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Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

samhenri.gold

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Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#31

Post by beachy »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #14
esafak wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your designers debug your React code now when the AI messes up?

I've been a developer for over 2 decades and I've been using AI in our react codebase for the past 3 months. Outside of some optimizations there's not much a designer couldn't debug through Claude Code. 90% of the industry is toast. I want to be wrong because I'm watching the death of my entire career, but everything I've seen is pointing to this as an inevitability. We are shipping better and more secure code, and d…

I've been writing code for 50 years and it looks now that we have seen sunrise and are about to see sunset on humans writing code by hand.

Is that bad? Not to anyone who has managed dev teams and is familiar with the incredibly tortuous and painful business of trying to corral a bunch of humans with varying skill and enthusiasm levels to create software. We have tied ourselves in knots with things like Agile just trying to work around the fact that software development is so slow and arduous.

Many times back in the waterfall days I have written up design documents to kick off dev teams on multi-week or month projects. Now I could feed those into Claude Code and get results in days. This stuff is exciting beyond belief in just getting shit done.

This is a golden era for any established company with an existing customer base. My question to them would be "with Claude Code, why aren't you carving through that massive backlog of feature requests that has been building up over the years?".

A lot of people seem to look at this as job threatening, and it surely is for junior devs. But for companies that already have a strong senior talent bench, it's time to raise the ambition levels and ask not how many jobs can be shed, but instead just how fast and hard can we go now we have these new superpowers.

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#32

Post by kevinsync »

alkonaut wrote: post #17

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 develope…

lol yes. At least in agency world, a common approach in the last X years has been that designers create entire pixel-perfect, component-based sources-of-truth in Figma (which evolve! they aren't delivered static and complete) -- these are also what the client sees and approves, or at the very least they see branded deck slides that incorporate the Figma designs. Anyways, front end then re-implements from Figma into CSS, except it's usually best-approximation (not pixel-perfect) partially because, despite Figma allowing you to "copy CSS" for an element, it's unusable, almost inline CSS (and usually not aware of its ascendents and descendents, or any variables you're maintaining in CSS, or any class hierarchies, etc), and partially because the units of measurement aren't always identical on either side. You'll also often have multiple FE devs recreating components independently of each other (as a team effort), which can lead to drift and different implementations, which is fun. Then, depending upon the tech stack, FE might be building these components in something like Storybook [0] as a "front end source of truth", which then are either directly injected into a React or NextJS app or whatever, or sometimes they're partially or fully re-implemented again into BE components in the CMS (ex. Sitefinity). Then people ask which one is the source of truth, but really it's a chain of sources of truth that looks more like the telephone game than a canonical "brand bible". Then throw in any out-of-the-box future client efforts (say, a promotional landing page hosted outside of the main project) and you may have yet another reimplementation of part of the same design, but in a completely different system.

[0] https://storybook.js.org

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#33

Post by esafak »

nslsm wrote: post #30
esafak wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All right, here's a statement: your designers won't even know when the code is wrong. Just because it compiles it doesn't mean it's fine. They lack code judgment in the same way your coders lack design judgment.

It's very easy to know when code is wrong: it doesn't work the way it's expected to. So you explain to the AI what's wrong and the AI fixes it.

Your designers are going to be looking at the layout; they're not going to notice if it's slow, uses too much memory, is not maintainable, doesn't follow repo patterns, etc.

Do you think it is reasonable to expect a person with an arts degree to know this?

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#34

Post by doug_durham »

sebmellen wrote: post #5

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 fund…

What if the approach isn't reusable, but instead is rebuildable? We are stuck in the mindset of creating components that we can grab and plug in to new designs. When we have a component that we like, why not ask the tool to create a markdown definition of it. Later on, when we're doing a new design where we would like to reuse that component, we tell the tool to read the markdown and use that whenever they need to use that component. I think the future will be much more flexible and interesting.

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#35

Post by jbmsf »

alkonaut wrote: post #17

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 develope…

I'm not sure about "without changing code" but I have definitely seen the believe that Figma represents something authoritative about the product instead of, say, the product being authoritative for itself.

Perhaps because I have a similar bio to yours, I am allergic to this view.

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#37

Post by uxcolumbo »

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.

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#38

Post by only-one1701 »

esafak wrote: post #7
operatingthetan wrote: post #6

Front-end, UX, design, and product have become one role. The market is just realizing it slowly.

So your designers debug your React code now when the AI messes up?

That’s what CEOs think lol. Let’s see if it pans out!

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#39

Post by only-one1701 »

operatingthetan wrote: post #29
micromacrofoot wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a developer for over 2 decades and I've been using AI in our react codebase for the past 3 months. Outside of some optimizations there's not much a designer couldn't debug through Claude Code. 90% of the industry is toast. I want to be wrong because I'm watching the death of my entire career, but everything I've seen is pointing to this as an inevitability. We are shipping better and more secure code, and d…

I think the real question is which of the four roles is going to be the one that takes over. Probably people who were already UX-Engineers.

I would ask this: which is the worse failure mode —- design not quite right, or users can’t access the app?

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#40

Post by doug_durham »

esafak wrote: post #7
operatingthetan wrote: post #6

Front-end, UX, design, and product have become one role. The market is just realizing it slowly.

So your designers debug your React code now when the AI messes up?

In my opinion this should have always been the case. All designers should be able to code and do html/css. It's the medium of design.
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