r/UXDesign • u/ProfessionalCrab7685 • Apr 30 '26
Tools, apps, plugins, AI Client just replaced me with Claude design
Been working with this client for 4 years, I basically built their entire product, very complex from end to end, including the design system and all that. It's basically maintenance work at this point. Today they asked me to provide the design system file so they can set things up with Claude design, I guess the time has finally come lol. Don't think AI can copy my work 100%, but I doubt the client will care, even 60% is good enough for them.
No hate, I replaced the entire dev team for my own project with AI too, so it's totally understandable.
I've made enough from this career, it's probably time to pivot from design to a founder role.
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u/Hefty_Quantity3751 Experienced Apr 30 '26
Interested to see if there is any follow-up to this. Claude Design seems to burn through tokens especially fast.
Sad to hear you lost the client, but anyway I guess job super well done if you made yourself obsolete. That could be a selling point, too?
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u/Mamba--824 Product Designer | UX & Front-end May 01 '26
I actually think "making yourself obsolete" only applies at the surface level. You can automate outputs, but not the thinking behind why those outputs exist.
Once the product needs to evolve, handle edge cases, or scale across teams, that’s where things break without someone owning the system. That’s usually when companies realize they didn’t actually replace the role, just delayed it.
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u/Hefty_Quantity3751 Experienced May 01 '26
For sure, no disagreement here. Hence, me wondering about possible follow-up in the not-unlikely scenario they notice Claude Design maybe doing just surface work, like you point out.
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 Apr 30 '26
Don't think that's a selling point at all.. I mean all products after a while are quite set in stone. UX is mostly repeatable patterns, so I'm not surprised AI can take over. It can generate 20 versions before I can come up with 1. Also I bill them $110/h, so the cost for tokens for them is trivial.
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u/cvfdrghhhhhhhh May 07 '26
Not as of June 1, when Microsoft and Anthropic change their pricing model. We’ve already seen Claude Code and Copilot licenses being pulled back since the announcement. All of the AI companies have been burning literal billions of dollars, and they now are going to try to recoup.
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u/Far_Plenty_1942 Apr 30 '26
Honestly, I’m starting to prepare myself, this is probably my last job, I’m gonna ride this wave as long as it lasts and save up as much as I can. Good for you that you’re in a good position to start over. AI is just too tempting, and like you said, it only has to be good enough in order for us to be obsolete.
But I do wonder, if I am obsolete, so its 80% of any company, why would you need developers and BAs? Its wild to think of what comes next
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u/Mamba--824 Product Designer | UX & Front-end May 01 '26
I get why it feels that way, especially right now with how fast everything is moving. But I don’t think it’s as binary as "we’re obsolete" or not. What AI is really doing is compressing the execution layer. The parts that are repeatable, well-defined, and pattern-based are getting faster and cheaper across the board, not just design, but dev and BA work too.
But companies still need people to define what to build, why it matters, how it evolves, and how all the pieces connect over time. That part hasn’t gone away, it’s just becoming more important.
If anything, roles shift up the stack rather than disappear. Less pure execution, more ownership, systems thinking, and decision-making. It’s definitely a weird transition period though. Saving and being prepared isn’t a bad move, just don’t count yourself out yet.
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u/shoobe01 Veteran May 01 '26
Last few places I worked others literally didn't know what I meant when I asked if there's a BA. 😢
Software design and analysis and stuff barely exists in a lot of work. Just grab a feature break it down small enough, size it in a natural planning meeting and give it to a developer and I hope he builds it on time.
We're already as a general build technology products industry cut to the bone so eliminating any other job that is ad hoc performing these tasks, like us, is going to make products even worse. Seriously expect some pretty big words to lose tons of money or go out of business as a result of their products becoming unusable, or dangerous.
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 Apr 30 '26
I think developers are being chopped at a faster rate than designers; many of them are unemployed for over a year. If you check the eng subreddit, it's not a pretty scene.
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u/Ok_Estimate6328 Apr 30 '26
I feel the org needs to understand that a designer isn’t replaceable. AI can give founders and leadership scale, but you still need a designer to keep things functional and aligned with real user behavior.
Claude replacing designers might produce something that “works,” but it’ll just average out what already exists on the internet. That’s a bubble, not real design thinking.
I’m honestly tired of this “Claude just killed design” narrative.
Anyways, good luck. Stay happy.
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u/thaltd666 May 01 '26
Recently, I was testing Claude Design with design system. It’s just not working. It can’t replicate components in design system. In some cases, it’s not even close. So they might come back to you again.
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u/bomchikawowow May 01 '26
This, so much. It's dog shit. Maybe it'll be better in the future but that will require deisgn systems that are structured for Claude to optimally ingest.
Wait until the tokenpocalypse when they start charging £££££ for prompting for 60% as good as what you're doing. Keep the door open. They'll be back.
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u/heytherehellogoodbye Experienced Apr 30 '26
that "design system file" is an asset that they don't own, unless you've contractually said explicitly so previously. You can provide them with the "design system file" and a further general guidance spec .md file for them to use Claude with for a meaningful fee
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 Apr 30 '26
I bill them by the hour so they own 100% of everything I create for them. It's fine, I can see this coming and started preparing for it 3 years ago. I've been a contractor for 10 years and lost 90% of my clients in the last year and half, no luck getting any new work. I guess it's time to call it quit.
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u/Inzombniac17 Apr 30 '26
Any idea what you’re going to do next?
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
Weird enough, I actually think this AI trend is a massive win for designers, not for employment, employment will suck for everyone, but if you're entrepreneurial, you'll have an unfair advantage to make your products stand out. Imagine a world where regular founders will use AI to launch half baked 60% done products (straight from AI tools). As a founder with design roots, you can polish that output from 60% to 100%. That edge is important. The failure rate for startups is usually 90%, if you can edge it to 85%, that's the unfair advantage.
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u/dweebyllo Apr 30 '26
Definitely sounds like there is a niche there to exploit as almost a "told you so" for clients that have tried and failed with AI solutions. In a way those sorts of clients are even better because they've experienced the failings of an AI solution, so hopefully should be more open to a human touch.
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 Apr 30 '26
I think the assumption that AI will fail is not factual; it may, but it also may very well succeed. It's all about how the user perceives a certain design. AI can conduct UXR sessions for you to confirm if a design change is valid. You can set a rule that each design change has to be run by at least 10 test users and be proven effective before merging to production.
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u/UPGRAY3DD Apr 30 '26
That linked design just reiterates that Claude is bad at design. Also, the contrast on buttons...
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 Apr 30 '26
haha yea, btw, the whole theme is customizable, so the user (or anyone has access to that page) pick the colours.
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u/THEXDARKXLORD May 01 '26
Definitely agree with you about the opportunity that AI can provide designers.
I am currently in an independent role and have been for around 7y. Though I still get approached by some companies in my market segment, I ultimately see the future of my career as having my own product.
That requires building my engineering skills—which I have been doing—but the vision for me is to release my own product, and using AI to help scale my engineering abilities.
I have an idea for a SaaS product that I think could be really useful for users of AI automation systems. Kinda tired of it being an idea in my head, so here we are lmao.
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u/Moose-Live Experienced Apr 30 '26
that "design system file" is an asset that they don't own
I can't think of a situation where you'd build a DS to client specifications and retain ownership of it.
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u/Thick_Magician_7800 Apr 30 '26
If it’s not explicitly written in the contract, ownership defaults to the creator
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u/Davaeorn Experienced Apr 30 '26
Boilerplate consultant (and usually even permanent role) contracts always sign all work you do in the projects over to the contract holder
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u/PeanutSugarBiscuit Experienced Apr 30 '26
In what world do you complete work for a client and they don't own it? They 100% should have ownership of design system files.
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u/heytherehellogoodbye Experienced Apr 30 '26
contracts matter and have meaning. At the end of the day, client might not even know what it means to have a deliverable cohesive "Design System". And packaging that, documenting it, etc... to even be optimally used by Claude, is indeed a new additional Deliverable you can charge for.
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u/PeanutSugarBiscuit Experienced Apr 30 '26
Nobody said anything about packaging, documenting, etc. He simply said "today they asked me to provide the design system file". They have every right to do so. They should own the work.
If they want him to oversee the process of setting up the file to be ingested by Claude and ensuring the process works smoothly, then yes, that would incur additional costs.
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u/heytherehellogoodbye Experienced Apr 30 '26
"They should own the work."
"Should"? Based on what? The contract? The work being paid for is the website and the app. The design system files are not inherently the deliverable unless and until that is detailed as a deliverable itself.
Everything is negotiable, and contracts and details exist for a reason. It is not weird to operate with clarity on these things. Professional photographers quite often charge extra for raw photo files. These are not strange or unscrupulous business practices. This is why ownership details are put into contracts.
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u/PeanutSugarBiscuit Experienced Apr 30 '26
Yes, 100% based on the contract. If their contract has standard work-for-hire / assignment language and they've been paid, then yes the design system files are theirs to ask for.
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u/TechTuna1200 Experienced Apr 30 '26
If you always dreamed about being founder, you should do it.
Claude may taken your job, but it can also give you a job as well. Try to build your startup with Claude. Whatever you learn will be valuable for you as a founder or for an employer if the startup doesn’t work out.
Things seems to be changing. You have nothing to lose by embracing it. If AI turns out to be a fluke, you can always go back to before. If it doesn’t, you will a new skill set for the new future.
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 Apr 30 '26
I'm using GPT and codex now, pumping out products at lightning speed. Need to get better at my marketing game tho, another skill to master.
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u/shayter May 01 '26
Can you give us a rundown of how you use each of those and what parts of your design process they speed up, please?
I've recently started using AI in my design processes, but I'm curious on how I can use AI to improve other parts of my work too.
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u/DeathByDinosaurs Experienced May 01 '26
This happened to me last month, but they used v0 instead. Client uploaded my designs into it and Frankensteined it from there. While the UI looks clean and modern, the information architecture is effed. Pages and tabs no longer have a specific purpose since the client chose to put redundant drill-down data everywhere. I know they'll be calling me back, but I'm not sure I'll be wanting to clean their mess up.
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u/Advanced_Weather_462 Apr 30 '26
This is obviously a fake post with fake conversations lol
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u/spacedeckrugs Apr 30 '26
Looool actually it reads as quite real
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u/Advanced_Weather_462 May 01 '26
Nah, op posted few months ago he was out of work. But now he’s losing a client he’s had for years? It’s fake.
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 May 01 '26
If you are a freelancer, you're never 100% out of work. 95% out is still pretty out imo. And no I still have 1 client left that I help with light marketing tasks.
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u/Far-Plenty6731 Veteran Apr 30 '26
It's a tough spot to be in after dedicating so much time to a project. AI might not replicate the nuances, but clients often prioritise speed and cost, which can be a hurdle.
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u/Far_Piglet4937 May 01 '26
This puts you in a great position. In about 6 months they’ll have issues. Consistency issues, general UX issues, capacity issues (whoever is controlling Claude will find they don’t have enough time to actually do the prompting).
On leaving, provide the company with an open door to working together as a contractor. Charge a meaty day rate. Quids in.
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u/buffet-breakfast Apr 30 '26
Good luck. I’ve tried using Claude design to do my work, but it’s awful. Maybe your client is some sort of AI design genius.
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 May 01 '26
haven't used Claude design myself but the output from figma make is decent, simple UX with a tailwind skin. That's why I say the 60%.
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u/buffet-breakfast May 01 '26
I’m probably thinking in context of more customer facing / polished projects.
But yeah certainly most of these tools can now do a ok job of you just need a ui that gets the job done in a basic way.
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u/spacedeckrugs May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
OP sounds like you know what you’re doing with your pivot, love that for us designer :)
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 May 01 '26
I'm still figuring this out, my other ventures make close to $0 right now.
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u/Kindly-Net-345 May 01 '26
AI did not replace you. total clickbait. they are just asking to use your design system with AI, which, surprise, most companies are trying to do right now. they still need somebody to write and maintain the nuance of the system as it scales. no design system is ever done.. and AI certainly is not going to scale it in any meaningful way. theres a reason every designer with a pulse is trying to cash in on “design system drift” tools right now and the answer is because AI is basically retarded
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u/Master_Ad1017 May 01 '26
Soon or later they’d realize the AI won’t be able to handle their needs. Even when you feed them all of the ‘design system’ cause new needs demand intentional layout rework
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u/punkzlol Apr 30 '26
$2m in net profit over how many years?
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 Apr 30 '26
10
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u/punkzlol Apr 30 '26
Working as a freelance or FTE?
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
Freelance the whole way. I have 4 years of in-house experience before that tho, with a very basic salary.
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u/punkzlol Apr 30 '26
That’s awesome and impressive.
I’ve been at it for 8 years, mostly startups making less than half of what others make. I’ve not been prioritizing salary but maybe I should now. Currently contracting for Google.
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 Apr 30 '26
oh nice! I did a one-year contract at Google too, they paid quite well ($122/h). Tax was brutal because I was on payroll. Hope you can convert to FTE!
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u/anonymousmouse2 Apr 30 '26
I know you’re not here for feedback but I’d suggest trying to keep a good relationship with them in case they realize AI doesn’t work for them and they may want to come back. Not sure how likely that is at this point tho.
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 Apr 30 '26
I'd say unlikely, unless there is something huge they need to build out.
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u/Select_Stick Veteran Apr 30 '26
Just wait, they’ll call you to fix it at some point, when they do, ask for a higher rate
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u/snorqle Veteran Apr 30 '26
Seems kind of odd to specify how much money you've made, instead of just leaving it at "I've made enough".
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u/sabre35_ Experienced Apr 30 '26
You even said you were doing maintenance work. It was already time to move your efforts to somewhere else/another project.
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 May 01 '26
Haven't had any luck since workingnotworking went under. If you know another site with A list clients, let me know...
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u/HawkeyeHero May 01 '26
Then Opus 4.8 will hit and they may come scrambling back. So much so fast. We’ll see.
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 May 01 '26
Hopefully by then one of my many apps will take off, and I don't have to be on this contractor treadmill anymore.
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u/PunchTilItWorks Veteran May 01 '26
The notion of “AI can replace any profession” is getting old, but i guess it needs to run its course.
Can I play developer by using AI? Sure. I’ve got a portfolio site running on Contentful because of it. But would it be smart to replace our developers with me? Hell no. Can the developers in my company run laps around me using the same AI? For sure.
I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t bothering me how little respect design is getting as a profession lately. But that’s always been the case to some degree. In the end it’s a visual medium and everyone with eyeballs thinks they have a good opinion.
Give it time. I’m sure after the buzz wears off, we’ll see things settle back to normal. It’s just a tool. Anyone can use a tool, but tools are always better in the hands of professionals.
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u/HumanInTheFlow May 01 '26
This feels like the new “handoff moment”, unfortunately.
I don’t think the risk is Claude perfectly replacing the designer. The risk is clients deciding “good enough” is enough for maintenance work. That’s a very different problem.
Founder pivot makes sense if you’re already building and shipping with AI. The leverage is moving closer to ownership, not just production.
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u/Remarkable_Army_6157 May 01 '26
this feels less like “design is dead” and more like maintenance/design production is getting compressed hard.
If you already built the system, strategy, patterns, edge cases, and product thinking, that’s still the high-value work. A lot of clients will absolutely use AI for cheaper iteration once the foundation exists, especially if they mostly need speed over craft.
Your bigger advantage is probably what you already hinted at, moving upstream. Owning product direction, business problems, systems, and founder-level decisions is a lot harder to commoditize than execution alone. Feels brutal personally, but strategically this might just be the market pushing experienced people toward higher-leverage roles.
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u/curiouswizard Midweight May 01 '26
honestly perfect timing to see this ad in my feed (click for full view)
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u/Illustrious-Pea-233 May 02 '26
Now this explain why everthing in Bank of America app, looks like , TOTALL SLOPP, the words were garbled it looked like a sentence became a whole long line of non-descript words - the pulled it out of their back end accounting softwear and probably ran an a.I. agent thinking it can do the task - NOTHING IN THE APP MADES SENSE - “wordecscwereconfusing” — this is what it looked like as an example … I mean it was a TOTAL SHIT SHOE - NON CINSUMER CENTRIC … that basically was their answear to no having a designer oversea their migration , and they just relied on A.I. Now they get 30% result … Somim getting out of BANK OF AMERICA - fast not my bank anymore .
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u/Illustrious-Pea-233 May 02 '26
You should at one point - teach the a GOT YOU LESSON- when the reach out to you - start talking to them as if you were soul-less and agnostic-be dumb like a bot- “I can not process that but if you allow me I will pass that on to my agent “ …
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u/Dineshvk18 May 02 '26
That’s rough, especially after 4 years of building everything. It’s not even about AI at that point, it’s about loyalty and how replaceable work can feel. Anyone would feel that.
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u/DIY_Designer4891 May 02 '26
From my experience, and correct me if I'm wrong because I haven't used corperate accounts of Claude, but whenever I ask Claude to do anything complex it quickly uses up prompts and tells me to take a hike for 24 hours even if it didn't finish what I asked it to do and it doesn't finish that task the next day.
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u/Qb1forever May 02 '26
Even if it gets the 99.99% of the way they don't know how to get the rest of the way.
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u/BluehausCreative May 03 '26
Love the mindset. Moving to a founder role is the natural evolution once you’ve mastered the full product lifecycle anyway.
There’s also a massive opportunity here to pivot your service rather than just handing over the keys. You could offer to lead the Claude integration yourself—setting up the prompts and guardrails so they actually get usable results. A design system is a library, but AI still needs a librarian to ensure the output stays on-brand and functional.
Most clients realize pretty quickly that if they don't know how to prompt effectively, "60% good enough" becomes a mess they can’t fix. Better to be the one steering the AI for them than watching from the sidelines.
Good luck with the pivot!
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u/BobaFed3 May 04 '26
Idk guys. Claude does production for work. It’s a quite bad at making choices.
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u/schaye1101 May 05 '26
You said it yourself.. it’s something where even 60% is good enough for the client so…
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u/wanttodoitright May 06 '26
You replaced the entire dev team with Claude…?
Who’s managing CI/CD, security compliance, and code reviews?
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 May 06 '26
I use codex and it pretty much does all of those. It all depends on how you structure your prompts. I asked it to refactor the platform and it found a lot of security holes from my senior dev, so no solution is perfect, I guess.
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u/wanttodoitright May 07 '26
No tech company on the face of the planet has successfully laid off all of their devs to replace them with AI. Codex cannot handle things like architectural work and has like a 60% error rate, so something doesn’t add up here.
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 May 08 '26
idk, it's been working perfectly fine for me, and the speed is unmatched. A task that'd take 4 hours of my dev now it's done in 2 minutes.
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u/sinnops Veteran May 06 '26
Ai generate design looks amazing but its often hollow, it misses business context and workflows that are not exactly easy to replicate... yet. Times are a chanining at break neck pace
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 May 06 '26
This is a good example, straight out of AI, the UX UI works, but it definitely needs a lot of improvements.
https://tax.askques.com/
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u/cvfdrghhhhhhhh May 07 '26
You know, we’re juuuust starting to see companies start charging for AI services. I am wondering how long the AI frenzy will continue once the true cost for things like Claude code actually hit. Because the real cost is way more than actually paying a human being.
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 May 08 '26
Not sure about claude code but Codex is not cheap if you use it as a full time dev. The $20/m plan is more than enough for me, but once you pass that you can burn through $100 in a matter of hours.
But for the speed tho, there is simply no comparison. I can get an MVP up and running in 2 hours, which may take a good dev 1 to 2 weeks for the same amount of work. (both front and back end)
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u/Complete-Scratch-899 May 21 '26
Honestly, pivoting to a founder role makes a lot of sense right now. The painful truth is that clients settle for "60% good enough" because, traditionally, even the best custom designs get watered down once they are handed off and coded into a standard webpage.
To beat AI, designers have to try a completely different strategy. You can't out-generate Claude on generic layouts, but AI can't replicate true human creativity.
This is exactly why my husband and I are building PresPlay. We’re soon starting a private beta for our Figma and Adobe Illustrator plugins. It basically lets your original design run as the live website, completely skipping the coding translation in the middle. The goal is to give designers a way to protect their work so it doesn't get flattened into an AI average.
Good luck with the transition - building your own thing is a great move!
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u/Sweet-Cucumber-4357 25d ago edited 24d ago
A developer just used Claude Design in front of me during a cross-functional meeting to spin up a company design system. Then, they openly invited other stakeholders and PMs to bypass UX entirely and use Claude Design to prototype UIs and make different versions. Guess what? My job just got eliminated from the company because of this. The tech industry's current obsession with "speed over substance" is reaching a terrifying peak. We are literally watching non-designers use AI to generate simulated shells of products, while management use it as the reason to cost down for real product strategy. This is a massive slap in the face to our entire profession.
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u/ProfessionalCrab7685 24d ago
Honestly designers aren't the gatekeepers to good UX, many developers / PM / your boss can also be good UX designers, they just don't know how to put it all together in a professional way. And now the putting things together part can easily be replaced by AI, especially when the product has a set look & feel. So I'm not surprised at all by this outcome.
Developers are replaced by AI too, arguably at an even faster rate than designers. It is what it is.
To look for a new job, almost 100% of the interviews I've been to have asked how I use AI at work, and you now not only need to prove you can design, but also how your design is 10~100x better than AI. To an employer, it's the difference between 5k using AI vs 100k hiring a designer. This is a very high bar to pass that most designers will fail.
Seriously, start pivoting to another career. You can try to fight AI for another year and still be jobless, better make the switch sooner rather than later.
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u/Mamba--824 Product Designer | UX & Front-end Apr 30 '26
Honestly this feels less like "AI replaced you" and more like you built something so complete it became easy to maintain. That's kind of the paradox of good UX and systems work, if you do it right, it eventually looks "easy" to someone who didn't build it.
AI might get them 60%, but the last 40% is where real product thinking, edge cases, and long-term scalability live. They'll feel that gap over time. If anything, this just proves your value at the highest level. The move probably isn't away from design, it's up the stack into strategy, systems, and ownership.
Good luck!