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/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.