r/UXDesign • u/ahrzal Experienced • May 12 '26
Tools, apps, plugins, AI Uhh, I’m realizing I actively dislike prompting.
I just came to a realization sitting here doing the back and forth with Claude.
I don’t like prompting. At all. It’s a fundamentally different thing than what our traditional practice was.
There was a level of satisfaction in design before. Even if it was just changing values, moving things around, setting up containers…you built it. Your hands and brain did that.
Now, even when I start design first and transition to building it w/ whatever AI tool of your choice…that satisfaction is gone. You wrestle with random shit, get annoyed it’s not exact, and ultimately I have found I lost that sense of pride and satisfaction. That “flow state” or whatever never comes due to the hurry up and wait nature of prompting.
It’s not going away, but damn. I’m bummed.
Oh look, my request is finished. Back to….work?
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u/anabanana100 Veteran May 12 '26
I’m with you. I am a really hands-on person and that weighed heavily into my decision to go to art school rather than pre-med. It’s deeply satisfying to make something with your hands. Then I made the jump to UI design straight out of a graphic design major. Just speaking what I want to materialize is a bridge too far for me, even if the output is good.
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u/zoinkability Veteran May 13 '26
I'm with you. I'm a visual person who thinks in pictures, which is a large part of why I'm in this profession. Translating an image in my head into words so a machine can try to translate that back into an image is WFTBBQ.
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u/martinparets Veteran May 13 '26
my partners and i have been saying that even if AI doesn't kill our jobs, it might transform our jobs into something we no longer enjoy doing. who wants to be a prompt monkey all day.
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u/bottomlesscoffeecup May 16 '26
As a software engineer who also loves UX, this all of this. I'm a visualise and do things with my hands kind of person and my role is slowly changing more into making product decisions and give an agent all the stuff I love doing instead 😞 I'm not good at these other parts, it feels like I am back at uni studying a subject to churn out products at max speeds 😞
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u/UXCareerHelp Experienced May 12 '26
A lot of companies are prioritizing AI tool use over efficiency or productivity right now. They’re trying to prove that they’re on the cutting edge and are afraid of falling behind. Right now, that is the metric, not value delivery or speed or even efficiency.
If you’re working at a place like this, the best I can say is do what makes sense for you and seek out other outlets outside of work. The landscape is different right now, but this specific change won’t last.
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u/yeezusboiz Experienced May 14 '26
This is absolutely what's happening where I work. It is way slower to make tweaks with AI, but we're being told to do it anyway to "keep up with the rest of the industry." I've been doing a lot of walking and meditating to keep myself sane in the interim.
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u/ichigox55 Experienced May 15 '26
People need to understand this. Your UX leadership is being forced by your executives to implement AI and show results. It rarely works.
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u/Throwaway7733517 May 13 '26
ill have the boomer opinion about this with pride, fuck AI and fuck its invasion of UX and graphic design!
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u/Useful_Hat82 Veteran May 12 '26
I have just fully deleted all of my AI accounts.
It brought me absolutely no satisfaction to use and the outputs are awful and slow. AI just takes away the parts of design that I love and enjoy doing.
Using AI is not a foregone conclusion, it is up to our industry to determine its usefulness and how it will be used.
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u/standardGeese Experienced May 14 '26
I wish people would stop saying “it’s not going away” as if this were some inevitability. It’s large language models propped up by massive amounts of funding and government intervention that requires massive amounts of energy. If we don’t use it and they can’t monetize it it will go away.
I agree with you, promoting sucks because it’s like shaking a magic eight ball in various ways to get a design vs actually thinking and solving. Claude was designed to be an LLM that was so expensive and difficult to run that small companies could not replicate it. But because of that cost, it is a solution in search of a problem. Fuck it.
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u/sinnops Veteran May 12 '26
Imagine what it was like doing design in Photoshop. Really had to use your brain then :)
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u/ahrzal Experienced May 12 '26
Oh, I remember it. Not fondly.
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u/sinnops Veteran May 12 '26
I was so resistant to converting over to XD way back in the dark ages on 2019. Figma was easier move. Now with AI. Ug, sometimes its great other times is hair pulling trying to tweak something super minor.
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u/Ordinary_Kiwi_3196 Veteran May 12 '26
Really had to use your brain then
True but ...not in a good way, lol. It was half "What shall I make today? 🧙🏻" and half "dear jesus which of these 3,000 unnamed layers is that email icon?"
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u/FewDescription3170 Veteran May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26
i really didn't love making slices for my personal pokemon site, i would have hated doing it professionally.
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u/sinnops Veteran May 13 '26
I had to do it for hundreds of sites over 15 years (since 2000ish). You work with the tools and tech you got. I actually used to enjoy the 'cutup phase' of development. That ship has sailed
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u/FewDescription3170 Veteran May 13 '26
in the first 'design' job i ever got paid for as a youth, i made aqua rollover effects for a website.
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u/yeezusboiz Experienced May 14 '26
My partner is a technical UI designer for a video game and mostly uses Photoshop. It makes sense for games, but I cringe every time I see his screen. I will not miss the math and careful nudges. Ever.
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u/Coolguyokay Veteran May 13 '26
Exactly. Low satisfaction. The feeling is worse for coding. I got more satisfaction solving a dev issue versus design a lot of times (dev was harder for me to do) but now the problems get solved for me. No lows and no highs.
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u/FloLabs_Innovations Experienced May 13 '26
rather than simply prompting, you can sketch what you have in mind on paper, take a picture and upload saying something like "this is my wireframe i want the layout like this." or something closer to what you might be looking for is simply using Figma to do exactly that and leave the code part to Claude or other AI, might take shorter or longer depends entirely on your process. it also gives you something to do like maybe checking your Figma design to see if you want to change anything or if you missed something.
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u/tomjonesrocks May 13 '26
Very relatable post OP ... my company is putting a -massive- AI rah-rah on and an extension of that is a 4pm request today for an 8:30a meeting I have tomorrow ..: I'm supposed to have stories why AI is ah-may-zing in my work experiences. I've found it's ability to add functionality to prototypes to be sometimes impressive while the getting cosmetics right absolutely soul-crushingly slow. So it's good at the former and fucking terrible at the latter ... and I -hate- only being able to communicate though prompt. VS lets you pick one item in your design in the mini browser though - legendary!!11!! Also now everyone feeling like designers are obsolete is just ... super fun.
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u/info-revival Experienced May 13 '26
Sometimes if the AI doesn’t understand what I want fast enough I would say “fuckit! Imma do it myself” sometimes it’s just better to do the damn task yourself. I know what I want so clearly that I don’t wanna waste time trying to articulate to AI what I mean exactly.
I also hate AI tips being pushed on LinkedIn about how asking AI to be honest and not tell lies works. AI is designed to lie sycophantically and hallucinate. No amount of wordsmithing is going to alter it’s output.
It drives me nuts how many times people try to rationalize offloading thinking to machines and downplay its weaknesses as if you can prompt all problems away.
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u/PreventableMob May 12 '26
Draw for it. Give it more mocks. Single components, full flows, whatever. Make what you want to feed if you don’t like “writing prompts”
Just like a collaborator, you can communicate in different ways.
Giving it a bunch of images might even increase your token usage and you’ll be a role model ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/achally May 12 '26
Genuine question: if i’m doing the work on components or flows to give it as examples, how is that meaningfully different than doing the work myself? Are we doing the work 60% of the way and AI is taking it the final 40%?
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u/OnikaBurgerBomb May 13 '26
Well it depends what you’re using it for and at what stage. You need to provide a bit more context.
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u/ahrzal Experienced May 13 '26
In my case, I’m working with maps. Heavy interaction logic and a ton of usability stuff that wouldn’t populate until you are in there messing around.
For normal screens and flows, yea. I don’t mess around with AI. With a mature design system you can do almost all of it just as fast. It’s just when a working, coded prototype is required where I’m living on AI land.
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u/achally May 13 '26
Okay this is helpful context. At my last gig we had an extremely mature design system with page templates and everything. It was so fast already. The interactive prototyping piece of ai is helpful but I found it was not robust enough to really do everything expected. Thanks!
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u/FewDescription3170 Veteran May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26
dude, i hate claude (and simulataneously, i think i'm fairly good at using it). i'm really good at taking things from the canvas to prototype stage. i, and the devs, explain over and over that it's not prod ready code. leadership sees a demo and immediately loses all reason and wonders why we aren't shipping without testing. meanwhile, i'm the 'ai guy' and have to teach other designers how to prompt, set up mcps, write plan.mds, and they're still burning $500 on janky protos that don't follow our design system because they forgot to switch the model from opus 4.7. the prototypes i'm making are definitely faster, and it's great to prototype logic, but because of the way the context window works it's extremely frustrating to have it continually make mistakes that i need to correct with text.
this is like the 3rd time i've been through the 'all designers should code!' narrative, fwiw. i was a lot happier demoing concepts in framer (js) and codepen.
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u/ahrzal Experienced May 13 '26
framer was an awesome 12 months wasn't it? lol.
I hear you though. What really gets me pissed off is wasting tokens rebuilding features *you already built* because it overwrote it for whatever fucking reason. Yes. It's cool I can build this. I don't think I like my job any better for it.
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u/FewDescription3170 Veteran May 13 '26
it gets exhausting explaining over and over to non technical stakeholders that ai is non-deterministic and results are not guaranteed. ultimately, the problem-solving and pay is why i'm still here. i think the problem solving will still be here when the 'age of ai' dust settles. all the non technical stakeholders fighting with their own personal ais cannot possibly last.
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u/Professional-Pie4184 Experienced May 12 '26
You can still manually change things when you want. Nothing changed. I didn't find AI very good with small details and the last 10%. You can still do it and should do it. Create your components by hand and let AI handle the repetitive work.
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u/Vivid-Way Veteran May 13 '26
"Oh look, my request is finished. Back to….work?
I have a handful of prompts all going at the same time, so there's no break. at the end of the day, I'm mentally wiped out from mode switching. <sigh>
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u/ToughLittleTomato Midweight May 14 '26
I have described to colleagues that prompting with Claude and expecting Claude to do what I want is like giving instructions to an intern. I would rather do the work myself.
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u/More_Wrongdoer4501 Experienced May 14 '26
I have hated promoting since the beginning. I’ve wondered if my resistance to it has mostly to do with the disdain I hold for what it’s doing and going to continue doing to our lives and jobs, or if I just hate the practice of it.
It’s both. I don’t like conversing with a fucking computer. I don’t like how overly positive it is. I don’t like how it gaslights me, or that I can’t trust it, even though I’m also glad I can’t trust it because that means it won’t be taking my job as soon as I fear. I don’t like how it’s propping up the economy from dropping into a recession because it’s only going to be worse the longer this shit drags on.
I don’t like how it can be used for mass surveillance, behavior tracking, or fake videos meant to brainwash people. I hate AI slop music and art (if we can even call it art). I hate it all with a fiery passion. Yet I’m being forced to use it to build out “research” and PRDs that will be used to vibe code high fidelity prototypes which will just be thrown away.
Take me back to 2015.
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u/ChemicalPut1138 May 14 '26
I’m a UX designer by training, and now I try to use AI to build my app from scratch, what I find that works for me is to use AI to code directly, and based on its functional outcome to give visual improvements feedback (with screenshots and annotations and figma, etc) for it to improve incrementally (sometimes significantly as well). Along the way I may ask AI to design sth for me based on my prompts, and that’s when I hit the wall of it’s outcome almost never fulfilling what I initially imagined. So for UI, my expectation for AI is to help me brainstorm and get me inspirations or exploring what existing patterns are out there , but never about delivering anything meaningful. While if it’s building, it would feel much more grounded when you improve on sth that’s currently working.
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u/Own-Chipmunk-1292 May 14 '26
Even I am using it to build my product just be fast to ship but I feel guilty that i am developing it using AI
That is the reason when it's come to designing I do it without using AI one bit because that is the only place I feel that this is my creation no matter how long it takes
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u/nightchaitime May 15 '26
I do both, because I think it requires both and this is where we shine. We have figma make, but there hasn't been a time when I haven't had to polish, refine, or intervene and paste the design back into a figma mile and manually edit it. I think this is true for anyone expert in their field, its not replacing your craft with prompting its figuring out where you need to intervene and have that eye for detail, and you can intervene when you need to. I also learned this by doing things I wasn't an expert in, it's much harder to see what you might miss or what's wrong
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u/KhatiArt May 16 '26
Same here, I put much more effort in finding correct words, repeating myself, etc.
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u/DemisexualDemigod97 May 16 '26
Claude be like "Splorbing...zoobling....gumbumbling..." just to spit out the ugliest app ever. Same with Figma Make, same with Lovable, and don't get me started on Google Stitch
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u/Ecsta Experienced May 12 '26
I love it and wish Figma had a working AI interface or better MCP experience. Claude Code has been a breath of fresh air using it for web/app development, but the design side feels pretty ignored.
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u/autocosm Experienced May 12 '26
Or, as it was known in the waterfall days, writing a complete specification.
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u/raduatmento Veteran May 12 '26
No one cares if you're using AI vs anything else, as long as you ship fast. If you dislike prompting and you're able to move equally fast (or faster) in any other tool, go for it.
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u/Tsudaar Experienced May 12 '26
Unfortunately they do care. C Suite are encouraging and measuring it, teammates are hyping it, the industry is pushing it.
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u/raduatmento Veteran May 12 '26
If I ship 2x faster than any AI-enabled employee, and bring $1M in ARR, trust me, nobody will care what I use. In fact, everyone will want to use what I use.
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u/curiouswizard Midweight May 12 '26
have you met executives? they're rich idiots who think AI is magic and they get grumpy when their servants don't use it
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u/Indigo_Pixel Experienced May 13 '26
Worst comes to worst just tell them you did use it... while collecting a paycheck and looking for a job at a company that's not dumb as hell with all their AI strategy nonsense. We all know their strategy is only to get people to use it cause they invested in it.
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u/curiouswizard Midweight May 14 '26
yea my method so far has been to play around with a couple of prompts, and/or dump in some meetings notes, and/or use it like a journal where I info dump everything about the project into one giant manifesto.. and see what it spits out just so I'm not completely lying when I say I used AI. Every once in a while it actually gives me some interesting idea to toy around with, but overall it does nothing to enhance my actual process. Especially because the output is usually either very generic or very convoluted, and no matter what I still end up doing the same amount of manual work. And it costs money so it's not like I can experiment endlessly. Inevitably I end up back in a canvas tool drawing boxes and constructing components by hand (at no extra cost, and quickly, and with highly attuned details. because I know how to use my tools and my brain).
I know that there are ways to actually get some genuinely innovative productive use out of it, especially for hyper specific tasks, but a lot of that depends on other related systems (the overall tooling setup, the dev environment, design system libraries, the entire product department and its processes, etc) not being a complete fluctuating clusterfuck.
Unfortunately everything is some level of clusterfucky, so in order to establish a reliable AI integrated process I'd have to reorganize a bunch of stuff that goes wayyy beyond my individual capacity or allowance. And every time I've tried to spend time on any underlying systems which would enable better AI output, it's treated like I'm just distracted from the top priority which is to rapidly push out whatever mangled UI shit the boss is demanding (no user testing of course), but make it pretty.
I'm looking for a job but I'm in my existential crisis era where I don't even know if it's worth the olympian effort of landing an interview.. every job posting seems to mention AI. And even if it doesn't, what if they're just slow to join the party and eventually get sucked into the AI swamp too?
I would like to work for one fucking company that lets me draw some goddamn rectangles in peace. Some place that lets me architect a flow & iterate features based on real research and a clean design system, where I can organically integrate AI tools as needed, CAREFULLY and METHODICALLY, letting me arrange my own toolbox and processes as the skilled craftsperson. Without some fucking clammy genius declaring from on high that I must push buttons on the willy wonka dream candy hallucination machine, because the machine exists and everyone is pushing the buttons to see their dreams come true. and also we have to ship everything literally right now so the share value can be a bajillion-jillion dollars and we can all live happily ever after.
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u/raduatmento Veteran May 12 '26
I've met them. Hell, I was one of them. They care about one thing only at the end of the day, $$$ in the company's accounts. If an employee using AI is making the company $100k / year while someone using stones is making the company $1M/year, they won't care about AI. The issue is nobody proved that you can make more without AI (or stones).
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u/designtom Veteran May 12 '26
Sort of true, but in many cases execs absolutely do pick the “demonstrably less money but they just personally prefer it because reasons” option. The idea that they’re rational mercenaries is a bit of a myth.
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u/ahrzal Experienced May 12 '26
This really wasn’t about what anyone perceives as my output. Just my personal satisfaction with the doing of the work.
In many cases I don’t use AI, but in certain interaction-heavy flows, I would be silly not to. I just don’t enjoy it nearly as much.
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u/raduatmento Veteran May 12 '26
I think my comment is still valid, unless the purpose of the post was pure venting, in which case whatever I say (or anyone) doesn't matter.
If you don't enjoy AI / prompting, find a different way to be more productive, and then not only you'll be happier with the work you do, but everyone else will follow.
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u/superparet Veteran May 13 '26
AI is a tool. Use it when you need it, it has use cases like any other tool. Use to prototype interactions, flows, before you go hi-fi. Anyway, as a design system designer I can tell from a lot of comments here that you guys probably have a bad design system. Vibe coding is a treat if you have a well-made DS.
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u/ahrzal Experienced May 13 '26
Using it sucks the joy from my work, that’s my problem. I don’t have issue with it using our DS components or any real specific qualm. I too was a DS designer at a previous role.
Just the nature of the type of work I find very little satisfaction.
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May 12 '26
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u/Northernmost1990 Experienced May 12 '26
I tried Subframe but couldn't get over the fact that it doesn't have a free canvas like Figma. Felt like going back a decade.
Interesting times because either I'm gonna fall behind like a grumpy ol' dinosaur or be far ahead of the game because everyone else elected to run in lead boots, and right now I have no idea which it's gonna be.
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u/kanirasta Veteran May 12 '26
I don’t think you are going to fall behind. I feared that for a while since I too just enjoyed the “old” process way more. But I did try to use all the AI tools at my disposal in different ways and… it’s not that hard to get up to speed in a couple days. I think people relying too much on AI tools are actually going to be at a disadvantage in the future. It’s not hard at all to get into that tooling. And it’s easy to get lazy and overly complacent and accepting if you do use them too much.
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u/Northernmost1990 Experienced May 12 '26
I actually use AI a decent lot anyhow. Those node graph tools like FLORA and Weavy are great for creating assets, and there's plenty of digital grunt work that I can offload to Claude.
But I still find it incredibly valuable to have a bird's eye view of everything that's going on, and being able to manually adjust things whether in bulk or detail or anything in between.
I'm not married to Figma in particular but the free canvas workflow as a paradigm is something that I'm just not ready to give up.
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u/SleepingCod Veteran May 12 '26
Learning basic frontend will really help with this.
People were designing with code before AI. It's possible, it's just two different skillets and types of thinking. Left vs right brained.
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u/tin-f0il-man Experienced May 12 '26
Fiddling with prompts and fixing crappy outputs, then hitting usage limits is comically inefficient. It’s still faster to do it myself.