Claude Design • Hacker News Board

Re: Claude Design

#511

Post by docmars » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 10:00 PM UTC

aniceperson wrote: post #501

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All Figma has spent the last 2 years doing is trying to get designers to use their Cursor/Claude Code text to code app. Not convinced Figma cares about traditional design craft anymore.

Figma was never needed. they were useful when enterprises allowed people with no coding experience to mandate how ui should look. It is the powerpoint of dumb people that wanted a career in tech. happy to see it dying.

Hard disagree. There's more to UX than pushing pixels around. Usability, accessibility, and capturing the broader customer experience at 40,000 ft isn't a trivial process when you're designing a large product (or suite of products) especially.

These areas obviously tie into engineering very closely, but the thinking that goes into them happens at the design stage, at a lower cost than starting with engineering. AI models suck at getting every facet of this process right, because designers are achieving a balance between branding, usability, standards, taste, and differentiation -- the exact opposite of a model trained to reach for the most average outputs.

Re: Claude Design

#512

Post by LordDragonfang » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 10:01 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…

Everyone else is already pointing out how competent over unique is purely a positive, so I want to criticize the other implicit assumption here.

This comment is just a rehash of the increasingly outdated and incorrect assertion that LLMs can't possibly exhibit any creativity -- and it's also incorrect.

If you're yearning for "old skool artisanal weirdness of yore", look up the trend on Twitter a month or two ago of people asking Claude to make YTPs. They ended up very weird and artisanal in a way distinct from how any human would do it.

Re: Claude Design

#513

Post by docmars » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 10:03 PM UTC

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #264

Bilal_io wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The folks at Wall Street do not understand this does not replace Figma. Figma is targeted towards designers who create thoughtful design systems and cohesive UIs and who don't code, while this is targeted towards vibe coders who can't design. Two different circles that intersect to some level. But like you said, if anthropic adds the tools in Figma, only then they can can take customers from Figma IMO.

All Figma has spent the last 2 years doing is trying to get designers to use their Cursor/Claude Code text to code app. Not convinced Figma cares about traditional design craft anymore.

I'm not sure they don't care anymore, as much as they experienced the same pressure every company faced when AI went mainstream.

Had they not included support for it, where would they be now? I'd wager a critical mass would be screeching to High Heaven for integrations, seeing as a Figma document is effectively a config file that can be translated to real code.

Re: Claude Design

#514

Post by BeetleB » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 10:03 PM UTC

gbalduzzi wrote: post #384

BeetleB wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the days when there was no "standard visual appearance" for the OS (e.g. DOS). I liked the diversity of interfaces. Years ago, I remarked to a friend that I'd spent half of my (computing) life post-high speed Internet, yet almost all my happy memories are from before that. It was the same for him, and we both explored why that was. The homogeneity of interfaces was actually one of the reasons we came up with o…

Everyone remembers fondly the time they were young, I believe it is more about that then everything else. I understand your feelings but it is extremely tipical in human history to keep remembering "the good old times"

That may be true, and had you asked me half a lifetime ago, I would have likely said "The old days were better".

But:

I would have still said I enjoyed using computers. And I wouldn't have said "Today's interface sucks" (well, other than my HW not being able to keep up with eye candy...)

I simply don't enjoy using the computer these days. And I do think the interface sucks. Pretty much anything that involves using the web browser sucks - be it a local app or a web app.

Re: Claude Design

#515

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 10:04 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…

> The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive.

You’re talking about art, not design.

Re: Claude Design

#516

Post by runarberg » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 10:06 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #450

mjr00 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no shame in being homogenous and obvious, though. If I'm building out an internal tool for, say, a hospital lawyer to search through malpractice lawsuits, I want my tool to be the most familiar, obvious, least-surprising UI/UX possible. Just stay out of the way and do what it's supposed to do. The trick is, of course, that the human is still responsible for knowing when homogenous is fine, or when there's rea…

> There's no shame in being homogenous and obvious, though. The real world analog is this... The reason people (especially Americans) stay in Marriott property hotels is because they are homogenous. If all I want to do is travel to Phoenix, AZ for work I want to know that the hotel room has the same mattress, desk, TV, customer service, etc. There is real legitimate value to that. So I'll book the Courtyard in Phoeni…

Personally, if I had to go to Phoenix, AZ for work and stay at a Marriott hotel, I think I would rather convince my boss that this business trip could be a zoom call, and during that zoom call I notice that participants have all sorts of fun virtual backgrounds, filters, emoji in their statuses etc.

Because it turns out, the type who don’t want fun little differences are exactly the types who will gladly go on a business trip to Phoenix Arizona and stay at a Marriott hotel.

Re: Claude Design

#517

Post by alwillis » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 10:08 PM UTC

taylorlapeyre wrote: post #198

It really feels like Anthropic's product area is extremely overextended at this point. If they want to extend themselves horizontally in an unlimited fashion, they will need unlimited focus, and agents can't supply that. Things will fall through the cracks. Why should I believe that Anthropic will care about this product in 2, 3 years? Whereas I firmly believe that Figma will care greatly about its product in that ti…

> Why should I believe that Anthropic will care about this product in 2, 3 years?

There's no reason to believe Anthropic will stop caring about this product--they're not Google [1] after all.

> It really feels like Anthropic's product area is extremely overextended at this point.

I don't think so. They have one core product: the Claude model; they're enabling different ways of accessing it. Claude Code for developers, Cowork for general business tasks, and chat for consumers.

This is their first graphic design product, but it fits nicely because once you create a prototype, you can hand it over to Claude Code to make the website, mobile app, or whatever.

The advantage Anthropic has is their ecosystem. A Claude user will be way more productive using Design because all of their context is with Claude; other AI tools don't "know you" the way Claude does. Claude already knows your style and your preferences; it's much more likely to create designs you'd like.

When you go to an AI you don’t normally use, you essentially have to start from scratch.

[1]: https://killedbygoogle.com

Re: Claude Design

#518

Post by docmars » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 10:15 PM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #508

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…

If you want to be creative, you should make art. I love art. I think it's a great idea for people to make art. If you want to make a GUI, it should be familiar. Extremely familiar. It shouldn't invent new ways to interact most of the time. It is well-known that "intuitive" in UX almost always means "what I'm used to". If you're regularly "innovating" in UI design, you may be making the product harder to use, maybe mu…

I agree somewhat, there's a common language for building products that most people understand and expect.

Innovation comes from the ways people differentiate, without straying too far from the tried-and-true patterns. It's the tiny decisions that situate UI elements and yes, reinvent the wheel sometimes, that can tip users over to whatever you're building because you did it better, or in a way "most" (the average) never thought of.

If people aren't creative in how it works, then really they're all just making the same, boring products, without truly competing against anyone in a meaningful way in the problem space. Visual appeal isn't a sole differentiator.

Re: Claude Design

#519

Post by docmars » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 10:15 PM UTC

GenerWork wrote: post #64

If you look at Figmas stock price, it started falling right at 11 AM as this news was released. Anyways, this is 100% a shot at Figma, but also catching Lovable in the crossfire. If anybody from Anthropic is reading this, if you keep developing this with features in Figma and other design tools, you'll have a major hit on your hands.

Judging by Anthropic's track record for sloppy, buggy software, I can't see this taking off quite as well as people might think, when compared to Figma and its captive customer base.

Figma actually put the work in to make a great product that performs well and offers anything you could imagine to design just about anything you need, with AI integrations and deep manual editing to sweat the details.

Re: Claude Design

#520

Post by tevli » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 10:18 PM UTC

tempest_ wrote: post #348

monarchwadia wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assure you, working with LLMs is intellectually challenging, and becomes more so as the technology matures.

It really really really depends on how you are using it and what you are using it for. I can get LLMs to write most CSS I need by treating it like a slot machine and pulling the handle till it spits out what I need, this doesnt cause me to learn CSS at all.

This exactly. My css designs have noticeably gotten better without me,the writer getting any better at all.