Claude Design

Well, after having high expectations from watching the intro the actual result of a simple prompt "Bear on a bicycle" is very underwhelming.

Maybe AI is not good at everything, yet.

nice!

Modern Figma design libraries are one of the best things to happen to product teams in the last 20 years.

Reusable components. Shared styles. Auto layout. Variants. Design tokens. So many useful plugins! Interactive prototypes. Dev mode handoff. Versioned libraries. A single source of truth keeping designers, engineers, and PMs speaking the same language.

It's fucking bliss when you use it right. And best of all, anyone on the team can build with the legos the designers gave us!

Teams finally started treating the design system like infrastructure instead of decoration.

Then Figma Make showed up.

It generates pages that ignore your components, skip your tokens, and treat every screen like a fresh snowflake. Looks fine in the mockup. Lands like a brick on the dev team. Now every page is bespoke and every handoff is a rebuild. Fucking sucks.

We had it all figured out, then we fucked it up.

AI was supposed to accelerate momentum. But it just so completely lacks maturity. AI Tools are dragging teams back to 2010, when every page was a Photoshop file (with way too many layers and shitty names for them) and none of the designers can agree on what radius to assign to their buttons.

Good design systems are a discipline. If your AI tool doesn't respect the library, it's not a designer. It's an intern with a Molotov cocktail waiting to destroy your productivity.

I haven't used Claude Design yet, I'll try it, but I LOVE Figma, and I hate Figma Make. I don't have high hopes for Claude here.

Oh great more slop

the tech is really cool. its amazing. but i freaking hate this future

Sigh, same old, rusty design.

Now I can visualize my bloated shadcn + Tailwind UI in advance.

Lol I've vibe coded something identical to this in a day.

And another step toward a world, where product managers/owners/whatever and other boring people can generate what they once needed creative, passionate and skilled people for. Go ahead, its just the natural evolution of extreme capitalism.

I disagree with most of the takes here. The reason this will fail has nothing to do with design, designers, or taste.

This will fail because it's already a forgotten side project within anthropic, and anthropic also has pretty bad product DNA as a company. Their headcount is already too large and the culture is already set. They grew revenue so fast they speedran the stage at which you could build software product chops into the company culture (think Google circa 2008 vs. Google circa 2018).

They should focus on what they're good at: the actual AI models and B2B sales. Let OpenAI play early Google and churn through 100 different consumer product experiences to see what sticks, they're better positioned for it anyways.

Postmodernists are annoying because they are right about design. "Taste", aesthetics, design, vibes they're all as socially-constructed and post-truth as that annoying sophomore says everything is. The world is design is an isekai manga in which Derrida's delusions are the rules of physics. It's weird.

Part of this weirdness is the continual relativism of design. A taste-meme is good or cringe only relative to the prevailing social environment, never itself. An AI can never do "design", properly understood, because design is the work done by a reluctance motor, spinning endlessly in a Sysphean quest to align itself with a moving magnetic field and producing torque by side effect.

All efforts like this can do is capture the field alignment at an instant in time. It cannot do work. It cannot produce motion, not as long as its weights are as fixed as the field lines of a neodymium magnet. The instant AI design is good, it becomes bad through the act of becoming good.

Producing work through motion of taste may be one of the last human endeavors to be absorbed.

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I use claude daily

The faster we commodify design the faster we can get back to some sane consistent normal interfaces. Only the very biggest platforms (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Apple) should be spending any time on "design systems".

Imagine if a designer were hired to custom design the lightswitches in every building. We need to get back to off-the-shelf interfaces and stop wasting smart people's time reinventing UI widgets.

Thumbs down. Great design is original thought. AI is wholly incapable of that.

Go ahead and roast me.

Very mid. If you have any experience building your own UI kit, this will just slow you down.