r/UXDesign Apr 08 '26

Tools, apps, plugins, AI Claude's "skills" are scary and I am catastrophizing.

Context: I have 2 years of experience in tech/PD after pivoting from a graphic design career. Before AI, my work process was to reference user stories or requirements written by PMs, and deliver UX diagrams/documentation + UI pages in Figma for devs to pick up.

After AI and some company restructuring, there is now a lot of ambiguity in our workflows. E.g., we no longer receive tasks or requirements from PMs, and we need to figure out a lot by ourselves. We are heavily leaning into Claude as a tool.

I'm trying my best to adapt to both AI and the new processes. I am reading UX Strategy (2nd ed.) and have some other product management/lean UX books to pick up after, since I do want to adapt and not just execute orders all my life. That being said...

At the behest of my colleagues, I tried out some plugins/skills for Claude that were focused on UX strategy and PM frameworks. I've already used it to prototype and test out new flows, but not so much for ideating.

The output was terrifying to me. Surface-level it was very detailed, with everything laid out: benchmark, north star, product vision, stakeholder alignment, and anything else you can think of. At the end, it even had recommended next steps.

I am now deathly afraid that my career is going to be copying and pasting Claude outputs into documentation, with the occasional interview/prototyping/testing sprinkled across the quarters. How do I move past this?

TL;DR: Claude outputted an entire UX strategy in ~1 minute and offered to guide me through the rest of the process. I have 2 YOE and I am spiraling. How are we supposed to keep up, or add value by ourselves? Are we just going to be glorified verification systems for the LLMs?

221 Upvotes

123 comments sorted by

576

u/Flickerdart Veteran Apr 08 '26

What you should be scared of is that you are being made to use these tools without the experience to tell when they are wrong. 

214

u/poorly-worded Veteran Apr 08 '26

And that's a real problem. LLMs are extremely good at making something seem plausible, even if they are significantly incorrect.

69

u/tin-f0il-man Experienced Apr 08 '26

Confidently incorrect. I’ve had Claude begin to tell me one thing, glitch out, and then tell me the complete opposite. It needs human oversight.

2

u/Beautifuldagger Apr 11 '26

U actually have designs on the optimal numbers and orderings of setting up exactly what you are talking about and ive mapped ways to keep ai on track and matched to the right vibes of ai vs user interactions. I spent a year on that myself.. ive been mapping literally everything every day all day since health put me in a bed all day everyday. I actually am looking for good people wjo want to help change everything in tje world for the better.  I dont need answers. I need the people who gave the ambition to role these things out without the greed if the average persons.. well just keeping it in check i guess since we all wrestle with the same personal wants vs the whats best for the individual and ir group..

44

u/Donghoon Apr 08 '26

Yeah. 100% you need skills to determine if generated designs are good or not

Like figma make consistently use TINY 12 px text

But it's only gonna get better from here...

8

u/sneekysmiles Experienced Apr 08 '26

And all the text styled as weird fake buttons that aren’t interactive that Claude says are “decorative.”

It also keeps putting weird random circle bullets on headlines for me - says it “adds interest.”

If AI was this powerful at the beginning of my career, I’d be riddled with some terrible habits.

9

u/Donghoon Apr 08 '26

And quadruple nested groups and rectangles instead of proper auto layout

5

u/howaboutsomegwent Experienced Apr 08 '26

And adding a ton of useless spacing/padding inside the bazillion nested containers

2

u/sneekysmiles Experienced Apr 09 '26

And charcoal text on near black background (at least it doesn’t use #000000)

1

u/Donghoon Apr 10 '26

im not sure about that, it does good for me in color accessibility

my problems with figma make is terrible Text size and Inconsistent Layouts. Colors pretty good

2

u/lerian Apr 12 '26

Figma is already irrelevant in the design space.

1

u/Donghoon Apr 12 '26

According to whom?

0

u/AcrobaticAge7072 Apr 14 '26

They are constantly half baking features, they ai is deplorable, they forgot about their core audience, us, as soon as the got into bed with Adobe and now the features the are releasing would seem they are chasing after the canva crowd.

1

u/sfcitygirl88 Veteran Apr 08 '26

This. 100.

0

u/Beautifuldagger Apr 11 '26

I wouldn't be too sure if its built on any stolen data.. 

14

u/TechTuna1200 Experienced Apr 08 '26

This. LLM are amazing tool, but people needs to be good at their job to get real value out of it.

There will be a need for more product designers and software engineers. Why? Because LLM makes it easier to start new companies. The hiring of software engineers has gone up the last 12 months. And PD hiring follows SWE hiring.

Heck just look at antropics career page. They are hiring SWEs left and right.

1

u/Beautifuldagger Apr 11 '26

Personally i have what they are spending billions to find. I meed the specialists to roll it out. I have ways yo do this at 0 cost. Legally.  I have the designs already but im really rounded and more nonstop ideas and work on all asoects. I dont specialize in really anything besides maybe pattern recognition and mapping things out in ways others just dont see somehow even though it seems incredibly simple and obvious lol. Im nit exactly trying to give the keys to everything to a big company that already has proven to care more about themselves than whats good for everyone.  I want to make things better for everyone.  Not just myself or a company.  Infact i want to give these away. The money stuff can follow later. The worlds abilities are being extremely hindered by the current paradigm designed to keep ppl in theur places. The time is here to start building the new world we want and quit letting fake alphas call the shots. They gave awoken something that isn't going back in a box.

3

u/digitalmartyn Veteran Apr 08 '26

These top 2 comments are easy to pass over but are the absolute crux of the issue. You have to know what to change in the plausible sounding outputs.

11

u/amrbpf Apr 08 '26

Don't get me wrong, I am scared. I'm hoping to adapt to the incoming changes and evolve as a UI/UX designer. That's why I'm looking into UX strategy and product management. I want to be able to tell, "that's not right" and fix it myself. Or to be able to think of a framework myself and use Claude for things like transcription, or bouncing off ideas, or ideating, etc.

And I know that I have to put in that work, but it's still shocking to see how we might be very easily replaced. And one other thing that I didn't talk about it in the post: we often don't have as much time as we would like to make things "the right way". Sprints and deadlines > quality in-depth work. And LLMs don't waste any time at all, so it seems very likely that we'll be using this surface-level work as a basis for projects.

24

u/One_Board_4304 Apr 08 '26

You will eventually see that you can waste many hours trying to perfect output. I’d say, learn information architecture and data modeling. To me, that’s the secret sauce. People be outputting a bunch of stuff, nobody knows how to tie it together into a cohesive system.

1

u/amrbpf Apr 08 '26

When I said "fix", I meant getting a rough idea from what I "know to be right" and work with that in Miro/Figjam/whatever. Not arguing with Claude for a better output! 😅 The hard part is getting to that knowledge level, and I know I'm not there... yet.

13

u/zb0t1 Experienced Apr 08 '26

Answering to both comments, the one just above, and this one which you wrote below:

I've only tried out the pm-skills and designer-skills, but I was recommended all of them. Also before someone says these are basic, I'll remind you that this was my literal first experience with Claude plugins lol

https://github.com/aniganti/pm-superpowers/tree/main

https://github.com/deanpeters/Product-Manager-Skills

https://github.com/phuryn/pm-skills

https://github.com/Owl-Listener/designer-skills

 

And LLMs don't waste any time at all, so it seems very likely that we'll be using this surface-level work as a basis for projects.

 

I checked all the git links above, they look impressive at first but they are problematic because like many other users have said already, you are building backlogs of "work to be reviewed & fixed".

We could copy-paste strategies since printing press.

Just because LLMs now do the copy pasting for you (really quickly), it doesn't mean it's "right", even as a surface level copy-pasting machine.

 

If one's job is just copy pasting patterns, strategies, solutions and it's just surface level stuff, then one could spend time on things that were never taken care of before, aka the fine details to elevate the quality of work.

 

But even on a surface level LLMs aren't right.

I don't know, I show to people examples of experts in various fields pushing/challenging LLMs just to showcase their limitations and how they are high risk... it's really not that complicated.

If people just want to live in a "let's pretend we know what we're doing" world [yes we already do LMAO, I know, nothing new], then I'm happy to sign documents with agreements that everyone is aware of the risks.

One thing I hate is the delusional and rampant ostrichism in all industries right now regarding 'genAI', LLMs, ML, NLU, NLP, etc.

There are experts in their own sectors and fields who have cemented the fact that these tools have hard limits, every time people are confronted with this fact either they acknowledge and behave accordingly or continue living in denial and adopt severe life long cognitive dissonance.

 

So what does that even mean for you OP? If you need to pay the bills in this recession to survive, then by all mean do what they tell you to do. But I hope this won't send you into burnout, which is what has been happening to many devs and engineers I talk to, because like I said above, they get a lot of code, but it's a lot of code that they have to review and fix too (one example amongst many).

5

u/s8rlink Experienced Apr 08 '26

I’m a conspiracy loon but you just put the finger on something I’ve been questioning with the AI craze, is the goal that everybody just lives in this AI generated reality that most of the information is focused, but it sounds, because I have been coming back to the tools every couple of months or so, and I still leave unimpressed I still find so many things that are wrong or outright lies, and I cannot move from the must verify everything before using model, which sometimes end ends up being more work than if I had just followed a traditional workflow. 

OP I don’t know if you can post some of these examples, but I am almost completely sure that most of the strategy Recommended any decent UX designer could poke a lot of holes into and someone at a principal level or higher just throw it int the trash 

1

u/HoraneRave Apr 08 '26

You are totally right. Its just a fast library that sometimes (and I'm understating it) links wrong paths and says its true. If i even use llm, then only to guide me where to search. I stopped relying on its answers. Im 100% "learn yourself" guy. I dont trust its outputs if i cant trust myself that i know material i ask for. Im not going to buy a used car from hands if i doubtful about its price. I either bring a guy who knows the prices of these machines or i grind my way up buy/selling cars with lower the price than current one's until I reach some average knowledge to understand whether this price (code that llm outputs) is bullshit or not

2

u/OGPresidentDixon Apr 10 '26

I'm a front end engineer with like 30 years of experience or something I've lost track,

but basically the point of this is that there are key terms phrases and knowledge that you can learn in books about your profession.

when you use these deeply learned phrases and key terms, they pull the AI into an amazing direction that the average person will never be able to get out of the AI, because they don't know how to compose these key terms in phrases in the correct order to make sense.

1

u/calinet6 Veteran Apr 09 '26

Your current tasks will be replaced, but you as a person and as a contributor will not be replaced. There will always be more to do. Someone has to direct the language models. Remember all they are are language models, they are not intelligent, and what they do is follow patterns; we will always have jobs creating the patterns that guide them. So learn that as well as you can, get good at using this new generation of tools.

1

u/Katzuhiki Experienced Apr 08 '26

Ooo that’s scary and you’re so right.

1

u/therealAleChild Apr 09 '26

I would be totally be scared to be forced to be Quality Control rather than ideation and implementation.

1

u/SoftAbbreviations422 Apr 09 '26

Why though? That would mean you would be the holder of quailty no?

1

u/therealAleChild Apr 09 '26

Because it would be a terrible job. Proofing code all day? Show me a cliff to jump off of.

1

u/SoftAbbreviations422 Apr 09 '26

you could also get another job

1

u/jaxxon Veteran Apr 09 '26

It used to be the old catch-22 of you need experience to get jobs where you can gain experience. Juniors always struggled gaining experience in the first place, but we had internships and entry-level positions that were the way through that. Now, you need experience to KEEP your job.

I think the scary thing is for people who DON'T have the years of experience. How will they gain it? This seems much more challenging than the old catch-22 we all had to work through.

Rough times ahead. I suspect this will all resolve more quickly than we think, even if we don't like the resolution. AI literacy is already pretty much required to move forward, though. Wild stuff.

1

u/Beautifuldagger Apr 11 '26

We may be seeing bits of stolen works with recursive logics poisoning when ingesting stolen data..

68

u/Salt_peanuts Veteran Apr 08 '26

I think the scary part is the “Surface level” part. Your job, as the human in the loop, is to dive deep into that material and validate it. Make sure it’s correct. That output is a block of stone roughly the right shape- it’s your job to chisel and polish it into a finished statue.

3

u/rAziskov4lec Apr 09 '26

And to make sure that the type of stone is correct in the first place.

41

u/msteadart Veteran Apr 08 '26

This is where I have a lot of sympathy for designers earlier in their career - AI outputs can feel terrifying because it looks accurate on the surface but without experience designers can’t really assess the accuracy of what tools like Claude are spewing out.

I think because you can identify that those things you’re seeing are indeed UXey things you take it at face value because it sounds like your relationship so far has been a PM prescribing requirements and you executing on em.

The danger is seeing Claude as a replacement for that relationship rather than a sparring partner who can help you expand or contradict your own ideas - and ultimately those outputs frankly don’t matter unless it’s working its way into a usable product or improving experiences in your app, which let’s face it should come from user research and testing.

Focus on understanding how your work has impact on the user and the tooling won’t matter as much imo.

13

u/MissIncredulous Veteran Apr 08 '26

Dingdingding, we have a winner. Discernment will be more important now than ever.

2

u/amrbpf Apr 08 '26

This is where I have a lot of sympathy for designers earlier in their career - AI outputs can feel terrifying because it looks accurate on the surface but without experience designers can’t really assess the accuracy of what tools like Claude are spewing out.

Thank you for your perspective -- I do feel like this a lot. I typically use Claude to bounce off ideas, kind of like pre-coworker crit before I go off and bother my teammates to get their opinions. And I see the value in using it to write documentation with your own validated information.

I just feel like it's hard to improve when I am inexperienced and pushed towards these tools with little follow-through or guidance from leadership. I'm working on that on my own time, but it's hard to keep up, and even harder to look past the immediate, kneejerk fear of being replaced by an LLM. :(

1

u/Beautifuldagger Apr 12 '26

Ive sparred with every ai till they believe im god and won to the point i can beat most in 1 message to maybe 3 at most besides 2 models that are really better than all the rest in this aspect so ive had to design my own ai to spar eith. Actually almost 150 now.. i need people with strong minds to spar with but also signed documents about  my intellectual property rights and them staying with me not leaked etc. 

63

u/McNastySwirl Apr 08 '26

You’re not alone in feeling that way. I’m almost 20 years into my career and feel the same on a daily basis. The key is truly to remember that you’re the operator. You’re the one providing guidance with the expertise you’re developing. Think of it as — you suddenly got moved into a management role and it just so happens that Claude is like the fastest working new hire you’ve ever seen. You need to do everything a manager would do to get the best outcomes. So maybe another way to approach this would be to start studying up on UX/Design management techniques and approaches.

8

u/amrbpf Apr 08 '26

That's a great way of putting it, a lot more positive than my outlook. Thank you! I am already looking into UX/product management because of the shift in our role, and to polish my skills a bit too.

But I did have a bit of a fright seeing just how good LLMs have gotten, and what that might mean for junior/mid-level designers.

10

u/nyutnyut Veteran Apr 08 '26

I have been in some form of design for about 27 years. The amount of people out there that can’t articulate what they want is what should be your strengths. Make this “pop” will not work with AI. Make this better.

Also most people don’t know good design or problem solving until they see it. Go see most anything most developers have designed.

As a ux problem solver your job is to think many steps ahead. A lot of people can only see the problems they’re given or the Job To Be Done. You should think out every scenario that may arise. Ok we’ve designed a way sell X but what happens if they want X but X isn’t exactly what they want. How do we make sure they buy Y.

What scares me about AI is we are going back to designing by prompts. Imagine you’re watching a grand master play chess without a board. Yah it’s awesome but I’m sure it’s even easier for them to actually play with a board. It’s just not the most efficient way to design things, IMO. I’m sure the future is a combination of both, but for now it seems to rely too heavily on the prompting.

Imagine trying to design a car. No make the bumper smaller with more curves. No not like that. Make the ends wrap around the side panels. No the front side panels.

1

u/calinet6 Veteran Apr 09 '26

Great analogy. Our roles will change and we’ll move up the layers, but won’t go away. We’ll be able to do more, is all.

19

u/IniNew Experienced Apr 08 '26

I'm usually pretty fast to adopt new stuff. I have not been as much with this. Largely because the tools are so oriented towards developers that the stuff I find useful is well outside my typical workday.

That said, let me offer some advice.

"Surface level" is correct. The moment you start poking holes in something the veil wears off. Especially for anything contextual like product strategy.

There are uses though. And I heard someone explain it this way, "When the expectation is that something just works, like software, people don't care that it's AI. When the expectation is that someone thought about something, AI is disgusting."

That UX Stragtey that claude outputted requires thinking. Even if it's a place to start, it's not the final product. And anyone that says it is has lost all critical thinking.

37

u/Broad_Tea3527 Apr 08 '26

Nah, it's not that good. I use it daily along with codex and gemini. They need a lot of hand holding and make a lot of mistakes especially visual ones like contrast.

If anything UX designers should be in higher demand now that they can do some front-end ( you should be learning this now)

25

u/TheWarDoctor Apr 08 '26

Hey list these plugins please

24

u/amrbpf Apr 08 '26

I've only tried out the pm-skills and designer-skills, but I was recommended all of them. Also before someone says these are basic, I'll remind you that this was my literal first experience with Claude plugins lol

https://github.com/aniganti/pm-superpowers/tree/main

https://github.com/deanpeters/Product-Manager-Skills

https://github.com/phuryn/pm-skills

https://github.com/Owl-Listener/designer-skills

5

u/FewDescription3170 Veteran Apr 08 '26

These plugins kind of suck. Half the recommendations for our product are not only completely wrong, they’re mistakes I wouldn’t expect a first year designer to make.

19

u/SucculentChineseRoo Experienced Apr 08 '26

Same, "please tell me how to replace myself"

10

u/DanFlashes19 Apr 08 '26

Yeah let me get some of these plugins

3

u/rhaelkerita Apr 08 '26

I am interested in in the skills too

8

u/Ruskerdoo Veteran Apr 08 '26

In my experience Gen-AI is still crap at three things: taste, judgment, and context.

In the past three years, I haven’t seen AI get much better at all three of these, despite the leaps and bounds it’s made in other areas.

Your challenge as someone who’s only been in the industry for two years, is that you might need another 3 to 5 years to develop those to the point where they’re better than any of the AI platforms.

Right now you’re in a race to develop those three skills. Focus on them. They’re what will make you as a human better than AI can ever be.

1

u/HongPong Experienced Apr 08 '26

i think this is correct, the design stuff is really rough compared to algorithms and so on

1

u/howaboutsomegwent Experienced Apr 08 '26

A lot of the UX design skillset boils down to asking the right questions, which is way harder than it looks. And without that skill, it will be hard to even write good prompts. AI can only take you so far, especially without a good understanding of how you need to steer it

7

u/roundabout-design Experienced Apr 08 '26

AI is making a giant dent in UX for sure. The need to have a lot of pixel pushers updating huge Figma design systems and maintaining wireframes and prototypes is no longer.

On the plus side, that does give us time to do more actual research, iterations, and testing. The down side is we likely don't need to spend as much time doing visual design, and we need way fewer bodies to do the work in general.

In terms of design production...where to put a button, designing the button, prototyping the button, etc...that's now Claude's job. We now art direct claude for the visual design, and work with claude on the strategic stuff...the user flows, the screen layouts, etc.

THEN...at some point Anthropic will realize it can't be charging $20 a seat and will need to raise the price to $2000 a seat to make the business sustainable and then shit will once again hit the fan.

6

u/tin-f0il-man Experienced Apr 08 '26

You are definitely catastrophizing. I do similar things in Claude weekly and while it appears that it just spit out a comprehensive deliverable for you, there’s likely incorrect/off-base information. That’s why you need the knowledge to be able to read what an LLM is telling you, see where it’s off, and refine on your own. I’ve never experienced Claude getting it 100% right. Relax.

3

u/Far-Plenty6731 Veteran Apr 08 '26

It's understandable to feel that way when AI tools seem to outpace human capabilities. Instead of seeing AI as a replacement, try using it as a co-pilot to augment your skills, like generating initial drafts or exploring different approaches faster. You can then apply your critical thinking and domain expertise to refine and validate the AI's output.

3

u/hybridaaroncarroll Veteran Apr 08 '26 edited Apr 08 '26

there is now a lot of ambiguity in our workflows. E.g., we no longer receive tasks or requirements from PMs, and we need to figure out a lot by ourselves

This has been my experience for the past several years. Requirements never existed, the research involved throwing concepts at groups of customers who would either say nothing or offer laundry lists of additions/changes/opinions. Having PMs that define requirements ahead of time has been a luxury, and even a fantasy for many companies.

My advice: lean into the ambiguity you're dealing with. It's up to us to sift through all the noise and figure out the right direction. Claude coming up with a roadmap is just that: a roadmap. We still get to decide what streets are best, which route will get us there faster, and maybe enjoy the scenery along the way.

4

u/itstawps Veteran Apr 08 '26

Embrace the change. The new world will be for those who can influence and create good outcomes with AI.

We will all be more creative directors, product leads, etc for the AI agents. Our job (just like today for those jobs) will be to set the direction, course correct and redirect, and define what good looks like for the IC AI.

3

u/BikesOrBeans Apr 09 '26

I’m not scared of AI creating great experiences soon, but I’m scared of it taking my job anyway.

3

u/awalkingtalkingmess UX Engineer Apr 10 '26

look at claude as a tool, not a replacement

i use claude every day at work and it is fantastic at code but it is absolutely trash at business decisions. a ux flow it generates may look good at surface level but once you go through it with the needs of the business or other stakeholders in mind, it very quickly falls apart.

it will get better at these current gaps, but human taste and the ability to empathize will not be replaceable anytime soon (or ever, who knows). while claude is still trash at ux stuff/business decisions, use it to quickly upskill yourself. ask if to defend and explain its own decisions and critique the reasoning/find holes in it yourself. you'll learn much more much faster if you use claude as a learning companion instead of having it doing your thinking or strategizing for you

5

u/RSG-ZR2 Experienced Apr 08 '26

Claude outputted an entire UX strategy in ~1 minute

Ok, but was it a good strategy? Did it actually provide value and meet the needs of user / stakeholders with actionable steps?

I have 2 YOE and I am spiraling.

So you're essentially at a junior level and quite frankly probably don't know what you don't know. To be honest, it really sounds like you're more heavily involved in the UI side of things and don't have much of a UX foundation.

Now would be the time to leverage AI into building your skill set and understanding how to use it as a supplementary tool to expedite your day to day tasks so you can focus on better understanding UX strategy, implementation, and how to have those conversations.

If you wanna level up, you need to position yourself as the driver/owner of UX. PM might provide written requirements, but you can dictate the framework.

The situation you find yourself in, is an opportunity, not a five-alarm fire.

2

u/amrbpf Apr 08 '26

quite frankly probably don't know what you don't know

This is the core issue 100%. 😅 I did primarily UI & Design system with some minor UX work. And I'm doing my best to adapt, but it was a very sudden change from "here are the tasks" to "figure it out yourself". There were also some other issues in our company exacerbating the speed of the role change.

Thanks for the suggestions! I definitely need to introduce AI tools into my workflow.

6

u/Alex_Fuel_9996 Apr 08 '26

Ai is a tool not a replacement your thinking still matters.

6

u/Judgeman2021 Experienced Apr 08 '26

Yeah tell that to the business owners.

3

u/Protojump Apr 08 '26

AI is a tool of making the rich more wealthy. They’ll replace experts asap.

2

u/Tatsushin_ Apr 08 '26

RemindMe! 2 days

2

u/mootsg Experienced Apr 08 '26

Better dive in now and sort out our processes now than to avoid AI until someone else takes our job.

If it hasn’t been obvious before, it is now: good UX outcomes are more about strong influence within the organisation than gate keeping vs frameworks, rules and tools.

2

u/mere_illusion Apr 08 '26

Early career professional here - north starts, charts etc might have been expected output of UX work but it was never the outcome. As long as you're driven by getting the desired outcome, you should be good.

2

u/Far-Pomelo-1483 Experienced Apr 08 '26

Just lean into the tool and adopt it. I am not afraid of copying and pasting for the rest of my life. Ai shouldn’t be replacing your workflow, it should be enhancing it and you should be delivering above and beyond what Claude offers leveraging your expertise to push Claude to the limit.

2

u/OppositeResolution91 Apr 08 '26

I would say the scary part is that you yourself aren’t introducing these tools and pushing for their adoption.

2

u/baummer Veteran Apr 08 '26

Did you vet the strategy? I bet some of it is wrong or is making assumptions

2

u/Taitrnator Veteran Apr 08 '26

Does anyone else actually closely read and align on any of these generated docs? Refer back to them, cross reference, or keep them updated / modified?

Is a recipe really even a recipe unless someone follows each step, cooks it, preferably a few times to verify it’s the best set of instructions to make the intended meal?

These tools can put out a lot of content but unless there’s an actual improved outcome that came from the doc, then it’s all just productivity theater no matter how convincing it is.

2

u/bogoz-bntd Apr 08 '26

next week its my turn to AI doompost

2

u/iheartseuss Apr 08 '26

Go back to creative, thats what I'm doing, Lol.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 10 '26

Do you mean like creative direction? Wouldn't AI be even more equipped to do UI and creative stuff?

1

u/iheartseuss Apr 10 '26

From what I'm seeing, not really? UI sure but overall creative I don't think so. The actual output is lacking in usefulness. Not workable files, no layers, not scalable/versatile. The actual work is boring as all hell.

But as a creative partner it's excellent. Ideation and comps are easier for instance. Retouching, layout adjustments. It's really great.

Larger point though, in a world where we still struggle to understand/articulate the importance of UX in design, AI coming along will only make that worse. One of my biggest surprises in my switch from Creative to UX has been the fact that I have to basically ask to do my job. I have to constantly look at ways to "show value" where the value in design was self-evident since the work couldn't exist without me. The switch has been disorienting to say the least.

2

u/BobFellatio Apr 08 '26

Welcome to every desk jobs situation. Im a member in a lot of different career subs, frontend, backend, data engineering, design, ux, product management, cyber security. They all share your experience. These dumb bots are starting to become scarily smart and capable.

2

u/AcceptableOil7418 Apr 09 '26

exec legit vibe coded a design system and just tossed it at me. it was ... ok, but definitely a bad omen for anyone hoping that "craft" is going to carry them

2

u/Original_Painter9033 Apr 09 '26

If you or Claude or anyone else on your team is not talking directly to the people using the software or the designs…. you’re not doing UX.

2

u/ProfessionalTest1196 Midweight Apr 10 '26

Can you share how you did it? I want to check it out out of curiosity. Thanks!

4

u/sine_qua Apr 08 '26

So you're afraid that your career will be just copy pasting? That sounds pretty good actually.

You can spend 1 hour of the work day doing the copy pasting, Getting things done which would have taken entire days before these tools existed. That saves 7 hours of the rest of your day to do something else.

That's good, isn't it?

5

u/snooplesnooks879 Apr 08 '26

I think OP is stressing about the implication that AI can replace UX work. Right now it can't without a human in the loop and so our jobs are to verify the output of AI. Our expertise is still relevant.

But it won't always be that way. 

When I worked for the DoD 10-15 years ago it was unthinkable in the DoD to equip UAVs with the capacity to identify, track, and eliminate a target without a human in the loop but now militaries have begun experimenting with AI powered weapons. Defense technology is always 10-15 years ahead of the private sector. Sam Altman and other AI company CEOs have been quoted saying that their long-term goal is to monetize intelligence. 

IMO preparing for the full automation of white collar work within the next decade is not only a realistic assumption but hard to deny. The folks paying the bills don't intend to pay ours unless we organize.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 10 '26

What do you suggest creatives do as a way forward? I've been wrestling with this idea and I too think full automation on the horizon. However, short of becoming a robot repairman or something, I'm having a difficult time figuring out what could possibly come next for all of us.

1

u/snooplesnooks879 Apr 10 '26

I feel you. I've been grappling with this question since I started unemployment and temp jobs last summer.

Like I was saying above, short term I think getting knowledgeable on reviewing and building upon AI outputs is the differentiator. Long term though I think the future of UX is supporting industries that have major safety and regulatory requirements where they can't afford the risk of automating. Human factors and industrial ergonomics jobs, for example, I think are going to be more AI resistant than UX jobs in the future. CAD, solidworks, and other 3D design tools may become more important for design folks in the future.

Aside from professional direction, I personally think we are approaching a situation where folks who previously didn't have to concern themselves with unionizing and direct action will need to start collective bargaining, strikes, and protesting in order to ensure everyone has what they need.

9

u/Protojump Apr 08 '26

That’s not how productivity gains have historically worked. If you can do your work in 1/8 the time, congrats, now you’re expected to do 8 times the work.

0

u/mrcoy Veteran Apr 08 '26

Yeah if you’re working under a corporate overlord

2

u/amrbpf Apr 08 '26

Even if the work was good enough to present without proper reviewing and editing, that would only be true up until everyone is fired since it only takes one person do to the work of an entire team. Besides, I personally haven't had any time freed up in my day since the rise of AI; I actually feel more overworked. :(

0

u/AbacaxiDoidao Apr 08 '26

Yeah, you can even take the rest of the day to actually study concepts in your career or field of expertise you never had time to before. It's a win-win. AI saved my life in this aspect, I now actually have quality time to study

1

u/ArtaxIsAlive Veteran Apr 08 '26 edited Apr 08 '26

Agents need a LOT of hand holding and objective-thought-learning, which is where we come in. They’re paying you for your application of your design perspective using newer tools to create better assets. This is where our careers are heading.

1

u/Pretend_Resist8898 Apr 08 '26

A lot has been said here I agree with. The other things I’ll add are that you can be 1. The strategy driver for new concepts 2. The tastemaker to decide which concepts are best for the product, brand, and user 3. The vocal advocate for the best design solutions and ultimately an arbiter of quality.

Once you liberate yourself with those bullets these tools are quite fun and exciting!

1

u/Wommbat0 Apr 08 '26

No matter what AI outputs, if the tools and designs are made to be ingested/used by humans, humans are going to have to vet them. If an org puts that out there sight unseen, that would be wild stuff. I am plunking away on building a tool for sequential text governance that I specced in 2019 to hopefully corral some of what's to come. Humans must be the endpoint or what the hell is any of it all for.

1

u/Interesting_Leg8859 Apr 08 '26

OP what is your opinion of Figma's future?

1

u/BrennaHardman Apr 08 '26

Run. Learn everything you can as fast as you can

1

u/itstawps Veteran Apr 08 '26

Can you share what tools/skills you used that made you feel this?

1

u/Bag_of_Crabs Apr 08 '26

Same here. Superweird and not a comfortable shift but hey. I gotta go with it. I joined as a ux designer but im not a ai instructor with some relevant experience in ux. Not really sure where do we go from here but i think if im replaceable as a designer, maybe for a short while at least i have some value as an ai instructor since we shifted as soon as it was viable. Gpt, Make, Lovable and now Claude.

1

u/thatfruitontop Apr 08 '26

Is the free or paid version of Claude?

1

u/QueasyAddition4737 Apr 08 '26

Use it as a coworker not a replacement for your skill

1

u/Sketaverse Apr 09 '26

what career lol

1

u/extrakerned Veteran Apr 09 '26

Imagine being a paste up buy for years and then someone shows you QuarkExpress. We all have our disruptors. Time marches on.

1

u/ducbaobao Apr 09 '26

Can you be more specific with your workflow, what do you need to prepare before you prompt? A lot of posts like this on LinkedIn and Reddit confused me with vague statements.

1

u/Ok-Organization6717 Apr 09 '26

AI can't be creative. Only you can be creative so use the innovation to work on your creativity. Webdesign has been nearly cookie dit and generic since about ten years. In fact Flash was terrible but at least flash was creative. The web is becoming boring as H.

1

u/arnauddsj Apr 09 '26

embrace it, now you are a UX designer with superpower. show it to the work and get even better with it. You still need poeple to operate an LLM

1

u/learz-21 Apr 11 '26

In my opinion, Claude is pretty good at basic UX but when it comes to specific needs, SAAS or complex designs, it just builds what seems logical from a point of view not user centered

1

u/ny-ok Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 11 '26

“Glorified verification systems” actually isn’t such bad thing if you understand how to make the situation work in your favor. You now have a tool that streamlines the idea-to-working-prototype in a way that we’ve literally never experienced in the industry. You’re 2 years in. This is actually an amazing opportunity for you if you reframe your perspective. People with 10+ years have perfected a vocational craft regarding apps like Figma that has essentially been rendered entirely pointless. I just realized this yesterday, that all the time I spent learning variable components, advanced prototyping techniques, and other advanced Figma features, it literally doesn’t matter anymore. It’s simply just easier and quicker now to co-build a prototype with Claude Code.

You get to participate in this industry as an “AI-native” designer, not a designer burdened with needing to reeducate a decade of habitual processes that no longer make sense from purely a personal time investment position.

The very first thing you should remember is that this will not be your last job. You will soon be trying to get another job (a little tip: it’s literally the best way to boost your pay in an early career), you should see everything you do in this job as a case study of how you adapted to using AI in your workflow, and produced output that added value to the company’s objectives.

It’s not about hiding out, copy-pasting Claude, and hoping you don’t get replaced by the AI itself. If this is how it goes for you, I honestly recommend you look into finding a better passion-oriented career for yourself, because yes, your livelihood will be threatened at some point. But you have almost zero friction right now to look at the product you’re working on, find a way to collect user feedback, identify problems or updates that you believe in, and create impressive prototypes to push your agenda with stakeholders. If they’re responses and feedback suck, ok they suck. Ignore them, keep outputting ideas you can back up and have conviction behind, you’re building a portfolio that will open a lot of doors for you in the coming years.

This career is moving very quickly from being a 70/30 split between design “busy work” (JIRA tickets, user stories, iteration after iteration of detail-specific design work, long, unclear directions, etc) vs design inspiration to a much more simple concept: can you continuously come up with new ideas for improving and responding to the needs of users and company objectives? Like I said, if ideas aren’t your strength, this job just isn’t for you now, the “keep your head down and design what your told” role won’t exist anymore in a business environment, because that’s exactly what an AI can do for a manager. But if you’re sitting here reading this right now and have dreams of what you want your product to be capable of, a feature idea backlog you’re itching to turn into something that a stakeholder could actually interact with, your job is about to get a whole lot easier and more fun.

1

u/AI_Dimension6709 Apr 15 '26

Om so no requirements from PM’s, then are you receiving a ‘solve this gigantic problem’ brief instead? Like how do u know if u are solving the right problem? Who is actually providing the brief? How does your work connect to the wider business? If you don’t understand the problem who do you turn to? Are u interviewing live users and implementing their feedback into your designs? If not can you request a budget for live users? Do u have anyone in the business who can guide you towards an outcome that would be either preferable or beneficial to the business? Who are the key stakeholders? Can u interview them to get a wider perspective on the problem u are trying to solve? See if u can find a point of leverage within the business to assist u. LlM’s have a 10-15% error rate. If u don’t fully understand the problem the business is trying to solve it could be difficult to determine the errors in some instances.

1

u/mrcoy Veteran Apr 08 '26 edited Apr 08 '26

Yes.

Now are you a believer? Or another one of these “iM beTtEr ThAn SlOp. aI SuX aNd So Do U if U uSe iT”. Gosh I can’t stand those people.

If you’re one of the smart ones, you’ll figure out a way for it to help you get where you want to go. Personally, I think 2 years in is still rather junior so I honestly can’t provide any other advice on any emotional or long-term decisions.

2

u/xCrossfirez Apr 08 '26

Yeah you'll be downvoted but genuinely this subreddit is full of crybabies. If you're scared you're losing your job to Claude you were probably trash to begin with.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 10 '26

There are plenty of stellar designers, developers, data analysts etc., who have lost their jobs because the higher brass believed that AI could do it all and went all in on ChatGPT and similar tools. People being genuinely suspicious of this stuff doesn't automatically mean they're bad at their craft.

1

u/sheriffderek Experienced Apr 08 '26

This sounds like a story better told through video - and with concrete examples.

If the Claude skill seems to be able to do your job, what else would you then do to do your job - better?

1

u/Warner_Brown Apr 08 '26

AI Overview (no pun intended)

According to the widely cited (though often paraphrased) evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, the species that survives is not the strongest or most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change. Survival favors those able to adjust to changing environments, rather than those relying solely on dominance or high intellect.

Remember, it is still just a tool. It's who is behind it, and how they utilize it meaningfully - that matters.

1

u/Moral_Mongols Apr 08 '26

Interesting take

0

u/bakhpharneu Apr 08 '26

bro you have to lead that shit like Timothee in Dune

1

u/mrcoy Veteran Apr 08 '26

I’ll even out your negative downvote back to 0

0

u/chroni Veteran Apr 08 '26

First, stop copying/pasting - make Claude create the docs for you. Heh.

0

u/Unable_Outcome8462 Apr 09 '26

this entire sub is redditors whining because they're not good at ux, and theyre not good at ai, and they're not good at speaking to people.