We already have the business side come with requirements in the form of 'solutions' that they have thought up, which more often than not are Rube Golberg-esque contraptions, that you have to conversationally reverse engineer to arrive at the actual requirements.
In the future they will come with their 'ready' solution, already 'working' and be even less receptive to look at design and architecture holistically. Just make it like that. And why do you need to spend X man hours? The thing is basically already done!
I have seen this already. Vibecoded top to bottom.
The downside is that the business people don't understand why you can't just put their app in production as is. And then there's a lot of pressure to make it happen quickly "because we can use AI to move fast". This is going to come down to healthy organization dynamics, and hopefully represents a learning opportunity for leadership.
The upside is that the idea has already been proven out much more thoroughly than a sketch on a napkin. Claude has already prompted them about edge cases and design decisions. It's very likely that at some point they had to explicitly tell Claude "don't worry about that and just make an assumption", or "I actually don't like that interaction after trying it a few times, can you do a differently". They had to write out much of their idea in clear and direct language in order to prompt the AI. They've probably been playing with their own toy because it's fun to play with toys you summoned from thin air, so they've had a chance to discover the experience and refine their own preferences.
It's probably a net negative right now because the "ship it what's the problem team" pressure is intense and stupid and demoralizing and miserable to work under. But I think it will stabilize and it might be a net positive in future projects.
> business people don't understand why you can't just put their app in production
I’d flip that around and say that engineers don’t understand that sometimes you _can_ just put their app into production. It might take some cleanup, and some clever ways of deploying it in isolation, but some of these “vibe coded prototypes” — many made by technical business people (they do exist) – are much closer to production-ready than you might initially assume.
I’d encourage you to challenge your assumptions before dismissing the possibility. I’ve personally seen this workflow produce real production code, used by customers, in an extremely rapid feedback loop. Now is the time to adapt, not push back. Keep an open mind or you’ll be left behind.
An open mind to not having a knee jerk reaction to “this is vibe coded therefore it’s not production-ready.” The delta between the prototype and production is likely far lower than you think, and many engineers are sneering at the prototype without actually looking at it or attempting to spend a few weeks applying engineering discipline to bring it up to scratch.
What is being sneered at is these prototypes being put into production. What is being demanded is that additional engineering time to make sure it's actually up to scratch.
I actually agree with you, although I don't agree with the "open your mind or be left behind" sentiment. I left it implicit in my example, but in my actual experience they actually can't put it in production as it is because there are genuine broken things or features they can't add without rewriting big chunks of the system. The worst are the ones that are not obviously broken but are just wrong, like incorrect numbers in a financial report.
But yes, I do agree that some engineers and some engineering teams are slow and cautious where it's not needed, to the point of obstructing rapid prototyping and iteration. And yes I agree that AI will be good to help push them to overcome it.
It's not about turning out the necessary lines of code. It's about doing the critical thinking, validating of assumptions, etc. which was not done the first time around.
Yes, AI can assist with the brute force of broad scale factoring. But without the humans and domain experts involved, you are going to either keep flailing around at the cost of millions of tokens, or something actually really bad in production that you don't even understand and won't work for your business.
The lines of code have never been a bottleneck for the actual engineering team. That's why AI is so good for expediting the prototype cycle and allowing stakeholders to develop their own prototypes, but why you still need someone who actually knows what they're doing to finish the project, whether they are manually typing the lines of code or letting Claude do it.
In my experience, business people are chomping at the bit to build and manage the ops for their apps, but it's always an "IT Operating Model" that is thrown back at them
> Now is the time to adapt, not push back. Keep an open mind or you’ll be left behind.
That’s not the gating factor. Who picks up the liability accountability and picks up the pager duty at o’dark thirty when it breaks in production, that’s the big gate. That long tail of accountability for operational risk weeds out a ton of Eager Ethan’s who want to see something go live yesterday. Because the success of launching has many fathers while the failures in the operational long tail is an orphan.
Get them to sign up for the long tail troubleshooting operations of the product. They are after all, now the SME on the product having built 90% of it. The full promise of AI in such a world is deploying and operating an AI-forward application is an artificial distinction, and full conviction means fully committing to the operational model.
I've working on a small side project with a non technical friend for a couple months. It's really small but we are selling it to some clients.
The other day my friend discovered lovable and vibe coded an entire app and he started feeling like I was scamming him. Why would I take weeks or months in building our app if he could do it on hours?
He might be stubborn but ended up blindly believing me, but I couldn't find a good way of explaining that a prototype wasn't a final product. It has lots of errors, doesn't consider edge cases and it's impossible to fix if something breaks. Of course what I said didn't mean much because he didn't understand what I was talking about.
How do you communicate this problem? That there's much more than what you see in a frontend? Seems really hard to explain to non technical people.
I think the point is that those are the clients you don't want, so you encourage them to select themselves out of working with you. The fact that it might be bad for their own business is not relevant to you as a consultant.
I think it's normal for non-technical people to have no idea of how things work and of what to expect. It's our responsibility to communicate. And, within reason, theirs to listen.
Show it. Pick a missed edge case or breaking point in his app and demonstrate the pain the customer is going to encounter. You don't have to live in the realm of hypotheticals. He has given you a concrete, but flawed, implementation that offers proof of your message.
You are convincing me of it too. It is clear that your friend still needs your system thinking to point out edge cases and whatnot, but if you applied that by spending a couple of days adding a test suite to provide the missing validation, it seems like together you could have a pretty robust product built in less than a week. What justifies a couple of months?
I'm seeing so many of these come in with "this is 95% done, just need a couple of minor tweaks for production release"
"Minor tweaks" being fix the layout so it's not messed up if the browser isn't exactly 1920px wide, sometimes these filters and sorting don't seem to work right and the app doesn't seem to refresh new values properly after an action.
No matter the issue it's pre-estimated by the business as "should be a quick fix, for an experienced dev" because they (allegedly) did 95% of the work already.
Just wanted to check in on how we're tracking, I've booked a quick sync meeting for 4:45pm on Friday followed by a release cadence checkpoint meeting for 9am on Monday.
> In the future they will come with their 'ready' solution, already 'working' and be even less receptive
This has already been common in the audio engineering world for some time, as home demos of music approach professional quality. As you forsee here, people get used to what they have and become even less inclined to accept changes in a new professional mix.
There was this video which showed film directors doing something similar. They film their scene with “filler” music previously used in some other film. Then they hand the scene to the music director and ask a score for it, which forces the director to make something very similar to the filler music. It then makes all film music sound similar.
This was only possible due to the “productivity boost” of digital editing pipelines, which allowed directors to edit immediately after filming.
> We already have the business side come with requirements in the form of 'solutions' that they have thought up
We have that too and more often than not, it’s not what a customer wants. Yes there are some very talented customer facing people (PMs, CSMs, TAMs etc.) that also have a natural knack for translating customer problems into product features with great usability. However, for the rest, skipping the part of defining the problem and letting other functions to come up with a solution, usually leads to catastrophic messes that waste a lot of engineering and other resources. When someone shows up with a solution, you risk wasting months of resources in making production ready software, only to find, customers hate it and the solution either doesn’t fix the problem or introduces new ones.
I honestly much prefer this to the old way where the only mode of communication was speech or text. I now often understand a lot more holistically what the person coming with their product wants with just a demo + a conversation.
Of course you need the person making that vibe product to understand it's just a mockup of their idea and that it'll change. But I would argue this has always been a necessary quality for a product person.
thats really sad that only way you can understand something is with pictures and demos. like a little toddler.
when they already come up with a working model it doesnt really leave any room for abstract thought because now you are in concerte world . They see you as a machine that turns mocks into impls ( maybe you youself see yourself like that).
its ok if you see yourself as a code monkey monkey doing menial job of implementing someones mockup. But that job wont be here long and you will be on the streets holding "can turn working mocks to production code for food" signs.
honestly your attitude scares me more than some business guy building crap in lovable.
I can understand words, but having more diverse medias for communication lets a person express strictly more than before.
Sometimes words are better, sometimes a visual demo is better.
Is your solution to the problem you presented that you should artificially restrict what a person can express just to keep your own personal moat?
I prefer the alternative, let a person express themselves and grow thanks to AI, while keeping the necessary culture and boundaries to where it's also accepted for _me_ to cross boundaries and express my ideas to them in the same way. Or suggest other ways to express those ideas.
We then become a marketplace of ideas in a much deeper sense than before, where product managers would already expect you to implement what they want, but without them being able to convey it properly.
If I didn't have original ideas and didn't think I could compete in that marketplace of ideas, I would be scared like you convey in your message. But I'm confident that my value is not about translating things into code, it's because I have original thoughts I can convey to other people (and to AIs). (and about understanding architecture and systems to a degree that keeps me valuable even if all the code itself is written by AI without my direct involvement)
Might I suggest taking a step back and asking yourself why you were so triggered by the prior post. You made a bunch of mental leaps that are not supported by the prior post. Won't waste my time going through all of them, but the suggestion that they couldn't understand before has no basis in reality, they merely said it's easier to understand with increased fidelity of mocks.
The words can't hurt you. Deep breaths. :)
If your goal was discourse, might I suggest leaving the insults out of the message, it rarely is effectual.
If your goal was simply to insult, might I suggest leaving HNs, your anger and insults do the community a disservice.
I can say that its happening right now (not where I work, at a place I used to). Even being shipped to production as-is, with data loss and security issues in tow. We're cooked haha
With a vibecoded multiplayer web IDE for our flutter app, I have two nontechnical team members prototype app features from a browser all day. The outcome is a git branch with functional dart code, and a strictly more powerful design prompt than figma make. Claude built its own claude -p harness that communicates with the browser via websocket flawlessly. To use our max subscription after [1] takes effect, we are considering adapting that setup to an approach like [2] instead.
> In July 2025, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) alleged that Jane Street used multiple entities for market manipulation and barred it from accessing the market.
There is a way to criticise unfettered nationalism and jingoism without the criticism involving racism, and tired and highly offensive stereotypes about nearly a fifth of the human population. Then the criticism becomes worthless in itself.
I hope you are a bot. Because its just sad if you are a real person with such hatred within them. Why exactly are you mad right now? Because someone called out Bloomberg publishing an incorrect article regarding India recently? And that prompted you to type out such vile sentences?
They were engaged in spreading disingenuous nationalistic bullshit.
> Because someone called out Bloomberg publishing an incorrect article regarding India recently
Is this mischaracterisation deliberate, or did you fail to understand their comment?
It’s the bizarre, obviously dishonest dismissal of the most respected source in the industry as “foreign news peddlers” that stands out. Bloomberg retracting a story they got wrong is just good practice.
Bloomberg is not some universally unbiased source respected by everyone in the world. And SEBI is a trusted entity for most Indians. Most Indians trusting SEBI over Bloomberg shouldn't be shocking.
Again. Be better. Even if you disagree with the person you had no excuse for being such a vile person. Look inwards and fix yourself.
Bloomberg is a universally respected source among sane people, what are you talking about?
> And SEBI is a trusted entity for most Indians
Given how the Indian markets are structured, that’s just incredibly funny.
It almost seems insulting to Indians to suggest this. Why would Indian people trust SEBI when their markets are mostly focused on options gambling?
I feel like the reasonable, not-racist thing to assume is that Indian people who are familiar with the financial markets do not trust SEBI. Anything else would be implying that Indians are somehow inherently stupid.
It’s not like anyone could legitimately disagree with me, Indian markets are regulated by either actively malicious people or deeply incompetent morons.
No amount of nationalistic proselytism makes it okay or just "a bit mean" to say:
> A nation of slaves with desperate delusions of grandeur.
> build some toilets or whatever.
It's not just perhaps a bit mean, it's thought-terminating immature racist bullshit when you could have many other better arguments against nationalism in general.
You may be annoyed by the pointless nationalism, it doesn't give you the right to be a racist asshole against it.
You having this opinion doesn't mean it allows you to be a racist asshole, what part of that you don't really understand? You are annoyed by Indian nationalists, there's absolutely no need to behave like you did just because of that.
The only thing Monaco has going for itself is being a tax haven for ultra-wealthy people in a land strip smaller than many towns in Europe; it's more impressive for a nation to be able to feed 1.4 billion people (even with all the gaps, misery, that are inherent from just sheer volume of people in a developing country) than being Monaco to be honest.
Just revisit your thoughts and be aware of the bullshit you say. Nothing good comes out from behaving the way you did, it can only lead to you cementing this pattern of thought, reinforcing it and re-applying to other nations that you deem "unimpressive", very easy to start considering people inferior if you continue on this path.
Be a better person than this, right now it's quite disgusting as much as you try to word it in ways to make you feel better and justified.
You know what's worse than shitting on the streets? Creating a fake account just to throw racist crap you otherwise don't have the balls to do so with your real name beside it.
Have you actually looked into the allegations and the response from Jane Street? By your logic companies can commit any fraud in India because if they get caught you can just say: hey cant trust the country.
I think you tried to narrow down my general statement. What I'm saying is: not all countries and their regulatory bodies are equal. India is a pretty top-down country with quite a protectionist policy.
And I'm saying wallstreet has a reputation of breaking the rules. Like a lot. Are you suggesting regulatory bodies in the US are somehow better? The whitehouse literally has a shitcoin.
> And I'm saying wallstreet has a reputation of breaking the rules.
Among whom does wall street hold this reputation? Breaking which rules? How can that be, in an incredibly regulated industry where the government will try to put you in prison for just breathing? As they're doing to Andrew Left right now.
As far as I can tell, this is only a commonly held opinion among people whose primary source of knowledge on wall street is a DiCaprio movie. Rules are broken everywhere in the world, but nowhere do you have as many controls to prevent that as on wall street.
There's a reason why just about everyone with significant amounts of money trusts US financial infrastructure, fraud and rulebreaking is uncommon.
I have! JS was engaged in standard arbitrage and did nothing wrong. SEBI is coming after them because JS being able to do what it was doing is deeply embarrassing.
Standard arbitrage? JS bought stocks worth 572 crores and sold options worth an effective short value of 8,751 crores. 15x more. You dont short 15x your long position to do arbitrage. They were moving the market to suit their positions.
No, all you can read into that is where they believe the fair value to be. If it landed in the middle, you'd obviously have to pick up a much larger delta in options given the liquidity issues on Indian markets.
>They were moving the market to suit their positions.
They were correcting a mispricing, not creating one.
Lets see how that reasoning works out in court then. SEBI sent them a caution notice earlier asking them to stop and they didn't. Calling it a "simple arbitrage" is silly.
As I understand Jane Street they have done great things for OCaml and they also do their own web framework (I guess that big money bin needs a lot of dashboards).
I think the designer here takes a wrong approach and sort of falls into engineer envy where he wants to make prototypes as deep and realistic as possible. And that is not really the most important part of the design job.
The most important thing is that the right thing gets build (why do we need a JSQL input box? what do we actually want? what are other ways to do this?). And this is often better done with pen and paper sketches, meetings, observation, discussions ... rather than too quickly narrowing on a particular design and spinning into discussions on whether buttons should be on the left or on the right, LLM intricacies etc.
Taking it slow with paper and interviews works if you think about what you're doing. The other option now is shut down brain and press the slot machine lever one more time. One of the designs has got to be good soon.
(I’m the author) making ideas legible and testing them with users is part of the design process regardless of tooling. You can summarize this article as “I find LLMs more effective at making ideas legible vs figma - for the work I’m doing at Jane Street”. This has helped me iterate and it helps me test with users and get better feedback from them. I’m not just prompting “make no design mistakes” over and over.
No matter how nuanced your your workflow is, there are some people on HN that just hate AI and will see it as "slot machine go brr" no matter what you say. It is generally pointless to engage with such people.
This. LLMs helping implement many ideas is a curse and the results speak for themselves.
As a non-designer I want to see a thought through 1-2 ideas, not 10 ideas you coded with llm and now the burden of thinking which one is better and why is for some reason is on me.
People are much better at saying what they don’t want rather than thinking about what they do. It’s more effective to throw everything in using LLMs, then using human judgment to sculpt away.
>> It’s more effective to throw everything in using LLMs, then using human judgment to sculpt away.
Not really. Maybe its effective from designer side but from other side that has to review all those ideas it is exhausting and counterproductive. Especially when it is in code.
You really don't need a real prototype for most things. Simple visual is more than enough to present an idea and explain etc. In fact, it is often much better as you can see all flows in canvas at once.
With interactive prototype to see all flows of a feature you have to go through each one, which again is very uneffective.
Jane St's hiring bar is higher than 99% of the tech industry, maybe even 99.5-99.9%. Blog posts from companies like this are interesting in the same way that papers from well respected journals are interesting.
I think AI programming just has a bliss period for a lot of people where it feels like you can solve every problem with a prompt. And you can, for a time. Eventually the chickens come home to roost and you realise what a mess you made.
Give it some time. We’ll figure out what LLMs are good and bad at. I think vibe engineering will eventually go up on the wall next to static vs dynamic typing and vi vs eMacs.
At least, that assumes AI models won’t keep improving by leaps and bounds. We’re in a transition period. It’s gonna be chaos.
> I think vibe engineering will eventually go up on the wall next to static vs dynamic typing and vi vs eMacs.
What do you mean by "vibe engineering"?
It really depends on what you mean by this on how people can agree or disagree with you.
My guess is that in any sense that you mean it, you're almost certainly wrong. AI coding and engineering will continue to improve until any developer who refuses to use it will be unemployable at corporate gigs, and outcompeted even in freelance stuff.
> eventually the chickens come home to roost and you realise what a mess you made
But a lot of times they don't. Devs building websites for small businesses used to be a thing, and it was almost universally a crap product. Practically every restaurant in my small town has been able to take control of their own website with AI, and it's a better experience for everyone.
Rapid digitisation meant a lot of low-value work wound up being done by high-value people. The economy is pivoting away from that configuration. The high-value folks getting displaced are pissed, partly rightly, partly out of spite. The folks who had to pay those bills are ecstatic, mostly overexuberantly, but in part correctly.
That era is already long gone. Those things have been built in Wix for over a decade. And since then, I haven't had any friends or family ask me for a simple site. The low-value work is already automated.
Your comment is valid, but not for the reason you think. What you should be talking about is the grunt work done in our field to non-trivial applications. Adding a search box to a table, or add an extra field to a form, etc.
So you think about a ticket that often might take a few hours, but in badly architected system might take a week, add a field to a class, edit the DB structure (maybe manually, maybe through via an ORM generated migration), add it to DTOs, add a validator, add it to the FE definitions, edit the page layout, etc..
Low value work that until now had to be performed by high-value employees.
> That era is already long gone. Those things have been built in Wix for over a decade.
I think there's still a lot more custom work than you'd expect. A recent example: My mum is ex-president of a small international NGO. When I visited earlier today, she was bemoaning how the lady who runs their NGO's website charges them an arm and a leg for small changes. As a result, the website is constantly out of date. The current site is entirely built on top of wordpress. There is, of course, politics. This lady holds the login credentials to everything. And she holds them close to her chest.
I showed my mum what we could do with claude design. Claude whipped up a much better looking, working version of (part) of the website in about 5 minutes. I think LLMs aren't quite at the point that my mum could manage the website herself. You do need a little technical knowledge. My mum just doesn't know what to ask for. But we're really close. I've offered to be a human frontend to LLMs for them going forward, if she can wrest control from the "webmaster".
I suspect conversations like this are happening everywhere at the moment. There are an incredible number of small websites out there. Most of them, claude or chatgpt could reimplement in 5 minutes tops.
There's absolutely no way I'd be advising friends or family to run a site vibe coded themself, that's nuts.
This is more a problem of your Mum mismanaging her contractors. She should be threatening hellfire down on this contractor for withholding the admin username + password.
Generating the site with Claude would be a pretty stupid choice for her right now, if she needs something more than a basic info site, word press is still king, but she should be able to do info updates herself.
OTOH, you might be able to ask Claude to do the changes for you.
> There's absolutely no way I'd be advising friends or family to run a site vibe coded themself, that's nuts.
Yeah, I'm going to act as a human claude frontend. But I don't think we're that far off.
the site is not much more complex than a “basic info site”. There are a few small dynamic elements - like a list of donors populated dynamically and a box to sign up to the mailing list. Sites like this are trivially easy for Claude. I got claude to do a mockup based on a screenshot. Its 5 minute mockup has a much nicer design and layout than the current website. 1 Claude code prompt later and it was functional.
But yeah, short term I’ll see if Claude can just update Wordpress directly. I don’t want to spend my weekends learning wordpress. But if Claude can do it for me? Great.
> Low value work that until now had to be performed by high-value employees
The current trend is a proliferation of internal tooling. I've honestly found quite a bit of it useful. The rest is the usual should-have-been-a-Google-form nonsense.
I can use a local model to build a restaurant website. The model generates code fast enough that even my 10 year old server can generate all the code needed in about an hour. It will use about 50 cents of electricity and be better than 90% of the restaurant websites out there.
I saw that blog post about running local models on a Xeon based server so I benchmarked a bunch of local models on it. The server is dual Xeons with 256 GB of DDR4 and I found it capable of running some things locally. It's slow but still faster than coding things manually. Also that was just an example. Even my 6 year old 6900XT is faster.
How is that relevant?
The convenience for restaurants owners is how easy, cheap, non-technical, and fast the process is.
You proceeded to make a point that does not match any of these four prerequisites
Yesterday I needed a tool for a specific task. In 1 hour I created a working tool with antigravity. Is it something I'd publish or sell or offer to others? Probably not, but I found that quite impressive. It is an extension of the idea "now I can program and create everything."
Besides I remember what kind of code we had when we first started coding with AI and now with all these coding agents etc. it has become quite impressive.
However, at the end it is still a tool and needs to be used accordingly.
You can create anything you need as long as what you need is a disposable script, a scotch-taped together single page app, or a complex problem and you have thousands of dollars to throw at tokens.
I've been playing with local models for some time, and I've been pleasantly surprised of late. A meager rtx 5080 with 16gb can give pretty good results now. The ecosystem is also improving pretty quickly.
I have a feeling at some point we will have a "Windows 95" moment (when computing really became personal for the masses) in AI, and things will significantly change shape again.
Hey, at least vi vs emacs is fun, no matter how crappy as an editor Emacs is, no one is getting paid by privacy invasive corporate, to sway people, to cash out more money
It’s some Sun Tzu shit. Create a sense of inevitability such that they win the war for financial capital without any fighting, then hope the tech catches up before Capitalists realize they’ve been fleeced. The Dotcom bubble was the same scam.
In between some old family history and recent US politics, I think there are other things I'd rather reserve the weighty word "cult" for... However, should it arise, one of the features that might convince me is this:
In the name of "loyalty" or "faith" cults require members to burn their bridges, actively cutting off their own potential to escape to any other social support network. That may mean creating enemies out of former associates, humiliating rituals or blackmail material, or simply ruining their reputations through obvious lies.
I think I did quite enough to be vague and oblique on that context, so that it wasn't the focus, and any reader could avoid the topic... if they chose to.
The utility of current-era AI may well be overstated, and the business models of certain companies might be doubtful, but that doesn't make AI it a "cult".
If you blindly ignore all the drawbacks, preach that "future is now" and whoever is not using the slot machine "will be left behind", then you're in a cult.
An opinion held, in my estimation, by a tiny (but noisy) minority of people who have always existed; the trend obsessed rebuild-the-world types who probably think that AI will soon be able to write unaided a kernel in Rust superior in 100% of metrics to Linux.
The problem here is you're complaining about cult members, then acting like one of the anthrocentric cult members yourself. I agree that we should build a human centered world, but ignoring our many faults won't get us anywhere.
It's also a huge ad for microprocessors. I mean don't people realize we did math before microprocessors? We even had mechanical machines which were much more elegant than these electronic abominations. /s
I'm not saying AI isn't a good tool. However the less you understand what you're using and what you're doing the further you stand to geopardize the business you're working for.
> There’s also a fear I have that designing with Claude keeps me out of a fluid, creative mindset and stuck in an iterative one, constrained to the outcomes I think Claude can produce. That’s fine for mature tools, where changes are iterative, but might mean I miss ideas when working on something new
I some times notice this. the LLM cant see past the interation so I have to think outside the box and say, what if we look at it from this perspective, and suddenly a new way of designing it comes into existance. Somes times I have to create a flow chart to get the LLM to see past its own progression steps.
> free, unlimited iteration, unbothered when I changed my mind
I think they mean that specifically in working with 3rd party per-project / freelance designers you usually get a "first draft + one adjustment" price, then every modification costs more. Similar for small design shops. Prices aren't necessarily per hour, as you'd get from developers.
50 iterations of CSS / layout? Easy, not even pushing it. A freelancer will cuss you out after 3-4 rounds of re-doing everything, but an LLM is happy to keep generating.
I have been able to iterate with Claude Design in a way that I wouldn’t illiterate with a human coworker.
“Ok, that’s good. Kill options 2,3,4,5 and make entirely new variations of them, be bold and use wildly different design theories”
“Take the submit button from 1, the list from 2, the item spacing from 3, the hamburger from 4 and then make that into variation 5”
“I liked the button design before. Split this design into two and use the old button and while we’re doing this, move the buttons to the top of the page outside the scrollable area”
I’ve found Design has been great for me who can’t blank page a design to save my life.
Slightly related: I was in an interview once where it was the CEO, lead dev, and lead designer and inevitable "What are your weaknesses?" question came up. I answered honestly, which was that not only am I really bad at design, I also have issues extrapolating for design systems. It's really hard for me to land on something I think looks okay and in that process almost inevitably always makes it worse. The designer interviewing me took this personally and laid into me about it.
It's not the first time, either. They didn't like the non-stop questions about how things should look and really wanted it to be a one-and-done type of handoff. Even at marketing and advertising agencies, I was fighting with them to give me samples of how things not in their design spec should look. I'm not saying I was right, but that's just a huge Achilles heal for me.
So when someone says
> free, unlimited iteration, unbothered
That's immediately what comes to mind. Not necessarily money, but time and patience. Bolt (which is the tool I use for protyping) never gets mad me. It might not produce the best designs, but they are miles ahead of what I'm capable of. When I'm done, I'll have a real designer make it look better, but until then I don't have to worry about pissing someone off.
I’ve been using Claude Design for my front ends. The output looks and feels good enough, but the designs often look very similar and generally adhere to contemporary web tropes.
Keen to hear if anyone has had unconventional creative adventures with it.
I've had that experience and I've started testing different prompts and inputs.
I find it funny about meeting requirements when you give them, and making safe choices when you don't give direction. So if you're going to rate the output aesthetics and UX/content, but you don't prompt especially much around the aesthetics, you're only getting the safe assumed defaults. It's good at making bootstrap/tailwind clone designs unless you work that angle. For simple web pages, I've started making this the only focus for initial iteration.
I keep a bookmarks folder of websites that have non-cookie-cutter design.
If I have an aesthetic in mind I'll use some screenshots of those sites in the prompt and phrase their inclusion as: "Look at these slightly non-standard designs that work really well for me." So far I've only seen Claude look for through-lines and high-level takeaways--"user likes <design feature> based on the screenshots, so I'll include that"--and screenshots aren't currently a granularity level where it can lift specific details or produce something derivative.
Other than that I try to encourage specific consideration of: type scale, borders and rounding, padding/whitespace, elevation as shadow vs blur, colors. I don't think one needs to pull every customization lever on every project.
[Take a look at my portfolio site](https://reebz.com), please view on desktop. This is about 3 weeks of effort to date. It is unfinished, but you get the idea.
Just like SaaS boilerplate from the decade prior, there is LLM boilerplate (since it’s trained on the internet).
So if you put in enough elbow-grease anything is (still) possible!
Most applications are years long projects that already have styling and code structure done by humans so if the mock up is not perfectly aligned it doesn't even matter because when you finally approve the design and get to building it; that's where the pixel perfect tweaking comes in. And again if it's a mature code base with an existing stylesheet it tends to come out with all the expectations you'd have of it because it's re-using components that already exist 99% of the time.
Same, you can instruct it specifically to look non-standard and give it examples of website styles I want. After some wrangling it feels a bit more creative but takes prompting.
Do you have any like dyes or work clothes describing this process?
I don’t know what prompted to get it away from the base model and any of like the non-standard web design like styles are a little bit too harsh for me if that makes sense. Like for example I like brutalist design, but it just feels heavy sometimes on the apps that I’m making.
I’ve tried to get the AI to describe a style based on the product name or you know it seem that I wanna have for example travel. But then it creates us like steal, amorphic design where everything looks like a boarding pass airplane ticket.
I use claude design too. It has been suggested to me by some very respected and experienced designers which now prototype almost exclusively in claude and then when happy refine in figma.
By the way, you can always tune your prompts to not be generic, if you ask for generic UIs without detailed styling prompts you will get generic designs.
I’ve done a few different things, some different presentations, web mockups etc. They all look more or less identical out of the box, and in every single case of a presentation, Claude Design has zero concept of layout boundaries, happily making slides that expand 200% or more out of the visible viewport (I have a lot of content and it just can’t figure out nice ways of presenting it).
There’s still value in it for me, I get decent enough output to convey my intent and I sometimes manually tweak the HTML.
Defining fonts is a good way to at least not get the same typography as everyone else.
Sort of, I've given it examples of unconventional UI's and then had it sort of create a mashup of them and it's been decent. But I feel like that's cheating.
The benefit here is designers learning to code. It was always weird to me that designers were shaping software without knowing how it was built. I'm a designer btw.
However, designing in code is technology-first. One could argue that the purpose of design - to shape the artifacts for human purpose - is better done NOT starting with the strict rules of code. Pen and paper is still hard to beat, not for anything that looks nice, but for helping your mind forward.
I've been a full stack and frontend focused engineer for six years and got sick of writing code by hand. Moved to design.
Now since I can code with my voice basically I'm getting back into vibe coding and building products. And it's awesome.
My bosses still trying to figure out the new situation though, i think the old school separation of roles is starting to die.Being on the intersection I think is the best place to be right now. I feel like my whole life I've been preparing for this moment.
Certainly, it helps the architect to know the constraints of concrete and bricks, but you don’t really have to know every level of down to the chemistry.
LLM usually make you forget coding, it doubt it's good for learning if you use in this way. For a designer it would be similar to Figma where he see the result and can edit it using language instead of visual editor
My wife works as a product manager in a FAANG and her team has leaned extremely heavily in using AI to vibe-code some pieces of software that they would have done on Word, Excel or similar otherwise.
They're not learning to code, they don't even look at the code a single second.
>>> prototypes are living proposal docs, the code is disposable, and a reviewer’s job is to give feedback about the design and user experience. Eventually, reviewers still take over the idea and implement it in a separate feature, referencing the prototype but owning the production code
That’s solves an issue I have with all POC - a really good approach
The article does not come from someone who relies of Figma for a living. It's easy to call it a "proposal doc" when you're working on a specific issue for a specific product. There are still millions of designers who use Figma to define and maintain design systems that span across products and platforms, where Figma is the source of truth.
Hey Edwin. Glad to see your post pop up. I remember doing a hackathon with you back in like 2012/2013.
I think the ability to get to a working prototype faster is very empowering, even if some will be tempted to ship these incomplete ideas. Design and UX needs benefits greatly from being able to play with it, and experience the actual flows beyond just a storyboard and wireframes.
We are doing this on my team (I am the frontend engineer) and honestly I really miss the old way of doing things.
Written specifications are being reduced in favor of these working prototypes, and now there’s this extra cognitive burden of reading the code and trying to determine what were the intended changes, and what’s the slop that needs to be tossed aside.
We also have to figure out, should we take over this generated PR and make any needed changes? Or do we start over from scratch? There’s often a sense of friction either way.
There have been times where a bunch of unintended changes were generated and I took time to port them over on my reimplementation, and then later on it’s “oops! Sorry! We didn’t mean to change that.”
I get it’s empowering but it does take away from some of the joy I used to find in my work and replaced it with some headaches.
I am in a similar boat. Design and product use Claude to vibe design/code a feature/experience and rapidly prototype it, getting it in front of customers to get feedback with minimal engineering time. Amazing! However, you might be surprised to find out it hasn’t really helped us ship stuff faster overall.
The reason, I believe, is we’ve lost something along the way. Thinking. A non-trivial amount of which is now outsourced to a language model. It paints over the cracks in the prompt, hallucinates how things should work when unspecified, what would normally make someone stop and say “this isn’t quite working”, “how should I communicate this idea” or “what happens when…” has gone. Now, these details are left for after it’s been built proper.
Sure, we can improve the process and reflect more on how to utilise this new technique … but is it better than how things used to be? Yeah nah
I did this before AI though. I'd sometimes just build mockups directly in React using real components because it was quick and easy to put a form together with existing UI elements. I remember one project where the whole team was waiting on designs and I just came into stand up and was like "I built this yesterday. Is this what we wanted?"
My experience has been there’s more “what did it make and does it work?” overhead. It’s like a junior developer throwing stuff over the wall and I’m responsible for seeing if it sticks.
Because I am getting the call to fix it when it breaks. I don't have to fix assembly by hand because compilers are deterministic and I have maybe encountered a single real compiler bug in my whole career. Compilers have earned my trust. LLMs are eroding that trust more and more every day I work with them. I encounter LLM-created problems in basically every single diff they surface for me, just over the months the diffs are getting bigger and harder to review and uncover the problems.
LLMs are not an abstraction(not even a bad one) because by design what they are doing is disambiguation. Compilers are not doing that, what you put IN the compiler has to be unambiguous in the first place.
Disambiguation is not a functionality of an abstraction layer. A good abstraction layer is the one I don't have to understand and can trust, if I have to understand its inner workings to use it it ceases to be an abstraction. Except with LLMs you can't even do that, they are a black box you can have no hope of understanding.
And it is not to say LLMs and agentic coding tools are not useful, they are absolutely very useful. They are just not an abstraction layer.
Good engineers should understand what goes on underneath them in the stack (at decreasing accuracy probably the more layers away it is) if they care about their craft and the quality of it, even if not in perfect detail, if you're just acknowledging that you've never even tried, then perfect! The AI "revolution" is just right for you.
your two statements can be true at the same time: I do not need to look at the code because I know exactly what it does.
do I care for every snippet? every call's signature? no I do not.
do I understand what it does 100%? yes, because I directed it to be built like that.
I don't get people like you. "care about their craft" - what craft? my job is to make ideas into reality, how I get there is irrelevant. this is what I get paid for and this is what gets me satisfaction.
I've always disliked spending weeks arguing with people about every little detail and having an ideaological war. From the end output most of the decisions that people who "care about their craft" care about are utterly irrelevant.
I use the same approach a lot. Before AI I also did this manually. First sit down with a user and just paper and pencil, then hack together a frontend POC / demo, have them play with it and adjust until it works as they wanted.
For me building a quick (not production quality) frontend demo in code was already often faster than getting the right interaction working in Figma. And it allowed to make it fully interactive so you can catch much more edge cases on the UX side.
Now with Claude Code it's even faster to build the throw away prototype. But not a huge difference since discussing with the users and thinking about how it should work is 80% of the time. Claude maybe halves the other 20% compared to quickly doing it yourself. Faster to first version, slower to iterate if it didn't fully get it.
Even for the large products, figma is not the starting point for new concepts anymore. I start with a quick prototype on dev environment and then share it with designer for further improvements in figma or in the app itself. With every new model or agent improvement, going back to figma for polishing the ui is decllinig.
If we can find a way to keep the frontend code static templates without complex logic, need for this polishing in figma will go away completey as llms can understand it one context window. With the modern frameworks designed for client side rendering, keeping everything in one context is still tricky.
I use LLMs to design things and build wireframes. Product people can actually play with the wireframes and it's trivial to implement changes.
And same LLM generated files can be used to guide the LLM to build the actual pages too.
It's much harder to RL out design taste because it's not self-grounding, and human labelers have no real skin in the game, so this (having a human with a vested outcome in the process directing a model's work) is the best way to get LLMs better at design/"taste"/aesthetic judgment themselves. We were working on the same thing 7 months ago and then I realized that winning over designers to do this would be a huge uphill battle setting up an inevitable fall from grace later on.
What makes me most suspicious of Claude Design is that when you disconnect and reconnect later, it loses context and nags you that the product doesn't work like that. Bullshit. It's at best an anti-abuse/implementation detail (to keep you from launching 10 at once and coming back to them later) or product shortcoming that just so happens to be optimized for keeping you from continuing your design in better tools than theirs for the inevitable followups.
It's great for one shots and it makes sense when you're trying to build a vertical product development stack like Anthropic but I'm disappointed it feels more like a tool optimized for keeping you in their product than for what you're working on. If a company other than Anthropic had shipped this - it's not that hard to build a visual self-eval loop, just use Chrome Devtools Protocol to run headless chrome and take screenshots -> feed into a judge LLM for feedback -> continue - I don't think it would really have seen much adoption.
That said, AI trained on Actor-Critic with a tight human feedback loop definitely seems like the right approach to solving the problem, just not something I want to spend my time training for someone else unless I can do so with higher "entropy" ie high parallelism/optionality
Where does the article mention Claude Design? It seems to me the author is using LLMs as a tool for iteration, given he is a designer.
Also, you're mentioning a lot of unrelated tech. DPO, PPO, actor-critic, visual self-eval loops, Anthropic's "vertical product development stack" may be interesting, but they are mostly orthogonal. The article's point is simply that a designer can now turn design proposals into working prototypes faster than with Figma.
Also, you mention what seems to be a random product bug about disconnect and reconnect that doesn't have anything to do with this workflow. It seems to me that you're post-rationalising some insights that are not really there.
Good to think things through and in public, not discouraging it. I hope this reads as constructive.
At work we are now in the process of migrating away from Figma. We had spend years perfecting our Figma based design workflow. Currently we are moving all the designs into the code itself using Storybook. The gap currently is reviews and feedback which is addressed by Chromatic now.
Sounds like desk strat RAD work is moving to LLM gen code at JS. My recentish experience of that kind of work has been Athena at JPMC and Quartz at BoA; both Python with functional style via DAG or pixie with py ui framework to match. Which enables quick dev of the parts of trading workflow that don't need to be quick, like booking tools or EOD risk. I know first hand Athena and Qz are crufty when you get into the weeds. The bonsai framework with Elm inspired ocaml impl sounds v cool. So I can see how this approach can accelerate a lot of trading tech dev. But does it have any traction over the hard problems where we turn to C++ or Rust: near real pricing and risk across multiple instruments and markets?
Figma make and gpt designer have a bunch of catching up to do. I couldn’t even import our brand guidelines into make which is already a .fig like what are we even doing here, guys? CD crunches through ungodly amount of tokens and is really slow on iteration but at least you can get some really nice prototypes extremely quickly there. GPT beats any Anthropic models on illustrations so they really should get a grip on multimodal. Overall, it seems like we’re still super early but you can already see glimpses of what may come
> workflow improvements that would have taken days or weeks of engineering
It's a nice article and good point but I feel "design" in the title is misleading - the example given has an extremely reduced visual or spatial scope (something models are still not good at). The post is more about rapid prototyping.
I worry about Figma stock, I know some who bought during the IPO who are now underwater. Figma launched their own design agent but not sure how well that's doing.
It’s not that I want them to suffer, it’s that them being rewarded incentivizes suboptimal behavior and outcomes. Markets don’t work anymore. Which results in even more suffering.
Their efforts at AI have been really sad to see. They tried making an Everything Bagel and seem to have hit a wall, hard.
It's a shame because if they'd taken an iterative approach of automating various parts of a normal Figma workflow to speed things up for users, that would have helped them discover where the value was; lots of little ideas, failing fast, testing and updating.
Even if this is ad only - are we really ready for a rug pull from Anthropic?
Maybe I’m completely unaware in this tools space, but I feel like it’s last tool that’s worth (and not pricey)…
> Submit a feature (our version of a pull request) that looks and behaves exactly the way I want
What happens after the submission? Who reviews the feature? How long? Are there any limits to the size of the diff? Do reviewers push back? How often are features submitted?
honestly, for me, chatgpt has more replaced dribbble than it has figma.
where i'd normally spend hours combing through dribbble looking for inspiration for layouts for specific components (most of the time finding nothing), now I use chatgpt to come up with a number of different designs, then port them over to figma.
most designs produced by cgpt arent production-ready, especially for mobile. figma allows me to set proper constraints (screen size, for example), that give it a more grounded "shape"
for that reason, the actual final design is still by hand for now. however, the translation from design to implementation is greatly sped up by codex, which basically does it pixel-perfect.
all the same, still lots of tweaks needed before the final implementation is ready. design to code still has a bunch of issues that often need figuring out/standardising - font sizes, weights, etc.
this is on mobile btw, where space is very limited. havent worked on a website in a while, but i'd imagine the extra space would allow for far more liberty. i do not miss having to craft ten different designs just to ensure responsiveness. massive pita.
> Having joined Jane Street this past summer, I’m finding AI support indispensable. There’s just so much that’s new to me, and so much I’m not good at yet, like OCaml and Bonsai.
Using AI for things you aren't good at, or not experienced with, is literally the worst way to use AI. You WANT to struggle when learning a new language, and use reliable documentation to solve your problems, not circumvent them entirely by using AI.
This is extreme incompetence, I'm shocked that Jane Street would advertise it.
Honestly, I'm not really pro or anti llm and I think there are a ton of limitations for using it to generate code, but UI has been probably the only thing I've been able to vibe code. It helps that I've done a lot of UI work over the years, but I think the combination of defects being easily visible through normal usage, the UI being a non-critical component of a system (bugs don't cause vulns or data corruption (usually), combined with the amount of churn that UI's see, make it a somewhat uniquely good candidate for vibe coding. Also a lot of UI toolkits are declarative, and I think language models do much better with declarative code.
In a way it's not much different from copy-pasting components from templates or whatever, just with more customisability. And for stuff that isn't HTML-based like React it does worse. It's also not great at building component libraries, I still write those myself with little LLM involvement, but that makes sense because the architecture is actually relevant with that, unlike generating CSS and xml-derived components, which is mostly just declarative templating anyways.
I've had decent success writing the core logic myself and then delegating the UI to AI. I think if I didn't write the core logic it would not work very well, but since it's designed well by myself the AI has a much smaller scope to work in which constrains it enough where vibe coding works. Pretty cool.
In other words, it is an AI booster. Abusing the goodwill of programmers for their OCaml involvement even though most of it was convoluted bloat and inferior to INRIA code is devious.
It happens all the time now and people need to inoculate themselves against it:
A single famous open source person or an open source involved company invested in AI suddenly posts "organic" testimonies in favor of AI. It means nothing. The person is not the same person, the company is not the same company (or is now overtly evil).
In the future they will come with their 'ready' solution, already 'working' and be even less receptive to look at design and architecture holistically. Just make it like that. And why do you need to spend X man hours? The thing is basically already done!
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