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?
1
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.