I design with Claude more than Figma now • Hacker News Board

Re: I design with Claude more than Figma now

#231

Post by 8note » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 10:26 PM UTC

gwerbin wrote: post #162

sfjailbird wrote: post #154

We already have the business side come with requirements in the form of 'solutions' that they have thought up, which more often than not are Rube Golberg-esque contraptions, that you have to conversationally reverse engineer to arrive at the actual requirements. In the future they will come with their 'ready' solution, already 'working' and be even less receptive to look at design and architecture holistically. Just…

I have seen this already. Vibecoded top to bottom. The downside is that the business people don't understand why you can't just put their app in production as is. And then there's a lot of pressure to make it happen quickly "because we can use AI to move fast". This is going to come down to healthy organization dynamics, and hopefully represents a learning opportunity for leadership. The upside is that the idea has a…

it would be fun to get access to those chat logs, to pull out detailed requirements decisions and get some more structure together

Re: I design with Claude more than Figma now

#232

Post by 8note » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 10:29 PM UTC

gwerbin wrote: post #229

chatmasta wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> business people don't understand why you can't just put their app in production I’d flip that around and say that engineers don’t understand that sometimes you _can_ just put their app into production. It might take some cleanup, and some clever ways of deploying it in isolation, but some of these “vibe coded prototypes” — many made by technical business people (they do exist) – are much closer to production-ready…

I actually agree with you, although I don't agree with the "open your mind or be left behind" sentiment. I left it implicit in my example, but in my actual experience they actually can't put it in production as it is because there are genuine broken things or features they can't add without rewriting big chunks of the system. The worst are the ones that are not obviously broken but are just wrong, like incorrect numb…

> rewriting big chunks of the system

the costs of doing this is much lower than it has been

testing to make sure thats safe to do maybe hasnt caught up, but its no longer an unreasonable task

Re: I design with Claude more than Figma now

#233

Post by make3 » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 10:49 PM UTC

Lalabadie wrote: post #230

throwaway98797 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

let them launch and fail it’s the only way they learn

"Prompt more" is my default answer now. Your 80% of the way there? Keep going! If they're satisfied with the result, I save myself a reluctant client. If they realize the difference, I save myself an explanation and we can start talking about good foundations.

they don't know that it'll break, that's the problem of course

Re: I design with Claude more than Figma now

#234

Post by girvo » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

sfjailbird wrote: post #154

We already have the business side come with requirements in the form of 'solutions' that they have thought up, which more often than not are Rube Golberg-esque contraptions, that you have to conversationally reverse engineer to arrive at the actual requirements. In the future they will come with their 'ready' solution, already 'working' and be even less receptive to look at design and architecture holistically. Just…

I can say that its happening right now (not where I work, at a place I used to). Even being shipped to production as-is, with data loss and security issues in tow. We're cooked haha

Re: I design with Claude more than Figma now

#235

Post by josephg » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #223

josephg wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That era is already long gone. Those things have been built in Wix for over a decade. I think there's still a lot more custom work than you'd expect. A recent example: My mum is ex-president of a small international NGO. When I visited earlier today, she was bemoaning how the lady who runs their NGO's website charges them an arm and a leg for small changes. As a result, the website is constantly out of date. The cu…

There's absolutely no way I'd be advising friends or family to run a site vibe coded themself, that's nuts. This is more a problem of your Mum mismanaging her contractors. She should be threatening hellfire down on this contractor for withholding the admin username + password. Generating the site with Claude would be a pretty stupid choice for her right now, if she needs something more than a basic info site, word pr…

> There's absolutely no way I'd be advising friends or family to run a site vibe coded themself, that's nuts.

Yeah, I'm going to act as a human claude frontend. But I don't think we're that far off.

the site is not much more complex than a “basic info site”. There are a few small dynamic elements - like a list of donors populated dynamically and a box to sign up to the mailing list. Sites like this are trivially easy for Claude. I got claude to do a mockup based on a screenshot. Its 5 minute mockup has a much nicer design and layout than the current website. 1 Claude code prompt later and it was functional.

But yeah, short term I’ll see if Claude can just update Wordpress directly. I don’t want to spend my weekends learning wordpress. But if Claude can do it for me? Great.

Re: I design with Claude more than Figma now

#236

Post by SlinkyOnStairs » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 11:03 PM UTC

chatmasta wrote: post #211

gwerbin wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen this already. Vibecoded top to bottom. The downside is that the business people don't understand why you can't just put their app in production as is. And then there's a lot of pressure to make it happen quickly "because we can use AI to move fast". This is going to come down to healthy organization dynamics, and hopefully represents a learning opportunity for leadership. The upside is that the idea has a…

> business people don't understand why you can't just put their app in production I’d flip that around and say that engineers don’t understand that sometimes you _can_ just put their app into production. It might take some cleanup, and some clever ways of deploying it in isolation, but some of these “vibe coded prototypes” — many made by technical business people (they do exist) – are much closer to production-ready…

> Keep an open mind or you’ll be left behind.

An open mind to what? To yolo deployment of dodgy code straight into production? Moving fast and breaking things?

> I’ve personally seen this workflow produce real production code, used by customers, in an extremely rapid feedback loop.

Yes. I've seen it as well. I've also seen what happens. It goes wrong.

Should the engineers building your cars, your house, all other infrastructure also "keep an open mind" to slopping up their work?

Your next words will be "I'm not working on something safety critical".

You are. Even the most basic CRUD app handling personal data of any kind of safety critical these days. Data leaks alone KILL.

Re: I design with Claude more than Figma now

#237

Post by darth_avocado » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 11:10 PM UTC

sfjailbird wrote: post #154

We already have the business side come with requirements in the form of 'solutions' that they have thought up, which more often than not are Rube Golberg-esque contraptions, that you have to conversationally reverse engineer to arrive at the actual requirements. In the future they will come with their 'ready' solution, already 'working' and be even less receptive to look at design and architecture holistically. Just…

> We already have the business side come with requirements in the form of 'solutions' that they have thought up

We have that too and more often than not, it’s not what a customer wants. Yes there are some very talented customer facing people (PMs, CSMs, TAMs etc.) that also have a natural knack for translating customer problems into product features with great usability. However, for the rest, skipping the part of defining the problem and letting other functions to come up with a solution, usually leads to catastrophic messes that waste a lot of engineering and other resources. When someone shows up with a solution, you risk wasting months of resources in making production ready software, only to find, customers hate it and the solution either doesn’t fix the problem or introduces new ones.

Re: I design with Claude more than Figma now

#238

Post by cube00 » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 11:13 PM UTC

sfjailbird wrote: post #154

We already have the business side come with requirements in the form of 'solutions' that they have thought up, which more often than not are Rube Golberg-esque contraptions, that you have to conversationally reverse engineer to arrive at the actual requirements. In the future they will come with their 'ready' solution, already 'working' and be even less receptive to look at design and architecture holistically. Just…

> The thing is basically already done!

I'm seeing so many of these come in with "this is 95% done, just need a couple of minor tweaks for production release"

"Minor tweaks" being fix the layout so it's not messed up if the browser isn't exactly 1920px wide, sometimes these filters and sorting don't seem to work right and the app doesn't seem to refresh new values properly after an action.

No matter the issue it's pre-estimated by the business as "should be a quick fix, for an experienced dev" because they (allegedly) did 95% of the work already.

Re: I design with Claude more than Figma now

#239

Post by bluefirebrand » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 11:14 PM UTC

gwerbin wrote: post #162

sfjailbird wrote: post #154

We already have the business side come with requirements in the form of 'solutions' that they have thought up, which more often than not are Rube Golberg-esque contraptions, that you have to conversationally reverse engineer to arrive at the actual requirements. In the future they will come with their 'ready' solution, already 'working' and be even less receptive to look at design and architecture holistically. Just…

I have seen this already. Vibecoded top to bottom. The downside is that the business people don't understand why you can't just put their app in production as is. And then there's a lot of pressure to make it happen quickly "because we can use AI to move fast". This is going to come down to healthy organization dynamics, and hopefully represents a learning opportunity for leadership. The upside is that the idea has a…

> This is going to come down to healthy organization dynamics, and hopefully represents a learning opportunity for leadership

What is it like working for organizations with healthy dynamics and leadership that is capable of learning?

I don't think I've ever encountered it in my professional career.

Re: I design with Claude more than Figma now

#240

Post by chatmasta » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 11:29 PM UTC

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #236

chatmasta wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> business people don't understand why you can't just put their app in production I’d flip that around and say that engineers don’t understand that sometimes you _can_ just put their app into production. It might take some cleanup, and some clever ways of deploying it in isolation, but some of these “vibe coded prototypes” — many made by technical business people (they do exist) – are much closer to production-ready…

> Keep an open mind or you’ll be left behind. An open mind to what? To yolo deployment of dodgy code straight into production? Moving fast and breaking things? > I’ve personally seen this workflow produce real production code, used by customers, in an extremely rapid feedback loop. Yes. I've seen it as well. I've also seen what happens. It goes wrong. Should the engineers building your cars, your house, all other inf…

An open mind to not having a knee jerk reaction to “this is vibe coded therefore it’s not production-ready.” The delta between the prototype and production is likely far lower than you think, and many engineers are sneering at the prototype without actually looking at it or attempting to spend a few weeks applying engineering discipline to bring it up to scratch.