alt Hacker NewsTools like Figma are for an era (and persona) who still wants to have all the various knobs and dials to dial in exactly what they want. And that is one way of working if, like you said people are trying to be more thoughtful and know exactly what they want.
But for the other 95% of people, being able to just say "ok can you make it look more modern" and have 4 variants in 5 mins, (like me) Figma will lose users like me.
But then again I was never a "designer" – more a builder.
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> But then again I was never a "designer" – more a builder.
Same here. I work in Claude Code all day long on slightly complex b2b apps, and the builder MVP for what I want to do with Claude.ai, to work on ideas is far simpler.
I just want to be able to create a React artifact prototype on claude.ai, then share it privately with a stakeholder (internal or external.) I want to allow those users to prompt changes, then see their changes in the artifact.
The bespoke design is not what I am really worried about at this phase. For b2b prototype stuff, claude.ai already does an excellent job with just a bit of project-specific prompting.
Why is this shared artifact building not yet doable? This seems "so simple." Yes, maybe some shared artifact specific git to allow version control is required, but is my ask really that hard, or unique?
I'm much closer to your persona than a professional designer. 5 years ago if I was going to spin up a landing page for a side project I was probably getting something mediocre together with bootstrap or material UI. Today I'd probably get something marginally better together with a tool like this. In both scenarios I'd end up with an undifferentiated but acceptable end state.
I've never paid for a figma seat. A couple of employers have so that I can collaborate with designers in the product, but I don't think this changes that.
In an era where it's cheaper and more common to end up at that undifferentiated state, the ability for companies to make their products go above and beyond it is more valuable, not less.
I see this across the board with AI. It lowers the bar to get to passable, but as slop fills the internet we're already seeing people place more value in good products, good writing, good art, thoughtful code architecture, etc. Everyone and their cousin's uber driver is vibe coding a SaaS startup no one's going to pay for right now.
> Tools like Figma are for an era (and persona) who still wants to have all the various knobs and dials to dial in exactly what they want
The Anthropic video on that page at 0:53 literally shows them clicking a "knobs" button and adjusting the pixel CSS value.
I know it's not exactly the same ... but it has that functionality to a degree.