I design with Claude more than Figma now

https://blog.janestreet.com/i-design-with-claude-code-more-than-figma-now-index/

by MrBuddyCasino • 2 months ago

324 245 2 months ago

blog.janestreet.com

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.

JasonSage2• 2 months ago

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.

firemelt2• 2 months ago

any tips for design/aesthetics prompts?

slopinthebag2• 2 months ago

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.

techpression• 2 months ago

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.

jaapz• 2 months ago

Most applications don't need unconventional creativity though.

hparadiz5• 2 months ago

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.

qingcharles2• 1 month ago

Exactly. 99% of sites don't need bleeding edge design and fancy fonts.

epolanski2• 2 months ago

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.

fragmede• 2 months ago

But then how do they get it back out from Figma and make it live?

monkeydust• 2 months ago

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.

itake• 2 months ago

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.

Reebz• 1 month ago

[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!

rirze• 1 month ago

This is amazing.

hemc4• 2 months ago

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.

saaspirant• 2 months ago

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.

meszmate• 2 months ago

Same here. I mostly use Figma for logos and random assets now.

dilyevsky• 2 months ago

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

mi_lk• 2 months ago

Is it just me or the bar to publish janestreet blogposts has been lowered recently?

colesantiago• 2 months ago

It is not just you.

This is a very disappointing post from Jane Street.

osti• 2 months ago

I think Jane Street is an Anthropic investor, so take it fwiw.

wartywhoa232• 2 months ago

The whole HN is one huge AI ad now.

OtomotO7• 2 months ago

It's a cult. And frankly, I am not interested in churches or cults.

jwpapi• 2 months ago

I’m looking for an alternative too..

chvid2• 2 months ago

I thought we were too anti-AI?

josephg4• 2 months ago

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.

signatoremo• 2 months ago

Well, confirmation bias. You see what support your beliefs, ignoring anti AI articles being promoted.

narrator• 2 months ago

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

luka2233• 2 months ago

I was literally reading through another thread[0] where the OP claimed that HN is anti-AI. I guess HN is decently balanced afterall?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420827

deepfriedchokes• 2 months ago

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.

karolist2• 2 months ago

With a huge pile of salt

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.

benced• 2 months ago

Anyone with knowledge of Indian regulatory culture would not take this as dispositive.

l23k42• 2 months ago

Incompetent SEBI went after Jane Street for closing an arb, what about it?

raincole• 2 months ago

Even if they're not, I'm not sure if we should care a quantitative trading firm's opinions on frontend design...

zuzululu5• 2 months ago

Why not ? They might have client facing apps or internal research applications. Such a weird comment.

solenoid09372• 1 month ago

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.

Sparkyte• 2 months ago

Most are. Some are paid for.

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.

prakashn27• 2 months ago

This is why hn is the best. First comment helps to decide if we need to read the article or not .

blitzar• 2 months ago

Gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this racket.

I myself, I pump my investments at least twice a day. Once in the morning, right after I work out. And then once right after lunch.

I want to, that's not why I do it. I do it cause I fuckin' need to.

jstummbillig• 2 months ago

Maybe a random employees mildly interesting blog post is not exactly where we need to look for a psyop. But that is maybe what they want you to think.

chvid2• 2 months ago

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.

vasco2• 2 months ago

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.

flyinglizard• 2 months ago

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.

onlyrealcuzzo• 2 months ago

Jane Street is an investor in most things.

How much does that matter?

Surely, we would expect Jane Street to invest in one of the major AI companies, right?

firemelt2• 2 months ago

amyone know how to use claude design more effectively I always alhave a feeling I use a slot machine

from 6 sessions and 5 projects only one template that I choose anything else is really really bad

osullivj• 2 months ago

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?

t0mas88• 2 months ago

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.

karolist2• 2 months ago

Oh no, Figma ER was actually positive, release mode SaaS FUD

__mharrison__• 2 months ago

I'm my work as an FDE this week, Copilot did the initial UI. Feedback was given and tells were adjusted all through prompting.

kcrwfrd_2• 2 months ago

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.

Iolaum• 2 months ago

Why not ask Claude design to write a document fully specifying the prototype?

zuzululu5• 2 months ago

old way that was clunky, long feedback cycles and gate keeping UI

no thanks. BE boys do FE now

drpotato2• 2 months ago

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

hparadiz5• 2 months ago

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?"

MikeNotThePope• 2 months ago

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.

_zoltan_4• 2 months ago

The code is not meant to be read anymore. That's the mistake.

Do you look at generated assembly that comes out of your compiler? You don't. So why are you looking at this code?

We have pushed up the abstraction layer.

movedx01• 2 months ago

So why are you looking at this code?

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.

Profan• 2 months ago

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.

lelanthran• 2 months ago

We have pushed up the abstraction layer.

That's not what "abstraction" means. You wouldn't hire a designer and then call their work an "abstraction", would you?

It's something, but "abstraction" it aint.

kcrwfrd_2• 2 months ago

I catch so much shit when I read the code. I’ll take this into consideration when I’m no longer catching poorly made slop all the time.

zuzululu5• 2 months ago

I use codex

DANmode4• 2 months ago

Great story.

zuzululu5• 2 months ago

codex can do UI well if you know what you are doing.

conradfr• 2 months ago

Claude gave me free, unlimited iteration, unbothered when I changed my mind for the 50th time or asked for a small tweak

Do you not pay for Claude?

kevmo314• 2 months ago

Free with an easy monthly payment of $20!

hparadiz5• 2 months ago

When you are used to ordering humans around that are paid a salary measured in tens of thousands $20 seems like nothing in comparison.

LoganDark• 2 months ago

50 iterations on the Pro plan? You kidding?

krzyk• 2 months ago

Yeah, for people that work in orgs that are < 150 people. For others it pay by token (API pricing).

_zoltan_4• 2 months ago

20 dollars for this is practically free.

satvikpendem2• 2 months ago

Free as in creative freedom without manual effort, not price.

NitpickLawyer• 2 months ago

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.

mexicocitinluez• 2 months ago

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.

dcre• 1 month ago

Jane Street’s profit per employee (profit, not revenue) in 2025 was high single-digit millions per employee.

slopinthebag2• 2 months ago

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.

designerarvid4• 2 months ago

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.

ozim2• 2 months ago

But then you „design like software developers”.

consp• 2 months ago

What's wrong with a good cli?

halapro• 2 months ago

without knowing how it was built

It helps to understand the constraints of a medium, but you really don't need to know every level down to the electrons moving through the silicon.

designerarvid4• 2 months ago

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.

vdfs• 2 months ago

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

physicsguy• 2 months ago

Of course but sometimes designers like architects design something that can’t easily be built.

micromacrofoot2• 2 months ago

having an llm produce code isn't learning how to code, it's learning how to use a tool to produce code

maybe that doesn't matter though, I suspect many developers will no longer look at all the code they produce either

designerarvid4• 2 months ago

Many nuances and “it depends” here in my experience. Is learning git part of “learning to code”? Some learn, others don’t.

Of course hammering away prompts aren’t learning at all.

iLoveOncall2• 2 months ago

The benefit here is designers learning to code.

Designers aren't learning to code.

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.

designerarvid4• 2 months ago

Generalising sure feels good doesn’t it?

illwrks• 2 months ago

You need designers that have worked closely with engineers and have their head screwed on.

polyterative• 2 months ago

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.

trick-or-treat• 2 months ago

I don't see how a coding model competes with figma TBH, an image model maybe but that's a stretch too.

satvikpendem2• 2 months ago

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.

jen729w2• 2 months ago

I know some who bought during the IPO who are now underwater

Yeah you don't say. High of $124, currently $22. But hey: that's ~~gambling~~ stock trading for you.

https://au.finance.yahoo.com/quote/FIG/

kubb2• 2 months ago

No sympathy from me. I just wish it happened more to people who overpay for stuff like houses or Tesla stock.

fugaziboutit• 2 months ago

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.

Maybe they just got too big and lost their mojo.

hckrnrd• 2 months ago

QQ is your insight from first-hand experience using it in an enterprise production environment? If not, then how did you get to this realization?

tonyoconnell• 2 months ago

i gave claude code my design system that i built in figma and haven't opened it again. it's much faster designing with your voice.

misiek08• 2 months ago

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)…

DANmode4• 2 months ago

For SVG and html/css generation?

When they paywall hard, I’ll use a local model on my laptop processor instead,

or phone,

and wait a few hours as needed.

weitendorf• 2 months ago

You should note that Claude Design is most likely a DPO->PPO->Actor-Critic bootstrap play: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18290 / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximal_policy_optimization / https://spinningup.openai.com/en/latest/algorithms/sac.html

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

gobdovan• 2 months ago

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.

hyperionultra• 2 months ago

For design tools and website builders tough times ahead. Wix for example lay down 20% of staff in some countries. All due to “optimization” with LLM.

Klankers will fix everything. Right?

itsnkr2293• 2 months ago

Claud design burns lots of tokens

ulfw• 2 months ago

Yea I mean okay JaneStreet. World wide renowned to be a tech design powerhouse...

tam159• 2 months ago

I still prefer Figma for collaboration

cryo32• 2 months ago

You aren't designing.

iLoveOncall2• 2 months ago

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.

asfjhq2• 2 months ago

They apparently pressure their new hires to blog and talk their book. It happens a lot in U.S. corporations.

Tanxsinxlnx• 2 months ago

upvote

asfjhq2• 2 months ago

Janestreet is now known for shady trading in India and its aggressive AI trading strategies:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-04/jane-stre...

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).

croes• 2 months ago

And how much of these designs are used in the end compared to when they where done with Figma?

bobkb• 2 months ago

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.

lifeisstillgood• 2 months ago

>> 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

ale• 2 months ago

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.

sfjailbird• 2 months ago

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!

gwerbin5• 2 months ago

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.

iamjs• 2 months ago

It's very likely that at some point they had to explicitly tell Claude "don't worry about that and just make an assumption",

Non technical folks vibe coding aren't explicitly telling Claude anything other than "Accept"

slyzmud2• 2 months ago

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.

chatmasta2• 2 months ago

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.

8note2• 2 months ago

it would be fun to get access to those chat logs, to pull out detailed requirements decisions and get some more structure together

bluefirebrand• 2 months ago

This is going to come down to healthy organization dynamics, and hopefully represents a learning opportunity for leadership

What is it like working for organizations with healthy dynamics and leadership that is capable of learning?

I don't think I've ever encountered it in my professional career.

almostdeadguy• 1 month ago

If you can vibe code it, you can vibe deploy it, and deal with the consequences.

nitwit005• 1 month ago

That will never get fixed. Early in my career I demoed a Java Swing UI, emphasized it didn't actually do anything repeatedly. A manager declared it done. They'd "seen it working".

ex-aws-dude• 2 months ago

I’ve seen that play out already as well

Then your job as SE just becomes reviewing and untangling vibe-coded stuff

frde_me2• 2 months ago

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.

dominotw• 2 months ago

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.

girvo• 2 months ago

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

darth_avocado• 2 months ago

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.

cube002• 2 months ago

The thing is basically already done!

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.

getnormality• 2 months ago

Could we hop on a quick call to get a quick status on that quick fix?

Nition• 1 month ago

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.

testdelacc1• 1 month ago

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.

https://youtu.be/7vfqkvwW2fs from 5:50 on but the whole video is a masterpiece.

Hazemamirrr• 2 months ago

true it is much more easier using claude design rather than Figma yet it does not produce the same output quality.

GoToRO• 2 months ago

They are not using design. They vibe code the feature.

azangru• 2 months ago

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?

bradleykingz• 2 months ago

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.

nether1• 2 months ago

I use Claude code a lot for design too but it just does a lot of regurgitation in design too

tsouth2• 2 months ago

Claude is pretty great at designing certain images. For favicons, logos, og cards, it does extremely well. For full image generation, I go elsewhere.

coldtea• 2 months ago

Funnily, that's the first stage in how you end up designing "will work for food" signs with markers, more than with Figma or Claude...

janpeuker• 2 months ago

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.

nixpulvis• 1 month ago

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.

ehmorris2• 1 month ago

Hi!

trinsic2• 1 month ago

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.

itsTyrion• 1 month ago

"i design with claude" no, you don't

MayCXC2• 1 month ago

"i design with claude" yes, they do

MayCXC2• 1 month ago

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.

[1] https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2054610152817619388

[2] https://lanes.sh/blog/claude-billing-split

alexpatin• 1 month ago

Designer here. There is a lot of pressure at the startup I work at to use AI for everything so we can 'move faster'. Often working with vague requirements. Given leaderships inexperience building software, having something to look at and point to is helpful for sussing out requirements and edge cases.

Figma is still my preferred canvas. Figjam is still great for rough wireframes, flows, and agreeing on data models with my eng counterparts.

But Claude accelerates the divergent early stage 'exploration' work. Unfortunately we don't take the time to properly validate the concepts with customers. Again in the name of 'moving fast'. They will learn eventually I guess.

I'm getting off-topic. Claude is super helpful. As time passes I'm doing more and more work with it. But sometimes taking my design system and pushing pixels is genuinely faster when there is an obvious solution, opposed to ensuring Claude has all the right context to solve a relatively simple problem.

All depends on what I'm working on really.

yieldcrv• 1 month ago

Claude Design is great because I always knew what I needed UX designers to do. A software engineer can pick up frontend UX concepts really easily, but it's just still a full time job to keep up, iterate, do states.

I've worked with graphic designers, whether its 1 person on a team, or a group, or a division, and had the back and forth for years. I've also contracted with many graphic designers to polish my own applications as well as promotional materials. I've contracted with agencies, I know what a style guide looks like, a press kit, a design library shared between applications and departments needs to have.

Now it's not a full time job. Its 3 tabs for different user flows in the application.

And on the flip side, designers can also deploy software now that's good enough - (I feel like I can deploy more efficient software than an AI will initially suggest, and do things that stay on free tiers for far longer than anyone just going along with AI's suggestions.)

awbvious• 1 month ago

" At present, there are no other major purchasers of AI compute outside of NVIDIA, hyperscalers (who are selling it to Anthropic and OpenAI, or they’re Meta, which has no AI strategy), OpenAI, and Anthropic. None. I can’t find a single one outside of Jane Street spending more than a few hundred million. We need a few hundred billion. " https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-slowing-down/

The one non-circular-financing entity that is heavily spending on AI, is interested in you knowing how wisely they think they are spending their money.

Jane Street isn't one to telegraph their moves (seems like they prefer to Telegram them privately https://protos.com/what-weve-learned-from-terraform-labs-unr... , so not only Jump Crypto felt fine letting everyone believe the ponzi, per these allegations it seems Jane Street did too). If Jane Street is spending the most, and their staff is supposedly high value pay/profit but low headcount, for all the end user knows, their "AI agent" is half chat bot / half software engineer with 20 years experience who checks each result before sending it. Literally the Mechanical Turk scam of hundreds of years ago, where a midget hides in the stand and moves the chess pieces--with shades of Amazon Fresh self checkout. Maybe the higher ups at Jane Street know this, maybe not. But unless they have a closed system that Anthropic can't get into, I would be suspicious. And, of course, they aren't /that/ free from the circular financing because they are a major investor of Anthropic. To me the fact that the blog post doesn't start with a disclosure doesn't seem like a misstep/accident. And if they find out they are being Mechanical-Turked, I think it far more likely they'll find some way of shorting before telling anyone, or they won't tell anyone.

I design with Claude more than Figma now

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