I used it today to take a look at my previously built design system with Logos, branding, fonts, and everything else. After a lot of annoying tweaking back and forth, finally, I got something that was satisfactory.
Then I looked at the usage and it said I had used 95% of my Claude design usage for the week!
This isn't a real tool. This is a plaything, if that's what they're providing as examples.
I used Claude Design to see how it'd spit out a design I already had been working on for some weeks, given a dense enough prompt and a decent requirements document (I did not feed it visuals). I thought the output was pretty good! It didn't match the style we're after at all but it did do some logical content grouping and made some IA decisions I decided to pull into my own explorations. Overall I left with a good impression.
And then I was scrolling Twitter, and saw someone else post their own "success story" and the design was nearly identical to the mock up Claude Design made for me. Lol. The homogenization problem will continue to plague tools like these to some degree, much in the same way AI generated text or code or imagery has a sort of homogenous tone or feel to it.
It’s really difficult to make a design that is usable, follows platform standards, yet has unique personality.
I mean, really difficult.
Coming up with a design that relies exclusively on platform standards is easy, “low-hanging fruit.”
I write stuff for iOS/MacOS/WatchOS. There’s tremendous pressure to follow platform standards. In fact, if you use SwiftUI, it’s very hard to deviate from them. SwiftUI makes it easy (crazy easy) to follow the herd, and downright miserable, if you want to blaze your own trail.
90% of the time, that’s actually a good thing. I get pretty sick of designers that refuse to compromise, and believe that their graphic opus is more important than usable UI. It’s even worse, if the designer is an engineer, with little background in graphic design.
A designer that knows how to compromise, and work with usability, is a unicorn. If you have one, keep them.
Like the code that LLMs produce, I expect the designs to be fairly low-effort, but that will be a good thing, overall. They will be effective and usable. We need more of that.
> I used it today to take a look at my previously built design system with Logos, branding, fonts, and everything else.
The fact that you are using this language tells me you are probably more advanced than the average individual, and likely have higher expectations.
My sister-in-law has a small apparel company. She’s developed quite a bit of skill over the past six years but she really struggled at the start. She had great ideas, but translating them to something she could apply was frustrating. *Anything* that could have helped her there would have been worth a look.
I had a similar experience with running out of usage quite quickly, after setting up one design system properly, and then getting pretty close with a second one. But it's a research preview - I'm sure it will change.
I was quite happy with what I pulled off using the first design system: I wanted a new footer section for my IPAAS startup, it generated four options, the fourth of which was quite good. We iterated on it for a bit, then I pulled it into Claude Code (that integrated feature is very cool), CC built it, I deployed it, done. (Bottom section of https://tediware.com/ if you're interested, the bit with "Origin story" on the left and the signup panel on the right).
It was not a complicated build by any means but I liked the concept it developed and it was dead-easy to make it all happen. I think the ideas in the UI are very good. Still rough, but you can see where this could go, and it's got a ton of potential.
• Claude Design uses Opus 4.7, which is more expensive than earlier models.
• It's just Day 2; it's not a finished product. It's ridiculous how quickly Anthropic iterates.
• If you've been using Claude for a while, Design already knows your style and preferences. You'd have to start from scratch using a different AI design tool. I don’t doubt that'll pay dividends in the long run.
It's in research preview. I suspect limits are low on purpose. FWIW, I gave it twelve screenshots of different pages in my app and it did a really excellent job fixing them up. Consumed just 40% of weekly quota - still too high but it's probably a YMMV situation.
It produced great results for me, in 10 mins, and then my usage was blown and now I have to wait a week. It did let me export the ZIP, though. I tried throwing the contents of the ZIP into Stitch With Google, but it didn't work very well.
Yup it's based off their playground so plaything is the right word.
It's a wrapper around that. I definitely appreciate the better design output from Claude code but it has a ways to go before it can replace serious design contenders.
I don’t really buy that Claude Design will remove all the complexity around design. Vibe-coded apps using Claude look simpler because they are simpler. They’re not a gigantic product suite with extremely specific UI components tailored to each use case. The ‘simplicity’ is an illusion coming from conflating the complexity of a bicycle (a vibe coded app) with an airplane (an app like Figma).
Building the same design system component in code versus in Figma is going to be slightly more succinct in code; Figma’s primitives don’t have the sort of conditionals and control flow that code has. But code is much less malleable than drawing on a screen, and creative freedom is harder to achieve in code.
UI can fix the gap where code feels less malleable than Figma, but complexity comes largely from the worlds that humans create, and humans apparently want to create 8 modes for 4 products and 2 light/dark modes. If you want the same setup in Claude, it’ll be a little easier to maintain, but not much less complex.
So let me get this straight (Pretend I'm 50, a developer since childhood, but I can't CSS to save my life) are there shops where developers, even front end developers, have to talk to designers who are't just sketching an idea for a logo or landing page, but designers who run this Figma thing and maintain the entire products "design" in some "style database"? And the idea is that these designers - who aren't developers - should be able to tweak the look of things without changing code? Or is it usually just the front end devs that run this Figma thing, but they dislike the disconnect between it and their code?
As someone who spent quite some times these days to reverse the figma protocol[0] I can't agree more with
> Figma accidentally excluded themselves from the training data that would have made them relevant in the agentic era.
Their binary format is so much of a "let's reinvent everything" which I think come from the fact it's a tool you can use for web design, android app design, ios design and anything-you-want design that it became a jack of all trade and so mapping it to web is not a perfect 1:1 translation.
And for being useful to agent, any people who got to implement the figma from a UX guy know that even human can't know truly the intent of most figma design, so how a LLM could ? Common source of question that even the UX guy has no answer for:
1. Ok this button looks great, but in German how will it look ?
2. Oh and actually this button does not look great when i put in CSS, it wraps on two line, you cheated again with the letter spacing, did you ?
3. How does it look on a phone that is not an iphone ?
4. You know that doing a border with a gradien is not possible in CSS, so what should i put ?
5. How does it look on a 4k screen ?
6. etc.
I know that most of these question can be answered by props and autolayout, and I've been asking the 5 question above these days on a figma that had these but it's just that the UX guy is not that mythical beast that "know-how-to-use-figma-right"
So I can't wait for these tools that are html behind to catch up, even more if we can have the prompt with it. (As a developer I never got to see the prompt the product manager made to the UX guy)
Great article, the last couple of paragraphs made me laugh! I love the part about things not masquerading as something else and being honest about what they are.
I was wondering if PenPot (https://penpot.app) might be sitting pretty in this new agentic era, considering that they took the direction of designs being actual markup, unlike the canvas approach in fig - if that’s even something that interests them.
I've worked on design tools for the last few years.
This article is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the design space, and figma as a company.
Just a few of my thoughts:
- Figma was always about building a successful company over a successful product. Figma started with a much more ambitious aspiration, and had the ability to deliver through talent like Evan Wallace. A lot of it started with showing how capable webgl was in the browser. And yet, a lot of things like 3d features don't exist because they had the awareness to really hone in and focus on building a specific thing that made them money because everybody in the company ended up with an expensive seat price.
- Seriously, Figma is a company that's about design tool second, and about getting a product that businesses use first. To that end, it's already succeeded through the IPO, subsequently, who knows what the market is going to look like. Figma having a war chest is in many ways much better than having a technically impressive demo that might evaporate.
- People at Figma, 100%, know everything in this article. And not just figma people, like anybody and everybody that's tried to build a design tool has had these thoughts. It's very obvious that ui/ux is the interesection of design/dev/pm. It's also very obvious that it should stick close to the source of truth, to something like code.
- The problem is, that it's almost underselling it to say that it's MASSIVE challenge to execute on these ideas because of how easily it bleeds into building not just a design tool, but a coding, data management, architecture, etc. tool
- I could talk at length about all the challenges and potential solutions, but that's neither here nor there.
- On AI, I guess other people's guess is as good as mine, but my gut feeling is that while data is important, SOTA AI is generalist enough that the base models, the thinking they're able to do, is better than having a lot of custom data. Especially because ui design is front-facing - you can just scour the web in contrast to private financial documents, or legal documents for example.
This design tool space died a long time ago for me when InVision shut down and pivoted to a digital whiteboard. It’s a really difficult space.
But the fundamental problem is that it’s hard to get a design system right long-term, especially because it’s so intertwined with your code and whatever component library you use, which is a layer your designer will never touch. I don’t really see Claude Design fixing the fundamental Storybook hell of designing reusable and pretty components and layouts, but I don’t see Figma or any other tool solving it either.
What’s the solution? It feels like something that needs to be fixed more deeply at the component level.
Some good points, but as a whole - I'm not sure if I agree. Sketch lost to Figma because of it's design tooling & multiplayer. Physical products still get designed before being constructed - I don't see that going away. If anything, I think Figma should stop trying to play both sides of the field and decide what it wants to be.
I tried yesterday for about an hour to have Claude design make me a simple logo (just the symbol) and didn’t get anywhere good. I’m sure for certain things like UI it’s great, and so is just Claude code, but this Claude Design thing very much to me feels like a demo and not a product. Maybe one day!
The article makes a good point about how Figma's non-open data model is limiting their utility as the source of truth.
But I think it's part of a larger mistake Figma is making: they seem to have shifted to an extraction mindset too early, assuming they'd captured the market, right when the ground beneath them is starting to shift.
It's most visible in their pricing model evolution, which is now explicitly anti-collaboration. Figma used to be the obvious default because you could quickly share files with non-designers, so they could view and make small edits without fuss. Now that requires a paid "seat", along with a confusing mess of permission flows.
It's platform wide too. I taught a college design class recently, and had students sign up for Figma because it seemed archaic not to teach them to use it. Instead of just giving any ".edu" address a free account (like they used to) students are forced through a 3rd-party process of uploading transcripts to prove education status. A few of my students got rejected or ran into confusing errors, and never got access… Now I have to re-evaluate whether its worth using when teaching the class again. (And this is for a population with near-zero short-term purchasing power, but huge potential long-term value… why add barriers?)
This is such a weird self-inflicted wound for a collaboration platform to make. The big tools that won on collaboration (eg. Google Docs, GitHub) have understood that low-friction sharing is critical to becoming the default choice. And that being the default is a flywheel that drives adoption, both in users and in tooling.
It makes more sense if you see it through the lens of Figma trying to juice short-term numbers for their IPO. But it's sad to see because it had so much long-term potential.
I miss the days of having a native desktop design app with a perpetual license.
What Figma achieved technically in the 2010s was amazing. Coded the app in C++ and then used WASM to deliver it as a multiplayer web app.
But now it's trying to be too many things. Why did they ever feel the need to add slides and this other stuff.
Their MCP is poor (sure, they'll improve it).
The app struggles with larger files and performance is sloppy.
And don't get me started trying to design data grid heavy apps.
And they could easily follow Adobe's lead. Enshittify and lock you out of your account whenever they feel it's necessary (remember what happened with Venezuelan Adobe users a few years ago?)
Either Penpot gets their act together and will become the opensource design canvas for open-weight AI models or we will see another open source solution that will fill this space.
I got deeper into Figma than I ever had to before yesterday.
It turns out there’s no way to use Math in variables built in to the product. The most common plugin is 99 dollars. To add what is obviously mustache JS. To browser based software. It’s not good.
I feel like we're leaning way too much into the "vibe" aspect of using LLMs at the moment. There is definitely a good use case for LLM's here, but is just prompting your way into a design really the best method here? I feel like something in between Figma and Claude Design would give designers the control they want, but still removing the friction of going between design files and the code impl.
I tried Claude Design yesterday and fed it the UI of an app I am working on and what I had created already. I asked it to mock up 6 new "layout skins" using different colors, different icon and button placements, different vibes and it churned out 6 good designs with hi-res images plus Claude Code instructions and the ZIP file to boot. Didn't hit the usage, took about an hour. Did a really good overall and I liked the process and thinking structure and question asking.
As far as I'm aware, "source of truth" refers to data/code that drives the actual app, so Figma could never be a source of truth (Figma is a reference of what the app data/code is supposed to do). Saying Figma is a source of truth is like saying JIRA is a source of truth, which doesn't make any sense.
Excellent post. I share the author's sentiment which is essentially "to hell with Figma, at least fix Sketch". Been feeling very lonely in may hatred towards Figma, which is for a whole bunch of reasons (among others, it's an incredibly shitty, memory and CPU hungry Electron app that looks and feels worse than any more or less well designed web site), but now after reading this I realize the number of reasons has doubled.
> Figma invented its own primitives to make that work: components, styles, variables, props, and so on
Fireworks, Sketch, XD, Axure, etc all had these (or most of them) in some form before Figma even existed. Even illustrator, photoshop, etc have had the applicable ones for decades.
When you can control the model layer like Anthropic, you get more leverage over the traits of the persona, enough so that the system feels closer to havin consistent expert design judgment built-in that complements the 'truth-to-materials'.
> "To Figma: I can see a world where this post does numbers in the Figma internal Slack. If that’s the case and you’re reading this from Figma: this wouldn’t have happened if you hired me last year when I was interviewing. Your loss, big dawg."
What a counterproductive way to end an otherwise good set of points. Gives the appearance of bitterness and a desire for vengeance.
244 comments
Then I looked at the usage and it said I had used 95% of my Claude design usage for the week!
This isn't a real tool. This is a plaything, if that's what they're providing as examples.
And then I was scrolling Twitter, and saw someone else post their own "success story" and the design was nearly identical to the mock up Claude Design made for me. Lol. The homogenization problem will continue to plague tools like these to some degree, much in the same way AI generated text or code or imagery has a sort of homogenous tone or feel to it.
I mean, really difficult.
Coming up with a design that relies exclusively on platform standards is easy, “low-hanging fruit.”
I write stuff for iOS/MacOS/WatchOS. There’s tremendous pressure to follow platform standards. In fact, if you use SwiftUI, it’s very hard to deviate from them. SwiftUI makes it easy (crazy easy) to follow the herd, and downright miserable, if you want to blaze your own trail.
90% of the time, that’s actually a good thing. I get pretty sick of designers that refuse to compromise, and believe that their graphic opus is more important than usable UI. It’s even worse, if the designer is an engineer, with little background in graphic design.
A designer that knows how to compromise, and work with usability, is a unicorn. If you have one, keep them.
Like the code that LLMs produce, I expect the designs to be fairly low-effort, but that will be a good thing, overall. They will be effective and usable. We need more of that.
> I used it today to take a look at my previously built design system with Logos, branding, fonts, and everything else.
The fact that you are using this language tells me you are probably more advanced than the average individual, and likely have higher expectations.
My sister-in-law has a small apparel company. She’s developed quite a bit of skill over the past six years but she really struggled at the start. She had great ideas, but translating them to something she could apply was frustrating. *Anything* that could have helped her there would have been worth a look.
I was quite happy with what I pulled off using the first design system: I wanted a new footer section for my IPAAS startup, it generated four options, the fourth of which was quite good. We iterated on it for a bit, then I pulled it into Claude Code (that integrated feature is very cool), CC built it, I deployed it, done. (Bottom section of https://tediware.com/ if you're interested, the bit with "Origin story" on the left and the signup panel on the right).
It was not a complicated build by any means but I liked the concept it developed and it was dead-easy to make it all happen. I think the ideas in the UI are very good. Still rough, but you can see where this could go, and it's got a ton of potential.
• Claude Design uses Opus 4.7, which is more expensive than earlier models.
• It's just Day 2; it's not a finished product. It's ridiculous how quickly Anthropic iterates.
• If you've been using Claude for a while, Design already knows your style and preferences. You'd have to start from scratch using a different AI design tool. I don’t doubt that'll pay dividends in the long run.
It's a wrapper around that. I definitely appreciate the better design output from Claude code but it has a ways to go before it can replace serious design contenders.
Anthropic has managed to figure out a lot of reading in between the lines.
I'm not sure how this will be any different.
Building the same design system component in code versus in Figma is going to be slightly more succinct in code; Figma’s primitives don’t have the sort of conditionals and control flow that code has. But code is much less malleable than drawing on a screen, and creative freedom is harder to achieve in code.
UI can fix the gap where code feels less malleable than Figma, but complexity comes largely from the worlds that humans create, and humans apparently want to create 8 modes for 4 products and 2 light/dark modes. If you want the same setup in Claude, it’ll be a little easier to maintain, but not much less complex.
> Figma accidentally excluded themselves from the training data that would have made them relevant in the agentic era.
Their binary format is so much of a "let's reinvent everything" which I think come from the fact it's a tool you can use for web design, android app design, ios design and anything-you-want design that it became a jack of all trade and so mapping it to web is not a perfect 1:1 translation.
And for being useful to agent, any people who got to implement the figma from a UX guy know that even human can't know truly the intent of most figma design, so how a LLM could ? Common source of question that even the UX guy has no answer for:
I know that most of these question can be answered by props and autolayout, and I've been asking the 5 question above these days on a figma that had these but it's just that the UX guy is not that mythical beast that "know-how-to-use-figma-right"So I can't wait for these tools that are html behind to catch up, even more if we can have the prompt with it. (As a developer I never got to see the prompt the product manager made to the UX guy)
[0]https://github.com/allan-simon/figma-kiwi-protocol
I was wondering if PenPot (https://penpot.app) might be sitting pretty in this new agentic era, considering that they took the direction of designs being actual markup, unlike the canvas approach in fig - if that’s even something that interests them.
This article is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the design space, and figma as a company.
Just a few of my thoughts:
- Figma was always about building a successful company over a successful product. Figma started with a much more ambitious aspiration, and had the ability to deliver through talent like Evan Wallace. A lot of it started with showing how capable webgl was in the browser. And yet, a lot of things like 3d features don't exist because they had the awareness to really hone in and focus on building a specific thing that made them money because everybody in the company ended up with an expensive seat price.
- Seriously, Figma is a company that's about design tool second, and about getting a product that businesses use first. To that end, it's already succeeded through the IPO, subsequently, who knows what the market is going to look like. Figma having a war chest is in many ways much better than having a technically impressive demo that might evaporate.
- People at Figma, 100%, know everything in this article. And not just figma people, like anybody and everybody that's tried to build a design tool has had these thoughts. It's very obvious that ui/ux is the interesection of design/dev/pm. It's also very obvious that it should stick close to the source of truth, to something like code. - The problem is, that it's almost underselling it to say that it's MASSIVE challenge to execute on these ideas because of how easily it bleeds into building not just a design tool, but a coding, data management, architecture, etc. tool
- I could talk at length about all the challenges and potential solutions, but that's neither here nor there.
- On AI, I guess other people's guess is as good as mine, but my gut feeling is that while data is important, SOTA AI is generalist enough that the base models, the thinking they're able to do, is better than having a lot of custom data. Especially because ui design is front-facing - you can just scour the web in contrast to private financial documents, or legal documents for example.
But the fundamental problem is that it’s hard to get a design system right long-term, especially because it’s so intertwined with your code and whatever component library you use, which is a layer your designer will never touch. I don’t really see Claude Design fixing the fundamental Storybook hell of designing reusable and pretty components and layouts, but I don’t see Figma or any other tool solving it either.
What’s the solution? It feels like something that needs to be fixed more deeply at the component level.
Claude Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806725 - April 2026 (732 comments)
But I think it's part of a larger mistake Figma is making: they seem to have shifted to an extraction mindset too early, assuming they'd captured the market, right when the ground beneath them is starting to shift.
It's most visible in their pricing model evolution, which is now explicitly anti-collaboration. Figma used to be the obvious default because you could quickly share files with non-designers, so they could view and make small edits without fuss. Now that requires a paid "seat", along with a confusing mess of permission flows.
It's platform wide too. I taught a college design class recently, and had students sign up for Figma because it seemed archaic not to teach them to use it. Instead of just giving any ".edu" address a free account (like they used to) students are forced through a 3rd-party process of uploading transcripts to prove education status. A few of my students got rejected or ran into confusing errors, and never got access… Now I have to re-evaluate whether its worth using when teaching the class again. (And this is for a population with near-zero short-term purchasing power, but huge potential long-term value… why add barriers?)
This is such a weird self-inflicted wound for a collaboration platform to make. The big tools that won on collaboration (eg. Google Docs, GitHub) have understood that low-friction sharing is critical to becoming the default choice. And that being the default is a flywheel that drives adoption, both in users and in tooling.
It makes more sense if you see it through the lens of Figma trying to juice short-term numbers for their IPO. But it's sad to see because it had so much long-term potential.
What Figma achieved technically in the 2010s was amazing. Coded the app in C++ and then used WASM to deliver it as a multiplayer web app.
But now it's trying to be too many things. Why did they ever feel the need to add slides and this other stuff.
Their MCP is poor (sure, they'll improve it).
The app struggles with larger files and performance is sloppy.
And don't get me started trying to design data grid heavy apps.
And they could easily follow Adobe's lead. Enshittify and lock you out of your account whenever they feel it's necessary (remember what happened with Venezuelan Adobe users a few years ago?)
Either Penpot gets their act together and will become the opensource design canvas for open-weight AI models or we will see another open source solution that will fill this space.
It turns out there’s no way to use Math in variables built in to the product. The most common plugin is 99 dollars. To add what is obviously mustache JS. To browser based software. It’s not good.
https://stitch.withgoogle.com/
> Figma invented its own primitives to make that work: components, styles, variables, props, and so on
Fireworks, Sketch, XD, Axure, etc all had these (or most of them) in some form before Figma even existed. Even illustrator, photoshop, etc have had the applicable ones for decades.
I have a complicated nextjs webapp, and I havent had to write front end code in six-nine months now.
> "To Figma: I can see a world where this post does numbers in the Figma internal Slack. If that’s the case and you’re reading this from Figma: this wouldn’t have happened if you hired me last year when I was interviewing. Your loss, big dawg."
What a counterproductive way to end an otherwise good set of points. Gives the appearance of bitterness and a desire for vengeance.