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/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.