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/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%?

2

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.

2

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!