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Claude Design(anthropic.com)
297 points by meetpateltech 2 hours ago | 171 comments
ljm an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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 valuable and nostalgic.

jjk166 a minute ago | parent | next [-]

> You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing.

90+% of attempts at making a truly unique or mind-blowing UI produce a mind-blowingly bad UI. For 0.5 seconds of wow factor, you've added substantial unnecessary friction. Outside of art projects where that wow factor is the point, it really should not be attempted, most certainly not by someone without the appropriate skillset.

The old skool artisanal weirdness was not a purposeful stylistic choice, it was a bunch of people trying to do the best they could with crappy tools. There may be some je ne sais quoi which is lost with the shift to mass adoption, but the reason for the mass adoption of these particular design trends was that they were objectively superior.

mjr00 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 real value in the presentation. If you're making a website for, say, a VST plugin for musicians, your site may need to have a little more "pizzazz" to make your product more attractive to the target audience.

Fordec an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no pride.

Standardized interfaces are as exciting as kettle thermal switches or physical knobs in cars. Useful, probably optimal and will be around for decades to come. Also nobody talks about it, treats it with interest, or pays above market rate to work on it.

The value becomes the architecture of the value of the tool, not the interface. There is still value being generated, but the need for a highly paid UX designer evaporates, and is ultimately replaced by the above.

jrimbault 39 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no pride.

But there's is "pride" in making tools people actually use without issue

soraki_soladead 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> There is also no pride.

Is the pride not in solving the users' problems?

> nobody talks about it, treats it with interest, or pays above market rate to work on it.

Definitely needs a citation for this one. For so many products the user isn't paying for standout design. They're paying for insight, leverage, velocity, convenience, whatever. The market definitely supports this by paying above market salaries.

Good design can be a useful differentiator but it isn't the only way for a tool or product to "spark joy" and often _fancy_ design (not good design) is used as a crutch for a subpar product.

enraged_camel 39 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

>> Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no pride.

I disagree completely. The pride should come from the value that is delivered. Specifically, this:

>> Useful, probably optimal and will be around for decades to come.

Is something to be proud of, full stop.

ezst an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's why I miss the days of old fashioned GUI toolkits (before the web thought of itself as an application distribution platform): you would just design any app as a bag of typical controls in typical containers, and you and your users would live with the expectation that they would look and feel just like the rest of the operating system, nothing more, nothing less. Frivolity would be generally frowned upon, with the result that applications were overall more homogeneous, effective, discoverable and efficient (also in dev time).

levmiseri 18 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is reducing the role of Design as some lego-blocks assembling process. And higher quality being seen as adding ‘pizzazz’.

You are right, though. Many products don’t need more than that. But I fear that this will greatly impact design innovation and progress. We might get stuck in the current UI paradigm for a long time.

ljm 15 minutes ago | parent [-]

We can skip Web3... Web 4.0 is twilight gradients, glassmorphism, text size xs in tailwind, and cards and pills for every UI component. Along with self-explanatory help text acting as filler under every header.

ilikecakeandpie 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's a real problem with everything looking the same though. For a consumer product, you lose brand recognition. For a B2B product, you can confuse your users because Tool A and Tool B look exactly the same. You have to look hard at the name, kind of like prescription pill bottles.

raffael_de 33 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

there is no problem with yellow, but if everything is yellow then that's a problem. that's his point.

crazygringo 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing.

Which is exactly what I want. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a competent UI?

Why do people celebrate consistency and uniformity in desktop apps, wanting to crucify developers for not following platform idioms and guidelines... and then suddenly want things that are "truly unique" or "mind-blowing" or "artisanal weirdness" when it comes to a web app?

A competent UI with little effort is a godsend.

adriand an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are still SO MANY insanely ugly, hard-to-use, absolutely horrible apps out there though. Sure, in consumer-focused apps, there's a lot of competition and pretty much everything popular is well-designed. But in enterprise? My god, it's still a massive shitshow.

The hilarious thing is that I would be willing to bet than in a decade, it's STILL a massive shitshow in enterprise. That's because the problem with enterprise software is not that good design is all that difficult to pull off (it just requires caring!) It's that the people making enterprise software have terrible taste and can't even see (I am convinced) that the thing they built is ugly and hard-to-use.

thunky an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing.

This is exactly what I want in a UI.

ljm 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The remaining issue is that even an AI-generated UI needs considerable UX input in order to work well, especially when you have to fit it around domain specific knowledge, use-cases, and prior art. Is it for power users or not? All that.

At risk of shifting the goalposts on what I originally said, unique here isn't meant to mean quirky or weird but, simply, something that hasn't been done before, or hasn't been done as effectively.

This is the challenge for B2B startups that are switching to LLM-based development and are trying to offer more than the reselling of cloud compute at a markup with specialised functionality, because AI turns SaaS into a sexy version of MS Access.

qazxcvbnmlp an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Exactly. If I am making a tool, I want the users mental energy to be spent on their domain, not bespoke weirdness of my ui choices.

carimura 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Music isn't really new either it's just recombining riffs already created. But the recombinations create new experiences. Might be the same with design?

est 14 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> how homogenous the internet has become in terms of design

I think it's because Steve Jobs killed Flash.

threetonesun an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'd argue it's relatively unimpressive given the ability to create design systems and apply themes to them to create relatively generic content has existed for a long time now.

Sure, some prototypes will be spun up more quickly. But if this was a real problem large companies faced it would have been solved in software already.

ctoth an hour ago | parent [-]

> if this was a real problem large companies faced it would have been solved in software already.

Good for everybody who isn't a large company then?

threetonesun an hour ago | parent [-]

I wasn't suggesting that the problem would be solved by large companies internally. If anything this is worse for smaller companies, who have already solved this problem for decades at this point by simply not caring about design too much and using the web UI framework du jour. We've already seen with Tailwind that moving to "just put money in the AI machine" comes at the expense of open source UI framework sustainability, with the upside of being slightly faster at making a first-pass boring design.

tcp_handshaker an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So this will turn out to be the most expensive web template business. Not really seeing how they expect to make money.

I guess post IPO, after the insiders cash in out of lock period its irrelevant.

ljm 18 minutes ago | parent [-]

It's a legitimate boon for throwing together little internal apps, mind.

I can slap something together with Claude over a few evenings to fill a gap on tooling, or I can wrestle with Jira and CI and all that to tie things together with their own integrations.

No thanks, I'll just take the API keys and build on top, to my exact specifications, and the interface will be passable even if it needs a lot of polish. Tailwind has worked wonders for that.

codegeek 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Twitter Bootstrap". Havent heard that term for years. The OG of CSS frameworks.

coffeebeqn 7 minutes ago | parent [-]

Most companies I’ve worked at still use bootstrap or something that looks very much like it for most internal web tools

volkk an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

that's how i've felt about all AI design. the harnesses get better and cooler, and the outputs up the baseline of utter crap to "whoa that doesn't look bad at all!" which works for probably 90% of the web, but anything truly unique still requires a lot of human taste. maybe that will change one day, but I hope it doesn't.

ezst an hour ago | parent [-]

By the nature of LLMs, there's no reason to think it would.

quacked an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I hate it so much. Ah, your website/app/program is comprised of rounded-corner cards in four colors (color/pale color/white/grey), with a dark theme. Your clickable text isn't visually distinguishable from your non-clickable text. All of your logos are sans-serif SVGs. Your settings and action menus are split across four different primary hidden locations. Your scroll bars disappear even when there's text hidden offscreen. You try to guess what I want to click on by showing a series of competing horizontally-organized pills over the top of the content instead of just giving me a consistent set of action buttons.

AI companies: "good news, everyone! We've automated all those steps so they're even easier to generate!"

I think the same thing is happening in physical construction. Ah, I see you've designed a new box with four primary color tones and slightly offset vertical lines to break up the windows.

rob an hour ago | parent | next [-]

What's great is I can take what you just said now and use it as context when generating my new DESIGN.md system and making sure it doesn't look like any of the other stuff. Thank you! Superpowers will show me all the options in their built-in visual companion when brainstorming. :)

Maxion an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This aestethic is useful though for SaaS apps and the like that know themselves to be generic.

rustystump 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I am not so sure. I lean towards client work on desktop/mobile/web and while the initial output is workable as new requirements come in it starts to fall apart largely because the vibe coder doesn’t understand design basics. It is one of those you dont know what you dont know and not that ai cannot write workable css or w/e.

GenerWork an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

Bilal_io 41 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

qkeast 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

>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.

The challenge is that this sets an expectation of what "design" is, de-valuing the former and shifting us culturally towards the latter and a space where "design" is seen as a subjective visual exercise with little intrinsic value.

jug 11 minutes ago | parent [-]

I think there's a parallel here in advertising and what AI has done there. It's clearly used nowadays, a seasoned user can probably spot it straight away even if it gets harder over time. Still, it's deemed "good enough". The savings versus having a team and shooting on location etc. can be enormous. Even before this launch, I see it on the web. It's already happening.

atonse 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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. 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.

nothinkjustai 4 minutes ago | parent [-]

Spending 5 minutes on the most user facing, tactile part of your products? Sounds like less of a builder and more of a slopper to me :)

motoxpro 3 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thats like saying Claude Code is targeted at coders who cant code (which I know some poeple believe)

xnx 6 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Figma is targeted towards designers who create thoughtful design systems

How many such people does the world need? Probably less than 1,000. Not a very big market for Figma.

ziml77 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think they understand that the people running businesses are going to look at this vs a human who uses Figma and realize how much more cost and time efficient it is to pay for a machine than a human.

seizethecheese 20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Just last week, I asked the designer on my team to try working in Codex instead of Figma. It’s just not a great workflow to pass a figma file to a developer to implement. She hasn’t wanted to go back yet…

ktimespi 7 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is this really that big of a moat for Figma to cross though? They would have a much easier time integrating AI than the other way around

codegeek 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On the other hand, Canva made a genius move to partner with Claude for this. One of my favorite products as a non designer.

ex-aws-dude an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't this something Figma could easily integrate? Then you'd have the best of both worlds

GenerWork 42 minutes ago | parent [-]

You already can use Claude Code with Figma. This is looking more like a Figma competitor than just Claude Code.

_aavaa_ 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’d be more concerned with the stock’s trajectory (continual decline) since the IPO than with whatever happened since 11AM.

rvz 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

This tells me that Lovable is certainly not worth $6.6B.

martinald 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Interesting! I wrote this approach up (more or less - extract design system -> make templates -> export) some time ago and I've found it unbelievably powerful: https://martinalderson.com/posts/how-to-make-great-looking-c....

I use it all day every day with Claude Code. I sometimes wonder past code if this has had the biggest impact on my day to day productivity, either having to make do with semi-bad looking reports or have a designer design them (which is slow).

Sort of feel sorry for Figma in a way though, given all the "partnerships" (highlighting their MCPs) and case studies they've done with Anthropic and then they release this. I note there isn't a testimonial from them this time.

I'm surprised how poorly Figma have used "AI" in general - given they were the "gold standard" in taking emerging technologies (WASM etc) and making an incredible product. The Figma Make thing was incredibly underwhelming, I managed to extract the system prompt out and it's basically just Gemini 3 Pro with a design prompt. Perhaps the original team has left?

They are extremely exposed imo. While all the UI/UX designers will continue using it for the forseeable, I strongly suspect a lot of their (A/M)RR was coming from extra seats for PMs, developers, etc to view and export and do commenting on the files - not core designer usage. I think a lot of this just won't happen on Figma as much.

coffeebeqn 13 minutes ago | parent [-]

I think you hit the nail on the head - I bet Adobe and Figma get most of their sold seats from people who don’t really need the full tool and are basically just using it as a viewer and to make very small adjustments or notes

ossa-ma an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 ideal user.

- Good designers will reject this, they prefer to be hands-on and draw from multiple sources of inspiration which is what Figma boards and Canva is good for, also mainly for cross-collaboration. If you've seen how quickly a great design engineer can prototype you'll know that "speed" they advertise in this video is not worth the tradeoff.

- Creatives typically have a very very very high aversion to AI.

- Non-designers will not see a purpose for this tool, basic design can already be done through Claude Code and Claude.ai, I fail to see what this could offer unless they leverage a model that is more creative and unique by default (you can not prompt/context/harness engineer creativity believe me I've tried).

- Design is a lot more than just UI. Tools like this ignore so many other important aspects like: motion, typography, images, weight, whitespace, sound, feel.

gpt5 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive

Designing a user inteface involves thousands of small decisions. When trading off pros/cons for each of these decisions, in 99% of the cases, the right answer is ‘optimize familiarity.

That’s why Android and iOS look the same, and why the small differences between them are where contention happen.

If you adopt existing patterns, your users would be instantly familiar with your app, and the design will not get in their way.

ossa-ma 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

You're arguing for familiarity in tactful design, while I agree that for most users this is a good thing, repeatability of existing patterns does create that immediate familiarity.

HOWEVER, that familiarity is only a virtue because someone, once, deviated hard enough that their deviation became the new familiar. AI can only optimise toward the current snapshot of "familiar". It cannot produce the next one. If designers outsource all their thinking to a model even in tactful design we would never have groundbreaking design concepts like "pull to refresh" or the command palette.

toomim an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"An AI model is incapable of that."

"Good designers will reject this."

^ Famous last words.

Sir_Twist 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I could see there being an 80/20-style argument for this sort of tool being used for more generic usecases, with "good designers" using Figma et al. for programs where the UI itself is a selling point.

ossa-ma an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I will stand by the first point unless models start being trained with different objectives instead of RLHF's three objectives: Helpfulness, Harmlessness and Instruction-following

I will very likely be wrong on the second point.

ctoth an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I noticed in your list that you didn't mention accessibility. I would personally rather have an accessible design than one which is "original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive." and here we are.

ossa-ma 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

I should have mentioned accessibility. It supports my argument more than yours. Accessibility like captions, voice, keyboard nav, dark mode are all a deviation from the norm by a minority (something AI is completely incapable of doing) and a fight against familiarity which now serves as a great benefit to the majority.

ctoth 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

This ... This is simply not true. I use a screen reader. I am using it right now. I can confirm that AI-generated code, by default, is far, far more accessible, cares far more about keyboard nav, about DOM order, about using the right semantic HTML, about the things that I care about than your average human-designed slop.

And no, it doesn't just add ARIA to everything as is so typical by poor practitioners.

ossa-ma 19 minutes ago | parent [-]

I think we're arguing two different points. You're arguing about implementation, AI is great at this given the existing defaults and the right prompting. AI was trained on 30+ years of accessibility standards that a minority of great humans fought to establish as a familiar practice.

I'm arguing about invention. It is extremely unlikely that AI will be the one to invent the next accessibility paradigm, because that requires deviating from the training distribution, which it CAN'T DO.

I'm also arguing that this homogeneity in design will lead to an atrophy in inventive, unique and original thinking.

Oras an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Data suggest different outcomes, there was always a way to standardise interfaces, from Twitter bootstrap, all the way to shadcn.

Not everyone is looking for unique design, 70% of the web is still using Wordpress. I would say majority prefer familiarity and appreciate uniqueness.

recitedropper an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Plus: So much of excellent user interface design is done through iterating on feedback from live humans testing it with their human sensory system.

Until we have embodied AI's with eyes and hands that provide good enough approximations, the aspect of design bottlenecked on human experience will stay bottlenecked.

paul7986 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Web design / digital design is a dying field as businesses will start paying one person who does 3 to 4 roles (PM, UX Research, Design and UI Development - tho why use a design tool for web stuff when AI tools generate designs in code), as well now tons of ppl can do this work using AI tools. Further, is the future of digital experiences user interfaces aka the web or will there be an AI Phone where everything is done / seen on the lock screen (AI generates the visuals as you text or talk to it) and or its more of a text and voice digital experience less UI.

Overall after being laid off in January and a 17 year UX Research/Design/Dev career Im starting school in my early 50s to change careers.

Uncorrelated 26 minutes ago | parent [-]

What career are you aiming to switch to?

jayd16 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You could have said the same thing about powerpoint vs high quality marketing departments. The "pros don't want this" argument doesn't really hold weight.

This is for non-designers to crank out slop with less effort. They can still be swayed by all the shiny knobs to feel in control.

ej88 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is cool!

Seems like Claude is actually building almost like a layered Figma wireframe that you can do fine grained adjustments afterwards (e.g. adjust font size).

Interesting that Canva provided a quote of support. I'm not familiar with the differentiation, but it seems like this will directly siphon customers from Canva, right?

npilk an hour ago | parent [-]

There's an "export to Canva" button in Claude Design, so perhaps they're hoping this will be another entry point for new users, or that they'll be able to "lock in" as the default design software for Claude users.

maerF0x0 14 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> voice, video, shaders, 3D and built-in AI.

As someone who's thinking about side project-ing a game, this caught my eye.

I am curious to explore what Claude can yolo in terms of a retro style indie game... One who's audience might only be me.

jayd16 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So how much of this is fully generated vs AI running through all the knobs on template widgets?

Is that globe made from whole cloth or is there a bespoke "telecom globe" widget that it dropped in? Could I ask for mock up of molecules with the same fidelity of knobs, down to nucleus size and such?

mpeg 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

It's generated, when you try it you can see this is mostly a harness around claude opus 4.7 that helps it create a good design plan, it also supports asking you questions as it goes along, letting you review and feedback on mockups, etc, but ultimately if you look at what it's generating as it does it – it's just code

jayd16 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

"Its just code" is meaningless to me. Is the code its generating using mostly well known widgets with predefined knobs, or is every element completely custom and the knobs are created on the spot with slightly different naming and function every time?

I actually think I would prefer the more boring "it composes well known widgets" because then there's a chance I could just use this to generate a presentation layer and integrate it instead of new blobs of code I need to essentially reverse engineer or remake.

mpeg 13 minutes ago | parent [-]

Depends of what you prompt it... if you tell it to use react and shadcn, it will use that.

reluctant_dev 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe I am using it wrong but it feels much closer to Lovable than Figma. I was expecting this to feel like the two products combined. Certainly better than Lovable though, but a little disappointing.

digitalShield a minute ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I use claude daily

lmeyerov an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When Anthropic's CPO left Figma's board this week, that was my first question . Oof.

sbszllr an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's interesting how OpenAI and Anthropic effectively mass dumped a bunch of similar features in the last two days.

I wonder what other features they're cooking right now.

fassssst a minute ago | parent | next [-]

It’s because they embrace their coding models to ship new things at light speed.

irishcoffee an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I think that's the wrong question. What kind of shadow spy network must exist around all these companies such that they all happen to be working on the same features at the same time.

embedding-shape an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> What kind of shadow spy network must exist around all these companies such that they all happen to be working on the same features at the same time.

Stuff like that happened even before the invention of the telephone, humans within the same geographic location is even more predicable, so surely this shouldn't come as a surprise.

clayhacks 5 minutes ago | parent [-]

Yeah the spy network is just all these people living in a 7 mile radius of each other (San Francisco) and have lots of overlap in social circles

jonlucc an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Frequently, two movies with very similar concepts drop the same year. Is that because they're spying, or because the companies make decisions in similar ways based on similar input information?

sbszllr an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's possible and even likely there's industrial espionage going on. But imo, you don't need that. I've worked in cutting edge industries, and even when you don't know what your competition is doing, there are usually only so many logical next steps.

xpe 24 minutes ago | parent [-]

This. / Who remembers the "birth" of crowdfunding? Why did so much seem to happen at all once? The most likely explanation imo is that it was "in the air" -- we share culture and ideas. These ideas don't have to be stolen to co-occur... quite the opposite.

xpe an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The human brain strikes again. It is built into our cognitive machinery to look for patterns and naively ascribe causation. We're not rational beings that sometimes mess up. We're a clusterf--k of cognitive biases all the way down.*

Cool pattern! Sure, maybe there is something there.** And/or maybe our brain is doing "conspiracy theorizing lite". Its all on the same spectrum -- the same flawed cognitive machinery trying to operate in a weird modern world quite different from where we came from.

A better way: write out your favorite hypothesis. But don't stop there... keep going... write out many hypotheses. Then find ways to test them. To tap into our best selves, I recommend The Scout Mindset (book). Here is an infographic summary of part of it: https://imgur.com/qN31PX8

Probably not a better way: float one's first gut feels to the Internet phrased as i.e. the better question and feed empty calories to our pattern-craving brains. There is reason some of our brain functions are considered higher order.

* Maybe I'm overstating this. Let me know? I want to read Rationality and the Reflective Mind by Keith Stanovich (https://academic.oup.com/book/5930) as a counterpoint to the usual suspects (such as Tversky & Kahneman)

** But what is there. What kind of pattern? What kind(s) of causation could be at work? See Judea Pearl's "ladder of causation". Nice write-up here: https://samuel-book.github.io/causal_inference_notebook/pear...

hudo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

404 Page not found when clicking on their link https://claude.ai/design at the end of the article! Vibe coding to prod, gone wrong?

anonfunction an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Fourth thing in a row they've announced that I wanted to try and couldn't.

Previous comment with the prior 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47794419

mpeg an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's rolling out progressively, it works for me – it actually seems very polished, the examples are really good; and it lets you create your design system from your codebase

alpb an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's rolling out progressively throughout the day.

baal80spam an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Perfect, that's CC design for you :-)

m_w_ an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Really interesting response to Google's Stitch - and seemingly a better alternative given some of the features shown in the video. If everything actually works at least close to how it's advertised, this'll be useful. I'm sure it's no Dieter Rams, but it wouldn't be a surprise if it's already better than many devs at design work.

aanet 17 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So.. this is why Anthropic CPO left the board of Figma

felixbraun 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This gets us closer to the optimal UI for designing interfaces -- a massive lever; nothing else changed (what to do with it is and remains a skill issue)

atonse an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've been spending the last two days building a large number of mockups for a new product. Literally the last two days.

I'm wondering how i can CONTINUE that in this design thing, can i import something? Because they show it the other way... you can start and edit, and then export to claude code.

Until then, I guess it's back to just using CC

coder543 an hour ago | parent [-]

From the page:

> Import from anywhere. Start from a text prompt, upload images and documents (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX), or point Claude at your codebase. You can also use the web capture tool to grab elements directly from your website so prototypes look like the real product.

atonse 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

Thank you, I should RTFA next time.

bryabaek 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

such a cheerful background music to celebrate the death of lovable, bolt.new, figma LOL

giancarlostoro 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We used to have RAD based IDE's and now I guess with AI we're going full circle, I'm curious how their mobile thing works, if its just React Native based or what.

firefoxd an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've been using stich from Gemini, and just plain zAi for helping redesign my website. You can use the generated code to copy and paste the design to fit your own templates, but that's a pain. Unless you are ok with using tailwind and the dozen or so classes on every element and don't want to edit anything.

What I found valuable is the design.md that was produced. It's a guide for building each component. So using these tools becomes akin to PSD to html we used do. At least that's when I find them most effective.

jmkni an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Unfortunate that linking code from your computer doesn't work with Firefox

Very interesting though

tzury 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anthropic’s roadmap is widely underappreciated; it is the company defining AI productivity today.

xnx 17 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

htrp 17 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Reminder that Claude's own AI design skill (which is probably incorporated directly into this product) says things like

>NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes (particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), predictable layouts and component patterns, and cookie-cutter design that lacks context-specific character.

> Interpret creatively and make unexpected choices that feel genuinely designed for the context. No design should be the same. Vary between light and dark themes, different fonts, different aesthetics. NEVER converge on common choices (Space Grotesk, for example) across generations.

[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...

young_mete 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Will be taking this for a spin imminently. What seems to be very unique here vs other canvas tools are the generative UI controls.

If you’re confused about why everyone is shipping their own canvas tool - this is what I wrote when I reviewed Stitch from Google in my newsletter:

“every SOTA (State-of-the-Art) model can already do this. Give it a prompt, it'll spit out an HTML design. Ask for 10 responsive variations, you'll get them. Stitch is a Ul and context harness on top of Gemini, in the same way Claude Code is a harness on top of Claude's models. This means every Al lab will likely ship their own version, and they'll all interoperate because at the end of the day it's all HTML and markdown.”

More generally, this is a competition of where the product development work starts and lives. The business value will accrue to those who become a destination, not a plugin.

AI can now power a new sort of tool that supports the entire process (not just coding or just design). So there’s no reason for Anthropic or any other lab to give that up to another tool.

psadri an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What’s interesting here is that with AI, all our interfaces should evolve away from previous generation rigid forms / buttons / tables etc. towards something more fluid / dynamic / “natural”. Yet all the AI coding is geared towards producing more of the former.

jayd16 an hour ago | parent [-]

Why would a remix engine move away from what it was trained on?

Why would we want to move away from hard fought UX design lessons? Dynamic and fluid UX is infuriating.

namanyayg an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Anthropic team looks to be eating all the usecases and application layer. I personally know of many figma + AI startups that are going to feel shaken up with this launch.

Anthropic has distribution on their side, their engineers are excellent (I have ran with them across the ggb in the past and they work 12 hours plus a day regularly.)

I think what actually might be slowing them down is the public releases and pr lol, not ideas or execution

subscribed an hour ago | parent | next [-]

12+ hours a day regularly?

What a toxic workplace :/

H8crilA an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Didn't know that anyone needed to hear that, but here it is: "hot" companies often have such workdays, especially pre-IPO and with such a fast growth.

adrian_b 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

"Hot" companies with stupid managers often have such workdays.

In the case of engineers and programmers, the amount of useful completed "work" has only a very weak correlation with the length of the workdays.

Good engineers or programmers will think anyway most of the time about the problems that they must currently solve, regardless whether they are in the office or at home or in any other place, and regardless whether to an external observer they appear to be "working" or they appear to do nothing.

Programmers who spend all day typing lines of code into a computer, are more likely to not be competent programmers, because otherwise they would have found ways to automate such activities that require continuous physical involvement, instead of being able to allocate enough time for thinking about the right solution.

If whatever they do does not require true thinking, then that is the kind of job that can be done by AI agents.

namanyayg 14 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah exactly, if you're seeing your own stock go up like the Anthropic employees are, it's gonna be hard to not work 12 hours

Sol- an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

They are all very wealthy, or are about to be at the IPO. Seems like a worthwhile tradeoff.

And money aside, it is certainly one of the most exciting companies in the world to work for.

namanyayg 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Exactly the engineers I've talked to are all so EXCITED

Noumenon72 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It's a horseshoe where the worst companies make you work 12 hours and the best companies make you want to work 12 hours.

wmeredith an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> their engineers are excellent... they work 12 hours plus a day regularly

What? In my experience people who are good at their job can get it done in a reasonable amount of time. Working 12 hours a day is obsession, no competence. There can be overlap, but there is no causation.

namanyayg 14 minutes ago | parent [-]

At a company like Anthropic, which is one of the fastest-growing companies in the world, there is more work than anyone can reasonably deal with

causal an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Will give it a try but my experience with Claude and browser use so far is that it’s extremely lazy: it rarely notices or cares when something doesn’t look right, it needs lots of pointing out “hey you ignored that broken render” etc

PullJosh an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I like their emphasis on quickly prototyping many variations of a design. That seems useful, even for experienced designers.

rvz an hour ago | parent [-]

Useful enough to replace Figma.

ramathornn an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's funny seeing the Co-founder of Canva commending the product. Yikes!

This app is pretty slick, this will funnel a huge number of customers away from Figma + Canva imo.

maerF0x0 17 minutes ago | parent [-]

you missed that there's an export to canva button. It will funnel users _to_ Canva.

ramathornn 14 minutes ago | parent [-]

Why would they need to back to Canva? If teams are working within claude already I think they will just offboard canva/figma tasks into claude.

gnegggh 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

no info regarding privacy and data if you connect your repo?

hmokiguess an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Who’s the end user for this? I struggle to relate but then again I also don’t use Figma so I may not be the target demographic

I have been doing fine just instructing Claude code to use Tailwind and reference design documents

recitedropper an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Seems to me like Anthropic is desperately trying to find as many product-market fits as possible before they IPO. They're reaching a chaotic weekly release cadence--each new product chockful of unclear, overlapping capability with their previous.

Combine that with the obvious hackernews manipulation that somehow gets each and every haphazard release instantly to the top, and you can see they're starting to feel some real heat.

johnfn an hour ago | parent [-]

It’s interesting to claim that because everything they do goes to the top on hacker news that they must be in trouble. I haven’t heard that particular chain of effect before.

recitedropper an hour ago | parent [-]

Feeling some heat != in trouble. Just that the pressure cooker is turning to a higher temp.

But, I'll gladly admit that I am bias: I'm tired of seeing blatant astroturfing by a company whose main marketing tactic is to play on societal fear, while simultaneously employing safety theatre to look like the "good guys".

So take my opinion with a grain of salt :)

dbbk an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

"Who's the end user for this?" obviously people who use figma

K0IN 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

this might be a game changer (for show dont tell), and fast itterations in design meetings, to show what your thinking of.

wg0 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How dangerous is this eh?

RickS 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

lmao at the idea of figma integrations, categorically. I don't ever want to look at figma again in my life. figma is what people used to ideate quickly because they couldn't build directly in the browser. we can now ideate quickly while working directly in the browser. figma's entire raison d'etre is dinosaur tier over.

With that said, this seems like it's just claude code + simplified devtools in a container? Will need to spend more time with it to see how EG commenting influences things, but 5 minutes in, this seems like it's needless formalization on top of how I already used claude for deisgn

mikeaskew4 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

Go ahead and roast me.

freedomben an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> Great design is original thought

I don't agree. For novel use cases, yes there's some truth to that. But consistency is huge in a UX. If basic controls work well for a situation, they should be used. Designers should not be getting "creative" or "original" for those sorts of things.

eloisant 9 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Having furniture made by a master designer and artisan woodworker is great. But sometimes, you don't have the budget for that and Ikea furnitures does the job just fine. Most of the time, actually.

jonlucc an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Transparently, I'm not a designer, I'm a biologist. That said, the things I want designed by Claude don't need great design. I need a slide format that is consistent from one study to the next so the reader can follow. I need a tool that tracks the number of mice in each lab and flags if someone is using more resources than we expect. I need a personal site that is easy to work with that tracks my pet geckos' feed and environment.

If I have a product out of my lab that makes it to human trials, there will be a full team of marketers and designers tasked to the brand image.

dumfries an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As if original thought occurs out of thin air. AI is definitely capable to take aspects of design and apply it elsewhere.

criddell an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe you haven't noticed, but most of the internet doesn't seem to care about great design.

Also, a lot of very good software developers are bad at design and unwilling or unable to pay for a designer. This will be an improvement for them.

rglover an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You're absolutely correct.

But the mass market (who this is ultimately for) doesn't care about great design. They care about "seeing something on the screen." If they can get something that looks 80-90% aligned with what they observe to be modern design, they won't think twice (even if the end result is clunky or not on par with what a professional designer would produce). It's the Ikea Effect on steroids.

johnfn an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Tell this to the 99% of designers who are designing the 5th page in some RBAC modal or some obscure settings page. Design is like code - there are a few people doing really groundbreaking stuff, but vastly more doing the utilitarian plumbing everyone depends on.

garrickvanburen an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My default position: If an LLM can create it, we probably don't actually need it.

t0lo an hour ago | parent [-]

If AI can create it- it's probably already been created and thought of before?

cortesoft 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure, great design is original thought.

Is there also a place in the world for not-great-but-good-enough design?

seydor an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Have you seen many original designs in the past 15 years?

chasd00 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Great design is original thought

not really, great design in a web application is no surprises.

wolttam an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Human inputs their idea. AI helps bring it to light faster. Human iterates.

Still human?

Jtarii an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Great designers will make great designs no matter what tools you give them.

subhobroto 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Great design is original thought. AI is wholly incapable of that

This is entirely accurate, however I fear there's a lack of perspective:

If you're in the middle of the desert and need to sit down, that random rock looks and feels great because there's nothing even close, around!

One issue that a lot of experts fail to recognize is that "great" is relative: It's not apparent to the experts because they are only pulled in when their expertise is needed. Most of the time when experts are pulled in, requirements are clear, you have traction, scale and now you need to optimize.

Once you're spoiled for choices, you have lots of options and then that random rock doesn't look appealing at all: now you're considering other factors like budget - IKEA vs Adirondack.

What AI is making a huge difference are places where "great" isnt that valuable:

- people in the desert: Someone wants to track what words their toddler is saying or their groceries or how much kitty litter they should buy soon and Claude will spit something out reasonable even if it makes the skin of experts crawl.

- commodity and bean counters: in cut throat industries like power or insurance, it's all commodity services competing on price. Most people arent going to pay a premium for a better looking, more intuitive insurance app. It just needs to not suck and fall over. Or you're making a knockoff of an existing, well understood product

rbtprograms an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

i dont disagree. but there is a difference between great design and entirely acceptable and shippable design.

mupuff1234 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most applications just need good enough design.

esafak an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This is just going to chop the bottom end off, same as with software. If you are great you get to keep your job.

The catch is that the person making the decision might not know or care about the difference.

anonfunction an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Start designing at claude.ai/design.

That link is redirecting me to https://claude.ai/404, anyone else?

devmor an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This stuff is the antithesis of what I want to see AI used for.

Deriving a bland average of creativity is the saddest thing you could do. I don’t even enjoy design and I find this offensive.

jonlucc an hour ago | parent [-]

Claude, add a bit of whimsy to this design.

firasd an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This seems a bit fiddly... I gave it the ChatGPT iframe html for my (not yet released) Liveclip MCP server that's like tables [https://x.com/firasd/status/2039926453408776649]. And I had this chat in the sidebar and it popped up some questions in a form

> do you see our current html

Hi-fi design Interactive prototype html

> do you see our current html

Hi-fi design Interactive prototype html

● Claude Yes — I can see your html/ folder. It has 7 files:

files-list.html math-result.html rows-view.html table-view.html text-editor-doc-view.html trending-topics.html unique-result.html Want me to open them up and take a look at what's in there? And what would you like to do — polish them, turn them into an interactive prototype, build something new on top, or something else?

> yeah in table view i'm thinking about how to deal with cells that may be big. i guess we want to do something different than excel or sheets in that auto expand rows with cells that contain big values. we can show like the first -- what does twitter show, 280? so we can show 280 chars and then [...]

● Let me take a look at the current table view to understand what we're working with.

Got it — I see the current table view. Right now every cell is clamped to max-width:220px with white-space:nowrap and text-overflow:ellipsis, so long values just get cut off at whatever ~30 chars fits the column. You're thinking about the opposite end: what if a cell genuinely holds 2,000 chars of text? Neither pure clip nor Excel-style row expansion is quite right.

Before I start sketching, a few quick questions so I don't guess wrong:

> Questions answered: - truncation_threshold: ~280 chars (new tweet) - expansion_ux: nothing right now -- it's not interactive - row_height_policy: Grow freely like Notion/Airtable - content_types: Not sure yet - indicator_style: [...] at the end of the text - newlines: Render them (row grows) - copy_affordance: no interaction right now - column_width: Fixed width, all columns equal - variation_count: 2 variations - aesthetic_direction: Same bones, but let you push it a bit

● Got it — so: non-interactive, rows can grow freely, 280-char cap with [...], newlines render, same bones but push it a bit, 2 variations. Let me sketch this out.

Set up variations file with two table treatments V1: Notion/Airtable-style free-grow with [...] cap V2: pushed aesthetic variant Wire both to the same sample data w/ long cells Let me peek at a couple of the sibling files so the variations stay in-family with the rest of the widget set.

Good — now I have the visual family. The shared vocabulary across widgets:

#f5f5f3 page, #fff card, #d0d0cc borders, #f0f0ec headers System font, 12–14px Subtle alternating row tints, no drop shadows, flat corners Color used sparingly; #666 for secondary text My plan for the two variations (side-by-side in a canvas so you can compare on the same rows):

V1 — "Notion-ish, stay in family"

Keep current palette, borders, zebra striping Rows grow vertically as needed; white-space: pre-wrap so newlines render Cap each cell at 280 chars; if longer, slice to 280 + […] inline Same fixed column widths, everything else identical V2 — "Same bones, pushed"

Tightens the grid (hairline borders instead of panels, more whitespace, denser typography) Column rail with sticky row numbers Soft fade on the bottom of ultra-tall cells instead of mid-text […] when content is really long (hybrid: char cap + visual) Monospaced tabular digits for row numbers; type column ⌾ / ▤ markers subtly hinting content type; column width slightly wider for breathing room Let me build it.

Now let me build the two variations. I'll set up realistic sample data with a mix of short values, tweet-length values, long-long values, and ones with newlines, so the behaviors are visible.

Now the two table components.

Clean. Two variations on the canvas, both rendering the same 7 rows so you can compare directly:

V1 — in-family. Your current widget, with white-space: pre-wrap so rows grow, newlines render, and a soft grey […] appended when a cell goes past 280 chars. Row 3's summary (double-long prose) and row 4's URL show the cap. V2 — same bones, pushed. Hairline borders instead of filled header panels, monospaced tabular row gutter, column letters as uppercased small-caps above the header names row, tighter typographic rhythm, cells > 280 → […] legend in the footer. Row 7 shows how newlines render naturally. Both slice at the nearest word boundary when one is within ~40 chars of the 280 cap, otherwise hard-cut — so […] never lands mid-word.

A couple of things worth calling out, not changed:

280 is pretty generous when a row has multiple long cells side-by-side — row 3 is ~2 cells × 280 = a very tall row. If that ends up being painful in real usage, dropping to ~180 or adding a per-row max-height with fade might be worth a follow-up. Neither variation is interactive per your answer; there's no click-to-expand, hover, or copy. Easy to bolt on later. Fork verifier agent Both variations are live on the canvas. Let me know which direction feels right and I'll fold it back into html/table-view.html." -----

It's basically similar to their Artifacts system in a harness I guess

MagicMoonlight 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Interestingly, Claude Design has its own completely separate usage bar.

albert_e an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

is this the Figma/Canva/Powerpoint/Keynote killer?

alpb an hour ago | parent | next [-]

This largely appears to be a HTML generator at its core, not necessarily what Figma does with layers/canvases etc. There's no collaborative nature to it either.

It feels like a lightly designed product that moves claude CLI to their backend, generates the HTMLs and renders them in browser on claude.ai website for you. Sure, it accepts your design system as an input from you or imports from your repo, but you could feed the same into claude CLI as well?

I'm curious what exactly it gives besides having claude CLI + prompting it well with your design system + skills.

weatherfun 40 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The IBM/Microsoft analogy is a classic. It’s always fascinating to watch these 'frenemy' dynamics play out. In these cases, the one who owns the direct interface with the end-user usually wins the long game, while the 'infrastructure' partner risks becoming just another utility. Will be interesting to see if Canva can maintain its identity or just become a shell for Claude's output.

diatone 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Yep agree it looks like it’s taking the existing generated artefact, parameterising it within an inch of its life, exposing a pseudo WYSIWYG for the parameters and calling it a day with a few export options. Not a huge leap from what they’ve got already but it’s a clever adjacent step for sure. Same product new chrome.

Boss0565 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Considering Canva collaborated with them, no?

Sol- an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe a collaboration with a metaphorical gun to your head.

frankdenbow an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Canva has more expansive editing tools but I agree, it seems like a frenemies situation.

svnt an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Or one from a place of unfounded hubris.

netdevphoenix an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

IBM also collaborated with Microsoft for the OS and we know how that ended.

strickjb9 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

First NanoBanana came for the artists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not an artist.

Then Claude came for the designers with Claude Design, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a designer.

...

yard2010 an hour ago | parent [-]

Great Niemöller paraphrase

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came

jansan an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

LetsGetTechnicl 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh great more slop

quotemstr 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

cdrnsf an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

lagrange77 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

weatherfun 42 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The point about design homogeneity is spot on. While standardized interfaces are great for usability and 'internal tools' as mentioned below, we're losing that 'artisanal weirdness' that made the early web feel alive. Tools like this make it easier to build fast, but the challenge now is how to use them without losing the product's unique soul.