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

71–80 of 106 posts

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#71

Post by coldtea »

troupo wrote: post #37
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 generatin…

>It still produces subpar code, with horrendous data access patterns, endless duplication of fucntionality etc

Not really. 2024 called.

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#72

Post by fg137 »

nekooooo wrote: post #65

people who aren't designers and don't understand design should not be writing about Figma being dead - they don't even understand that design is NOT outputs.

I am a developer. I recently requested to cancel my "full" Figma license (allows editing/sharing) in the organization because I no longer need it. I used to create prototypes with it and and use them to discuss designs with the team.

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#73

Post by kingkongjaffa »

dgellow wrote: post #67
nekooooo wrote: post #65

people who aren't designers and don't understand design should not be writing about Figma being dead - they don't even understand that design is NOT outputs.

Mind expanding on this? I’m not a designer and that sounds interesting

This book is a good read for anyone building anything, software, hardware, whatever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

Design is its own thing. Fundamentally it's problem solving, but design is thinking about the user of the 'designed' thing and how will they use it, what will they do with it, what will it enable them to do, how will they learn how to use it, how can it be ergonomic to the environment it will be used in and the user.

A lot of people can conceptualise a factory making widgets or a programmer writing code, but drastically few people really see the design process: sketches on paper, wireframes in figma, design as a solution to a problem, design as story telling, or aesthetics. But those outputs are not the point.

The output of a few hours in figma is not really the images of a website made, it's more about communication or articulation of the the problem being solved and the solution that will solve it.

Which is why it doesn't really matter about the tool, design is an expression, the medium whether it's a sketch or a figma mock up or a vibe-designed UI in claude design is less critical than the thought that went into it.

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#74

Post by edu »

dgellow wrote: post #67
nekooooo wrote: post #65

people who aren't designers and don't understand design should not be writing about Figma being dead - they don't even understand that design is NOT outputs.

Mind expanding on this? I’m not a designer and that sounds interesting

Not the OP, but here are my 2 CT’s on what is design:

Design is the process to you follow to solve a given problem/need/desire balancing the user needs with the business/tech constraints. The output could be a a digital UI, a physical object or an intangible process. But often people think about design just as the aesthetics of a product.

A common pattern is the Empathize (Research, Diverge), Define (Converge), Ideate (Diverge), Prototype (Converge), Test (and then iterate).

The main benefits come from the divergent phases: empathize and ideate. But it’s far too common already that some executive has an “illumination” of how something should be and just wants to build as is, without any research or validation.

They can use Claude Design (and similar) to just build a prototype of their first idea, skipping all the design process and end with something that looks good but doesn’t solve the problem adequately or fits the actual user needs/context.

Of course, LLMs are useful tools that can be used in the right way: to build better prototypes in less time, to synthesize research insights, to explore ideas…

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#75

Post by girvo »

coldtea wrote: post #63
jmull wrote: post #40

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 st…

> However, a lot of design has a deeper life-cycle than that. There's the collaboration, pitching, review, iteration, asset management, etc. If corners can be cut, they will. All those steps would be flatened to something like CD and a couple of side tools. Companies did "collaboration, pitching, review, iteration" because they had a designer in the loop anyway for the actual final work. Now that they don't have to,…

Exactly the same thing as coding, where “we don’t want to lower the quality bar” platitudes are repeated, while in actual fact that’s exactly what they want from us with AI output, consequences be damned. The stock market will reward us for the short term play.

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#76

Post by stronglikedan »

fg137 wrote: post #72
nekooooo wrote: post #65

people who aren't designers and don't understand design should not be writing about Figma being dead - they don't even understand that design is NOT outputs.

I am a developer. I recently requested to cancel my "full" Figma license (allows editing/sharing) in the organization because I no longer need it. I used to create prototypes with it and and use them to discuss designs with the team.

You are (were) only a relatively small portion of their user base. Of course they'll lose people like you, but there are many more people with different use cases that will not leave. They'll be fine, and they'll probably even innovate more because of the competition.

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#77

Post by mmcclure »

edwinjm wrote: post #44
StrangeSound wrote: post #32

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.

Don’t forget Pencil, another “Figma killer”. Free (for now). https://trypencil.com/

I was extremely confused before realizing I think that link is for the wrong Pencil. You probably meant to reference this one: https://www.pencil.dev/

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#78

Post by motoroco »

strimoza wrote: post #6

Used Claude Design to build the landing page for my side project (strimoza.com) over the weekend. Honestly impressive for a solo dev with no design background — got something shippable in a few hours. That said, I still ended up going back to tweak things manually. It's great for 80%, the last 20% still needs judgment. Not sure it kills Figma for teams, but for indie devs it's a game changer.

thanks for sharing your project. how was your process different compared to pre-claude design? would you use it again?

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#79

Post by rcleveng »

I tried out claude design yesterday and I have to say, it's exactly what I thought (hoped?) Figma Make was going to be.

I didn't want yet another lovable.dev or v0 with figma make, I wanted the prompt -> figma design which I could iterate on by hand once I got something in place (and also faster route to creating the prototype in figma) to play with the UX of it.

Re: Figma's woes compound with Claude Design

#80

Post by troupo »

coldtea wrote: post #71
troupo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 generatin…

> It still produces subpar code, with horrendous data access patterns, endless duplication of fucntionality etc Not really. 2024 called.

Just because you don't look at the code, doesn't mean it doesn't produce subpar code constantly.

Opus 4.7, high effort. Literally 30 minutes ago. There's a `const UNMATCHED_MARKER = ""` that we want to remove from a file. Behold (the first version was a full on AST walk for absolutely no reason whatsoever, by the way):

      function restoreUnmatchedSelectors(cssPath) {
          const cssContent = readFileSync(cssPath, "utf-8");
          const marker = UNMATCHED_MARKER + " ";
          const count = (cssContent.match(new RegExp(escapeRegExp(marker), "g")) || []).length;          
          if (count > 0) {
              writeFileSync(cssPath, cssContent.replaceAll(marker, ""));
              return count;
          }
      }

      function escapeRegExp(s) {
          return s.replace(/[.*+?^${}()|[\]\\]/g, "\\$&");
      }
Don't get me started on all the code duplications, utility functions written from scratch in every module that needs them, reading full database just to count number of records...
Post reply on HN