Claude Design • Hacker News Board

Re: Claude Design

#81

Post by rglover » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 3:52 PM UTC

mikeaskew4 wrote: post #11

Thumbs down. Great design is original thought. AI is wholly incapable of that. Go ahead and roast me.

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.

Re: Claude Design

#82

Post by recitedropper » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 3:52 PM UTC

ossa-ma wrote: post #30

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 i…

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.

Re: Claude Design

#83

Post by jonlucc » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 3:53 PM UTC

devmor wrote: post #76

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.

Claude, add a bit of whimsy to this design.

Re: Claude Design

#84

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 3:54 PM UTC

thunky wrote: post #40

ljm wrote: post #18

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 valuab…

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Claude Design

#85

Post by H8crilA » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 3:54 PM UTC

subscribed wrote: post #32

namanyayg wrote: post #17

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…

12+ hours a day regularly? What a toxic workplace :/

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.

Re: Claude Design

#86

Post by jayd16 » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 3:54 PM UTC

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?

Re: Claude Design

#87

Post by ossa-ma » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 3:55 PM UTC

toomim wrote: post #58

ossa-ma wrote: post #30

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 i…

"An AI model is incapable of that." "Good designers will reject this." ^ Famous last words.

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.

Re: Claude Design

#88

Post by johnfn » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 3:55 PM UTC

recitedropper wrote: post #16

hmokiguess wrote: post #8

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

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…

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.

Re: Claude Design

#89

Post by tcp_handshaker » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 3:56 PM UTC

ljm wrote: post #18

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 valuab…

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.

Re: Claude Design

#90

Post by adriand » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 3:56 PM UTC

ljm wrote: post #18

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 valuab…

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.