Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

martinalderson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 106 posts

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#31

Post by codethief »

> A lot of their recent product development has been to enable further expansion in organisations - "Dev Mode" for developers (which now looks incredibly quaint against LLMs), […] all are about expanding their TAM out of "pure" design.

I don't think this is correct. In my experience no one buys Figma because of Dev Mode only. Dev Mode just makes it easier/faster to go from an existing design to working code. So it is/was a means to increase Figma's moat, not to get new customers or users. (Devs already needed access to Figma before the introduction of Dev Mode.)

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#32

Post by StrangeSound »

It's funny to see all of these dramatic articles coming out about Claude Design, when Google's Stitch[0] has been around for at least 6 months and no one has batted an eye. https://stitch.withgoogle.com/

I'm not sure how much of that is overhyping Claude, or Google's poor marketing of their own products.

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#33

Post by owenthejumper »

While a big fan of Claude's models, I am starting to worry about the "winner takes all" game starting to play out in the open. With free inference to them (as pointed out in the article), why won't Anthropic build significantly more products related to software development, and kill all other competitors? Developers first, Designers next, would some kind of a clone of Jira / Monday / Asana be next?

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#34

Post by [deleted] »

stingraycharles wrote: post #2

> Anthropic themselves launched Claude Design which is a pretty direct competitor to Figma in many ways. While it's nowhere near functional and polished enough to replace Figma's core design product, I expect it will get significant traction outside of that The reaction that designers I know have given Claude Design couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for desi…

[deleted]

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#35

Post by woeirua »

owenthejumper wrote: post #33

While a big fan of Claude's models, I am starting to worry about the "winner takes all" game starting to play out in the open. With free inference to them (as pointed out in the article), why won't Anthropic build significantly more products related to software development, and kill all other competitors? Developers first, Designers next, would some kind of a clone of Jira / Monday / Asana be next?

Now you’re starting to get why Anthropic/OpenAI aren’t worried about their margins. They can just clone a bunch of valuable existing software along the way and capture big pieces of those markets too.

All they have to do is hold back a super capable model like Mythos while using it to clone your entire product. There’s nothing Figma, Salesforce, Workday, etc could do.

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#36

Post by deaux »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #20
stingraycharles wrote: post #2

> Anthropic themselves launched Claude Design which is a pretty direct competitor to Figma in many ways. While it's nowhere near functional and polished enough to replace Figma's core design product, I expect it will get significant traction outside of that The reaction that designers I know have given Claude Design couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for desi…

> couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for designers, their workflow is very different from software devs. You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs. Haha, that's exactly how cc was received initially. It's just autocomplete. It's useless. It can't eve…

> Haha, that's exactly how cc was received initially.

Haha, maybe by you. By many on HN, but HN is a bubble of its own. By plenty of others it was received very differently. Many of us had been doing agentic coding for more than a year already when Claude Code was released, because we found it valuable.

We will see if such groups of professional designers also form for Claude Design or other such tools.

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#37

Post by troupo »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #20
stingraycharles wrote: post #2

> Anthropic themselves launched Claude Design which is a pretty direct competitor to Figma in many ways. While it's nowhere near functional and polished enough to replace Figma's core design product, I expect it will get significant traction outside of that The reaction that designers I know have given Claude Design couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for desi…

> couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for designers, their workflow is very different from software devs. You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs. Haha, that's exactly how cc was received initially. It's just autocomplete. It's useless. It can't eve…

It's still an autocomplete on steroids (that's what LLMs are).

It still produces subpar code, with horrendous data access patterns, endless duplication of fucntionality etc. You still need a human in the loop to fix all the mistakes (unless you're Garry Tan or Steve Yegge who assume that quality is when you push hundreds of thousands of LoC per day).

Same here.

Oh, and Claude Code is significantly worse at generating design code than almost any other type of code.

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#38

Post by dilawar »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #20
stingraycharles wrote: post #2

> Anthropic themselves launched Claude Design which is a pretty direct competitor to Figma in many ways. While it's nowhere near functional and polished enough to replace Figma's core design product, I expect it will get significant traction outside of that The reaction that designers I know have given Claude Design couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for desi…

> couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for designers, their workflow is very different from software devs. You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs. Haha, that's exactly how cc was received initially. It's just autocomplete. It's useless. It can't eve…

Fair point but unlike code, design (webpage), audio, video are seen by consumers. If Sora (AI video) didn't fly, how'd AI web-design fly?

It is pretty good for internal apps and dashboards or small hobby pages and websites where being generic look and feel doesn't matter much.

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#39

Post by embedding-shape »

stingraycharles wrote: post #2

> Anthropic themselves launched Claude Design which is a pretty direct competitor to Figma in many ways. While it's nowhere near functional and polished enough to replace Figma's core design product, I expect it will get significant traction outside of that The reaction that designers I know have given Claude Design couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for desi…

> Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers.

There is a bunch of repetitive work in design as well, once you start working on larger projects. Yes, everything should be setup with components/reusability and what not, but just like programmers take shortcuts sometimes, so do designers, and you have to repeat the same change across many instances/files whenever you have to pay back the "technical debt".

Probably Claude Design could be quite helpful in those cases, and the same goes for other domains too, same happens in video editing and 3D work, probably any creative effort has moments of dull, repetitive "do this change across X" where any automation would be of serious help to reduce that. It seems like a quite good thing to try to address with LLM tooling, still driven by actual humans.

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#40

Post by jmull »

Not sure Claude Design really competes with Figma.

While it has a strong potential to let people iterate on using a design without the nuts and bolts of going back and forth with a designer, CD operates at the "leaf-node" level, where the output is generated.

However, a lot of design has a deeper life-cycle than that. There's the collaboration, pitching, review, iteration, asset management, etc.

In fact, the first step for using CD is "onboarding", where it sucks up a design system from your existing assets/resources. It presumes you already have a design.

As it stands now, CD is one way... existing design -> task specific resources. This could be very useful, but only touches on a part of what a complete design tool does. But for iteration it's not so great. E.g. task specific concerns don't have a way to feed back to the originating design. Changes to the originating design don't have a direct path to feed back to the task specific output (e.g., when a logo or branding focus changes, or maybe just spacing guidelines are updated, the ad hoc processes around CD will have to be repeated if the changes are to actually land.)

I'd think AI design integrated with Figma is in a much better position to address these more complicated scenarios.

I doubt Claude Design even cares about these deeper scenarios, BTW -- it's intended as a leaf-node tool. Just pointing out it's not about to replace Figma or other more comprehensive design tools.

Post reply on HN