I used it today to take a look at my previously built design system with Logos, branding, fonts, and everything else. After a lot of annoying tweaking back and forth, finally, I got something that was satisfactory.
Then I looked at the usage and it said I had used 95% of my Claude design usage for the week!
This isn't a real tool. This is a plaything, if that's what they're providing as examples.
I don’t really buy that Claude Design will remove all the complexity around design. Vibe-coded apps using Claude look simpler because they are simpler. They’re not a gigantic product suite with extremely specific UI components tailored to each use case. The ‘simplicity’ is an illusion coming from conflating the complexity of a bicycle (a vibe coded app) with an airplane (an app like Figma).
Building the same design system component in code versus in Figma is going to be slightly more succinct in code; Figma’s primitives don’t have the sort of conditionals and control flow that code has. But code is much less malleable than drawing on a screen, and creative freedom is harder to achieve in code.
UI can fix the gap where code feels less malleable than Figma, but complexity comes largely from the worlds that humans create, and humans apparently want to create 8 modes for 4 products and 2 light/dark modes. If you want the same setup in Claude, it’ll be a little easier to maintain, but not much less complex.
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 developers - should be able to tweak the look of things without changing code? Or is it usually just the front end devs that run this Figma thing, but they dislike the disconnect between it and their code?
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 CSS, except it's usually best-approximation (not pixel-perfect) partially because, despite Figma allowing you to "copy CSS" for an element, it's unusable, almost inline CSS (and usually not aware of its ascendents and descendents, or any variables you're maintaining in CSS, or any class hierarchies, etc), and partially because the units of measurement aren't always identical on either side. You'll also often have multiple FE devs recreating components independently of each other (as a team effort), which can lead to drift and different implementations, which is fun. Then, depending upon the tech stack, FE might be building these components in something like Storybook [0] as a "front end source of truth", which then are either directly injected into a React or NextJS app or whatever, or sometimes they're partially or fully re-implemented again into BE components in the CMS (ex. Sitefinity). Then people ask which one is the source of truth, but really it's a chain of sources of truth that looks more like the telephone game than a canonical "brand bible". Then throw in any out-of-the-box future client efforts (say, a promotional landing page hosted outside of the main project) and you may have yet another reimplementation of part of the same design, but in a completely different system.
@kevinsync's answer is 100% correct and it's been this way for the last ~~~20? years? at least - only it was "Photoshop files hold the (design) truth" before - now it's figma.
But yes, the "design to code" gap has always been where designers' intentions were butchered and/or where frontend developers would discover/have to deal with designs that didn't take into account that some strings need more space, or what to do when there are more or less elements in a component, how things should scroll in real life, how things should react to a variety of screen sizes, etc.
this short meme video is funny/not funny because it hits too close to home - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/r6JXc4zfWw4 - but yes, "designers don't code and developers don't design", roughly speaking
and then of course you meet some people who do both really well... but they are pretty rare. :-)
It's a real shame that people bought into this false dichotomy, because the base reality is that people who work in web dev that stubbornly pick either code or layout are more of a liability than an asset.
I don't believe that people who can design and code are as rare as folks seem to believe, either. What seems more likely is that there are a LOT of coders who are extremely fluent in CSS but aren't particularly gifted when it comes to making things look good.
It wasn't that long ago that designers understood that they couldn't just hand off a 2D comp of what they want to see. The job isn't done until the output can be integrated into the app. Nobody gets to launch cows over the wall and go for lunch.
Sure, and also Illustrator sometimes, and Photoshop at other times. Some of the designers I know (very famous for their ui/web work) never touched vector components and just had a ton of layers in Photoshop and air/paintbrushed everything. Hence the meme...
I'm not sure about "without changing code" but I have definitely seen the believe that Figma represents something authoritative about the product instead of, say, the product being authoritative for itself.
Perhaps because I have a similar bio to yours, I am allergic to this view.
UX designers I encountered have mostly been tasked on ensuring consistency across the various product (A lot of devs are very cavalier about spacing and font sizes). Sometimes they proposed new flows and layouts, especially when the product needs a coat of paint.
So tools like Figma is nice in that regards as it's simpler to iterate on (From simple to hardest: Sketch on whiteboard|paper, Wireframe tools like Balsimiq, Figma|Sketch, css code) because it's pure fiddling with various properties. Figma has direct feedback while the code may require a compilation phase.
Great article, the last couple of paragraphs made me laugh! I love the part about things not masquerading as something else and being honest about what they are.
I was wondering if PenPot (https://penpot.app) might be sitting pretty in this new agentic era, considering that they took the direction of designs being actual markup, unlike the canvas approach in fig - if that’s even something that interests them.
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 fundamental Storybook hell of designing reusable and pretty components and layouts, but I don’t see Figma or any other tool solving it either.
What’s the solution? It feels like something that needs to be fixed more deeply at the component level.
> 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.
What if the approach isn't reusable, but instead is rebuildable? We are stuck in the mindset of creating components that we can grab and plug in to new designs. When we have a component that we like, why not ask the tool to create a markdown definition of it. Later on, when we're doing a new design where we would like to reuse that component, we tell the tool to read the markdown and use that whenever they need to use that component. I think the future will be much more flexible and interesting.
I feel like we're leaning way too much into the "vibe" aspect of using LLMs at the moment. There is definitely a good use case for LLM's here, but is just prompting your way into a design really the best method here? I feel like something in between Figma and Claude Design would give designers the control they want, but still removing the friction of going between design files and the code impl.
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!
Some good points, but as a whole - I'm not sure if I agree. Sketch lost to Figma because of it's design tooling & multiplayer. Physical products still get designed before being constructed - I don't see that going away. If anything, I think Figma should stop trying to play both sides of the field and decide what it wants to be.
The article makes a good point about how Figma's non-open data model is limiting their utility as the source of truth.
But I think it's part of a larger mistake Figma is making: they seem to have shifted to an extraction mindset too early, assuming they'd captured the market, right when the ground beneath them is starting to shift.
It's most visible in their pricing model evolution, which is now explicitly anti-collaboration. Figma used to be the obvious default because you could quickly share files with non-designers, so they could view and make small edits without fuss. Now that requires a paid "seat", along with a confusing mess of permission flows.
It's platform wide too. I taught a college design class recently, and had students sign up for Figma because it seemed archaic not to teach them to use it. Instead of just giving any ".edu" address a free account (like they used to) students are forced through a 3rd-party process of uploading transcripts to prove education status. A few of my students got rejected or ran into confusing errors, and never got access… Now I have to re-evaluate whether its worth using when teaching the class again. (And this is for a population with near-zero short-term purchasing power, but huge potential long-term value… why add barriers?)
This is such a weird self-inflicted wound for a collaboration platform to make. The big tools that won on collaboration (eg. Google Docs, GitHub) have understood that low-friction sharing is critical to becoming the default choice. And that being the default is a flywheel that drives adoption, both in users and in tooling.
It makes more sense if you see it through the lens of Figma trying to juice short-term numbers for their IPO. But it's sad to see because it had so much long-term potential.
I miss the days of having a native desktop design app with a perpetual license.
What Figma achieved technically in the 2010s was amazing. Coded the app in C++ and then used WASM to deliver it as a multiplayer web app.
But now it's trying to be too many things. Why did they ever feel the need to add slides and this other stuff.
Their MCP is poor (sure, they'll improve it).
The app struggles with larger files and performance is sloppy.
And don't get me started trying to design data grid heavy apps.
And they could easily follow Adobe's lead. Enshittify and lock you out of your account whenever they feel it's necessary (remember what happened with Venezuelan Adobe users a few years ago?)
Either Penpot gets their act together and will become the opensource design canvas for open-weight AI models or we will see another open source solution that will fill this space.
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 doing it easily twice as fast. Many development teams can be cut in half today with no reduction in output. I don't want to say it out loud at work yet, but we're actually producing too much.
I've been writing code for 50 years and it looks now that we have seen sunrise and are about to see sunset on humans writing code by hand.
Is that bad? Not to anyone who has managed dev teams and familiar with the incredibly tortuous and painful business of trying to corral a bunch of humans with varying skill and enthusiasm levels to create software. We have tied ourselves in knots with things like Agile just trying to work around the fact that software development is so slow and arduous.
Many times back in the waterfall days I have written up design documents to kick off dev teams on multi-week or month projects. Now I could feed those into Claude Code and get results in days. This stuff is exciting beyond belief in just getting shit done.
This is a golden era for any established company with an existing customer base. My question to them would be "with Claude Code, why aren't you carving through that massive backlog of feature requests that has been building up over the years?".
A lot of people seem to look at this as job threatening, and it surely is for junior devs. But for companies that already have a strong senior talent bench, it's time to raise the ambition levels and ask not how many jobs can be shed, but instead just how fast and hard can we go now we have these new superpowers.
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.
But things really are different this time. Computers and software were nascent industries with lots of room to grow, lots of software to build in previous transitions. Today software and technology companies are the biggest in the world. Every industry uses software. Getting your web app, mobile app or game discovered is actually a huge problem today because we have so much software. There is not infinite demand for software, or for anything else, even if it seems that way in the early days.
> Outside of some optimizations there's not much a designer couldn't debug through Claude Code. 90% of the industry is toast.
I've seen the "debugging" and "coding" that non-coding designers are attempting to vibe-code. 90% industry is definitely toast, but not the 90% you're thinking of. Most industry is going the way of Microsoft that cannot even display a start menu in under a second
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.
In response I suggest that the engineers using AI also lack code judgement (because they are not reading it either). I don't think questioning the AI use is the actual topic here, it is the shifting roles. Who says it's the designers that are taking the new meta-role? It's probably the FE's honestly.
The role shifting doesn't mean that it's the best path forward. I'm simply stating that it is happening.
Your designers are going to be looking at the layout; they're not going to notice if it's slow, uses too much memory, is not maintainable, doesn't follow repo patterns, etc.
Do you think it is reasonable to expect a person with an arts degree to know this?
> Do you think it is reasonable to expect a person with an arts degree
Of course it is.
The only people who think your fucking college degree determines your knowledge level and ability are teenagers and people who are so deeply untalented that it’s the only way they feel qualified.
>A leading question is a query that suggests the desired answer or puts words into a witness's mouth, often guiding them toward a "yes" or "no" response.
Honestly, I never understood the move to create an artificial dichotomy between design and code with a heavy layer of tooling.
I suppose that a layout engine made sense in the context of Flash, and you saw the future of the web as a set of keyframe animations. But the notion that there's a lot of value in creating a very heavy, high-friction abstraction between the UI/UX and the platform it ultimately runs on was always going to be a loser.
In the end, it turns out we're all just web developers, regardless of your weapon of choice.
When you can control the model layer like Anthropic, you get more leverage over the traits of the persona, enough so that the system feels closer to havin consistent expert design judgment built-in that complements the 'truth-to-materials'.
Excellent post. I share the author's sentiment which is essentially "to hell with Figma, at least fix Sketch". Been feeling very lonely in may hatred towards Figma, which is for a whole bunch of reasons (among others, it's an incredibly shitty, memory and CPU hungry Electron app that looks and feels worse than any more or less well designed web site), but now after reading this I realize the number of reasons has doubled.
It may look like a crappy Electron app, but Figma has a quite interesting architecture. The browser editor is developed in C++ and cross-compiled to JavaScript with emscripten. The rendering engine looks like its handling HTML, but it's actually rendering their own document format for cross-browser consistency. They have their own CRDT implementation to handle multi-user edits.
I think my biggest question is who cares? What does having an interesting internal architecture have to do with the “its electron though” ideological attack.
(author of the post here) I cut a paragraph how Figma costs cuckoo bananas money for your entire team for the privilege of enduring this byzantine nightmare. And they paywall certain features, which you likely can't get authorization for, so you have to do more hacks on top of hacks on top of the “gold standard” practices I shared in the blog post. The price ramp is not gradual.
man, I dont even use Figma for personal & side projects because its so expensive. I still occasionally fire up sketch or freehand it.
Figma is a work tool only and I'm disappointed by its MCP tooling which feels late and behind where it should be, I just feel forced to use Figma Make which stays in their walled garden without practical utility and connections to my actual codebases
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
We can blame AI for slopcoding but it's just what we've been doing for decades now - who cares if it takes 9000 lines to do what in theory Linus and Knuth and Carmack could do in 3000? Our CPUs eat a million lines of code for breakfast and demand more.
Then I looked at the usage and it said I had used 95% of my Claude design usage for the week!
This isn't a real tool. This is a plaything, if that's what they're providing as examples.
Building the same design system component in code versus in Figma is going to be slightly more succinct in code; Figma’s primitives don’t have the sort of conditionals and control flow that code has. But code is much less malleable than drawing on a screen, and creative freedom is harder to achieve in code.
UI can fix the gap where code feels less malleable than Figma, but complexity comes largely from the worlds that humans create, and humans apparently want to create 8 modes for 4 products and 2 light/dark modes. If you want the same setup in Claude, it’ll be a little easier to maintain, but not much less complex.
[0] https://storybook.js.org
But yes, the "design to code" gap has always been where designers' intentions were butchered and/or where frontend developers would discover/have to deal with designs that didn't take into account that some strings need more space, or what to do when there are more or less elements in a component, how things should scroll in real life, how things should react to a variety of screen sizes, etc.
this short meme video is funny/not funny because it hits too close to home - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/r6JXc4zfWw4 - but yes, "designers don't code and developers don't design", roughly speaking
and then of course you meet some people who do both really well... but they are pretty rare. :-)
I don't believe that people who can design and code are as rare as folks seem to believe, either. What seems more likely is that there are a LOT of coders who are extremely fluent in CSS but aren't particularly gifted when it comes to making things look good.
It wasn't that long ago that designers understood that they couldn't just hand off a 2D comp of what they want to see. The job isn't done until the output can be integrated into the app. Nobody gets to launch cows over the wall and go for lunch.
You mean Fireworks. Photoshop was for graphic design. Web designers used Adobe Fireworks. Figma is a successor to Fireworks, not Photoshop.
Perhaps because I have a similar bio to yours, I am allergic to this view.
So tools like Figma is nice in that regards as it's simpler to iterate on (From simple to hardest: Sketch on whiteboard|paper, Wireframe tools like Balsimiq, Figma|Sketch, css code) because it's pure fiddling with various properties. Figma has direct feedback while the code may require a compilation phase.
I was wondering if PenPot (https://penpot.app) might be sitting pretty in this new agentic era, considering that they took the direction of designs being actual markup, unlike the canvas approach in fig - if that’s even something that interests them.
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 fundamental Storybook hell of designing reusable and pretty components and layouts, but I don’t see Figma or any other tool solving it either.
What’s the solution? It feels like something that needs to be fixed more deeply at the component level.
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.
We've got an LLM using CSS and emojis and maybe pelicans riding bikes (SVGs).
Claude Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806725 - April 2026 (732 comments)
But I think it's part of a larger mistake Figma is making: they seem to have shifted to an extraction mindset too early, assuming they'd captured the market, right when the ground beneath them is starting to shift.
It's most visible in their pricing model evolution, which is now explicitly anti-collaboration. Figma used to be the obvious default because you could quickly share files with non-designers, so they could view and make small edits without fuss. Now that requires a paid "seat", along with a confusing mess of permission flows.
It's platform wide too. I taught a college design class recently, and had students sign up for Figma because it seemed archaic not to teach them to use it. Instead of just giving any ".edu" address a free account (like they used to) students are forced through a 3rd-party process of uploading transcripts to prove education status. A few of my students got rejected or ran into confusing errors, and never got access… Now I have to re-evaluate whether its worth using when teaching the class again. (And this is for a population with near-zero short-term purchasing power, but huge potential long-term value… why add barriers?)
This is such a weird self-inflicted wound for a collaboration platform to make. The big tools that won on collaboration (eg. Google Docs, GitHub) have understood that low-friction sharing is critical to becoming the default choice. And that being the default is a flywheel that drives adoption, both in users and in tooling.
It makes more sense if you see it through the lens of Figma trying to juice short-term numbers for their IPO. But it's sad to see because it had so much long-term potential.
What Figma achieved technically in the 2010s was amazing. Coded the app in C++ and then used WASM to deliver it as a multiplayer web app.
But now it's trying to be too many things. Why did they ever feel the need to add slides and this other stuff.
Their MCP is poor (sure, they'll improve it).
The app struggles with larger files and performance is sloppy.
And don't get me started trying to design data grid heavy apps.
And they could easily follow Adobe's lead. Enshittify and lock you out of your account whenever they feel it's necessary (remember what happened with Venezuelan Adobe users a few years ago?)
Either Penpot gets their act together and will become the opensource design canvas for open-weight AI models or we will see another open source solution that will fill this space.
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 doing it easily twice as fast. Many development teams can be cut in half today with no reduction in output. I don't want to say it out loud at work yet, but we're actually producing too much.
Is that bad? Not to anyone who has managed dev teams and familiar with the incredibly tortuous and painful business of trying to corral a bunch of humans with varying skill and enthusiasm levels to create software. We have tied ourselves in knots with things like Agile just trying to work around the fact that software development is so slow and arduous.
Many times back in the waterfall days I have written up design documents to kick off dev teams on multi-week or month projects. Now I could feed those into Claude Code and get results in days. This stuff is exciting beyond belief in just getting shit done.
This is a golden era for any established company with an existing customer base. My question to them would be "with Claude Code, why aren't you carving through that massive backlog of feature requests that has been building up over the years?".
A lot of people seem to look at this as job threatening, and it surely is for junior devs. But for companies that already have a strong senior talent bench, it's time to raise the ambition levels and ask not how many jobs can be shed, but instead just how fast and hard can we go now we have these new superpowers.
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
Teaching programming is a bit of mostly solved problem, today anyway.
I've seen the "debugging" and "coding" that non-coding designers are attempting to vibe-code. 90% industry is definitely toast, but not the 90% you're thinking of. Most industry is going the way of Microsoft that cannot even display a start menu in under a second
In response I suggest that the engineers using AI also lack code judgement (because they are not reading it either). I don't think questioning the AI use is the actual topic here, it is the shifting roles. Who says it's the designers that are taking the new meta-role? It's probably the FE's honestly.
The role shifting doesn't mean that it's the best path forward. I'm simply stating that it is happening.
Do you think it is reasonable to expect a person with an arts degree to know this?
Of course it is.
The only people who think your fucking college degree determines your knowledge level and ability are teenagers and people who are so deeply untalented that it’s the only way they feel qualified.
i.e. The OP doesn't need to answer yes to their question for OP's claim to be true, yet their question pretends otherwise. (non sequitur)
I did not say anything of the sort.
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47819428
I suppose that a layout engine made sense in the context of Flash, and you saw the future of the web as a set of keyframe animations. But the notion that there's a lot of value in creating a very heavy, high-friction abstraction between the UI/UX and the platform it ultimately runs on was always going to be a loser.
In the end, it turns out we're all just web developers, regardless of your weapon of choice.
[0] https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-des...
[1] https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/
[2] https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/how-figmas-multiplayer-tech...
Figma is a work tool only and I'm disappointed by its MCP tooling which feels late and behind where it should be, I just feel forced to use Figma Make which stays in their walled garden without practical utility and connections to my actual codebases
I have a complicated nextjs webapp, and I havent had to write front end code in six-nine months now.
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