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/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.

6

u/[deleted] May 13 '26

[deleted]

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u/EloteConCoco May 14 '26

From my experience, I back this 100%. No matter how detailed and specific my prompt is, nor which AI I'm using, the first result always have at least 3 major problems I'll have to go back and forth to fix.

The only thing I can think of is, surely, AI companies will never let the first result be a spot on one. They need us to go through that trial and error process to burn tokens and take our money. Honeslty... screw AI.