This isn’t going to replace Figma. It’s going to replace the people who use Figma.
My 76yo Dad just used Claude Design to make a simple commercial tenancy/lease management CRUD app. We handed what he built to Claude Code to implement within my existing business tech stack. It perfectly followed my coding & testing playbooks (basically a multi-file CLAUDE.md with prompt & command hooks to evaluate conformance). It works… exactly as my Dad imagined.
Now, mind you, my Dad had some outdated UI expectations (he asked Claude Design to style use a Windows 98 aesthetic!), but my point is: we just built a fully-functional, deeply tested, domain-expert-designed app, in less than a day.
I don't like the "I canceled my x subscription" hype posts, but I did cancel Figma today. We've barely used it in months and this was the nail in the coffin.
Question for you, did these tools replace software / design consulting as something you relied on in the past?
This is a success story I've been hearing more recently. Restaurants, contractors, plumbing, 1 person startups... I'm wondering if this is because the barrier to entry is now lower - or if these tools are actually moving work away from small software teams or individual devs.
IMO this is the crux of the "AI Eating SWE" scenario (along with other knowledge work...) I'm sure it's a little bit of both. If this was something you were going to pay a designer and a developer for, it changes the outlook.
From my perspective, it feels more likely that with cheaper software we'll see a rush of people building their own, but once it gets sufficiently complex it then needs to be maintained, or improved, and it becomes more work than the initial weekend POC.
simple question, I didn't found out that tiny point in the claude design UI: how do you "hand over" to claude code exactly? just created my design system and would like to drop into my CC managed repo so CC can flesh out all the react components to the design system. only a folder with files like SKILL.md so far that I spotted ort some JSX stuff. wonder if there is some blessed way instead
For us, Claude Design wrote one html file and a bunch of jsx files. What it built was quite functional. We used the “export” button to download the project as a zip file and I placed the contents into a directory in my monorepo. Then I wrote an about 5 paragraph prompt for Claude Code, sent it with bypass permissions (CC is running as a different, non-root user with no LAN network access), and went to bed. The next day, viola, it turned prototype jsx into tsx (+ server-side ts) that mostly conformed with my existing stack.
I’ve been trying to find a good way to let my Dad keep tweaking the new version but haven’t so far. For now he continues to work (using CD) on the jsx prototype. I can do another export later and CC could use git diff to see what changed and realise those same changes in the “real” version. But there has to be a better way.
My 76yo Dad just used Claude Design to make a simple commercial tenancy/lease management CRUD app. We handed what he built to Claude Code to implement within my existing business tech stack. It perfectly followed my coding & testing playbooks (basically a multi-file CLAUDE.md with prompt & command hooks to evaluate conformance). It works… exactly as my Dad imagined.
Now, mind you, my Dad had some outdated UI expectations (he asked Claude Design to style use a Windows 98 aesthetic!), but my point is: we just built a fully-functional, deeply tested, domain-expert-designed app, in less than a day.