, coz they feel the urge to inject their “art” into everything they touch. I say that as a professional designer.
Most day to day apps and websites should be boring and usable, not truly unique or mind-blowing.
In fact, humans waste countless hours trying to figure out what is what and how things work, just because there's always some designer trying to do something nifty. And by "designer", I don't necessarily mean professionally trained designer - although the pros can be given to trying to make artistic rather than functional interfaces.
The vast majority of people using UI's want predictability. Not "guess how this UI works!" games where you have to click on things at random to figure out how the UI works.
If you are an UI designer and want to create art then fine do that in your spare time. But at work be a professional and make the UI predictable and functional above all else.
> 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?
In a direction where the AI model basically serves you everything live. No sites, no front end, just databases and model embodying them.
I mean why even code anything in the future where it is cheap and fast enough to just come up with everything each time based on each user need.
I am not saying it’s good but it’s lazy. And if one thing is for certain is that laziness prevails. Some even mistake it for progress.
But then, is human programming language really the most optimal way for an ai to steer the silicon? Some kind of bare AI OS with kernel, drivers and there in the middle a fat specialised asic ai chip to orchestrate everything.
> You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing.
The shelf-life of unique and mindblowing has reduced to a week (being generous) before it's copied by slop artists looking for a resume booster or funding, and months tops before it's part of training data for everyone. Unless you find it in that small time window everything will seem homogenous.
It could just be a systemic result; unless you deliberately take the lonely road to parts of the internet where other people aren't, you will not see unique and mind blowing things. Which by definition you can't source from a place that has a lot of users, like social media or popular forums.
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.
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.
Screen size is probably responsible for a vast majority of the homogeneous of the internet; but that a good thing. The space has matured and horrible experiences fewer. There’s a fine line between creativity and bullshit. Less bullshitting is a good thing.
p.s. Perhaps “quirky” is less because it’s simply not fulfilling? Too often it’s visual gaslighting pretending to be design?
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.
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.
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.
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.
762 comments
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.
> There's no shame in being homogenous and obvious, though.
The real world analog is this...
The reason people (especially Americans) stay in Marriott property hotels is because they are homogenous. If all I want to do is travel to Phoenix, AZ for work I want to know that the hotel room has the same mattress, desk, TV, customer service, etc. There is real legitimate value to that. So I'll book the Courtyard in Phoenix because I know exactly what I'm going to get.
On the other hand, when I'm traveling the Amalfi Coast in Italy, I want the Airbnb experience. Sure the bed is stiff, there's no A/C, and the 80 year old door frame is hard to close, but there is something magical about it.
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.
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.
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.
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 that said, for a UX'er I believe there should be a bit of shame in just doing the obvious amalgam of whatever 2-3 most popular things that already exist.
If you take on the UX lens, there's a lot of flaws in a lot of popular products, but they are accepted by the market because competition is not perfect. Copying that is not great, and I do think there is a point to be made on how "fine" shouldn't be the goal.
If people wanna have fun designing a cool, original website design, go for it. But if we need a fast, easy UI for someone that just needs get the job done, consistency/familiarity is obviously important.
> 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.
>
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.
> 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.
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.
I guess post IPO, after the insiders cash in out of lock period its irrelevant.
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.
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.
When you say old school artisnal design and weirdness do you mean something like this: (shameless plug, but relevant to design)
https://swellslots.com (surf forecast site)
The design for this was literally "90s Arcade / street fighter 2 look"
Funny enough without AI, i would not have been skilled enough to make the graphics (background, logo etc)
This comment is just a rehash of the increasingly outdated and incorrect assertion that LLMs can't possibly exhibit any creativity -- and it's also incorrect.
If you're yearning for "old skool artisanal weirdness of yore", look up the trend on Twitter a month or two ago of people asking Claude to make YTPs. They ended up very weird and artisanal in a way distinct from how any human would do it.
In fact, humans waste countless hours trying to figure out what is what and how things work, just because there's always some designer trying to do something nifty. And by "designer", I don't necessarily mean professionally trained designer - although the pros can be given to trying to make artistic rather than functional interfaces.
If you are an UI designer and want to create art then fine do that in your spare time. But at work be a professional and make the UI predictable and functional above all else.
> 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?
In a direction where the AI model basically serves you everything live. No sites, no front end, just databases and model embodying them.
I mean why even code anything in the future where it is cheap and fast enough to just come up with everything each time based on each user need.
I am not saying it’s good but it’s lazy. And if one thing is for certain is that laziness prevails. Some even mistake it for progress.
But then, is human programming language really the most optimal way for an ai to steer the silicon? Some kind of bare AI OS with kernel, drivers and there in the middle a fat specialised asic ai chip to orchestrate everything.
> how homogenous the internet has become in terms of design
I think it's because Steve Jobs killed Flash.
You might just as well bemoan the homogeneity of Windows 95 apps. All those gray buttons in the bottom right of windows.
It’s 2026 and every web application has a different menu layout, date picker, etc.
> ... because of how homogenous the internet has become...
Designs have been settling on a local maxima. If you are aware of a better hill to be climbed, please do let everyone know.
> You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing.
The shelf-life of unique and mindblowing has reduced to a week (being generous) before it's copied by slop artists looking for a resume booster or funding, and months tops before it's part of training data for everyone. Unless you find it in that small time window everything will seem homogenous.
It could just be a systemic result; unless you deliberately take the lonely road to parts of the internet where other people aren't, you will not see unique and mind blowing things. Which by definition you can't source from a place that has a lot of users, like social media or popular forums.
> since the glass effect and drop-shadows took over
And rounded corners, of course! :)
>but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing.
This is most every corporate website.
p.s. Perhaps “quirky” is less because it’s simply not fulfilling? Too often it’s visual gaslighting pretending to be design?
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.
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.
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.
- 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.