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Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

samhenri.gold

41–50 of 253 posts

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#41
post #30
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.

This isn’t meant to be sarcastic: have you ever worked for a real company?

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#42
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

HTML and CSS, sure, but modern frontend design is way more than that; it's a jungle out there.

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#43

Basic web development is completely over, and will be automated end to end, product, ux, design, and the code. I have a complicated nextjs webapp, and I havent had to write front end code in six-nine months now.

If it’s used by < 1000 people, it’s not a complicated app

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#45
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!

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#46

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…

> I don’t really see Claude Design fixing the fundamental Storybook hell of designing reusable and pretty components and layouts

FWIW Claude Code is decent at scaffolding those out if you have a good set of examples for it to work from.

But the argument is that is unneeded as we move forward as making changes and extracting things and such becomes basically "free". I'm not so convinced, but I do see the argument.

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#47
Oh no. Figma has variables and instances and it's hard to debug bad colors.

And here I am with Claude Code... That so far generated a 2000-line CSS file for a 7000-line app consisting of literally three web pages [1]. Where almost every single color, component, class and style is duplicated at least two times. Where custom classes are fighting with Tailwind classes (yes, there's also Tailwind ON TOP of custom CSS) that are fighting with inline hardcoded style= declarations.

Figma is definitely going to suffer the vibe-coded design slop-app from Anthropic.

[1] 7k lines are almost justified for the functionality in them, and I tried to keep an eye on the code. It's harder to keep an eye on CSS

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#48
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…

AI is impressive but this same sea-change happened at least twice before - the era when computers went from being rooms full of women(354) to machines programmed in machine language(892) to those with screens, keyboards and even assemblers (assembly language, especially macro assemblers, were considered seriously high level at a time), to mid-level languages like C (considered needlessly complex and slow at one time, now considered barely above a macro assembler), to high-level languages like Java and even higher ones (arguably) like Rust.

Every one of those transitions has resulted in more programmers - though not necessarily the same programmers.

354: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

892: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#49

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!

Claude Design is very explicitly oriented towards product UI design. It's not trying to be a product that can make you a logo.

Re: Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

#50

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 C…

I've directly experienced this and it is roughly as sane and effective as it sounds.
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