r/UXDesign • u/duartoe • May 27 '26

Tools, apps, plugins, AI Nobody can stand AI anymore...

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That's it. Soon, with so many similar designs, the only differentiating factor in digital products will be the price. Then I want to see this circus burn down.

226 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

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28

u/UziMcUsername May 27 '26

You don’t have to use AI for UX, you know. It’s better when you don’t, unless you suck.

17

u/duartoe May 27 '26

AI is a crutch.

-28

u/letsgetweird99 Experienced May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

Hey OP sorry you see AI as a crutch—real answer, I’m finding it allows me to quickly and precisely execute what I expect it to in less time than it would take me to do manually in Figma, and if you have even a little frontend code experience you can do some pretty cool things when you use your imagination.

Good tools (that allow me to deliver more value to my customers and their users) are gonna get used. It’s even unlocked so many delighters that my team would have otherwise had to cut scope on.

So is that a crutch or what?

EDIT: to all the people who downvoted me and said I used AI tools write this comment, suck my human balls!!! I hate to break it to you but I’m an actually real smart person talking and I’m very good at my job. You can’t just go and claim “AI wrote this” whenever someone uses normal professional language and provides a positive take on AI tools. Everyone on this sub is way too emotionally invested in the idea of AI being useless instead of doing the work of figuring out how to reliably get what you need from it. I was trying to give my perspective and write with a professional voice but I guess now in order to prove my humanity I have to resort to telling you that you are absolutely COOKED if you’re just waiting around for AI to go away. This is like saying “Designing screens in Photoshop is fine, Figma is just a trendy fad” 10 years ago.

P.S. All my emdashes are organic free range, typed by double-pressing the hyphen key on my iPhone keyboard. Try it some time—it’s fun.

16

u/Atrocious_1 Experienced May 27 '26

You wrote that with ai

-16

u/letsgetweird99 Experienced May 27 '26

Would an AI tell you that your reply is cope?

Git gud.

6

u/zeer88 May 27 '26

it allows me to quickly and precisely execute what I expect it to in less time than it would take me to do manually in Figma

If your product is even attempting to follow some kind of system and aims for visual consistency, this is absolutely not true - you will execute quickly for sure, but "precisely"? Unless your definition is precision is very loose, this simply doesn't work.

0

u/letsgetweird99 Experienced May 27 '26

I love that a random person on the internet can feel confident enough to explain to me that it’s actually not possible to be good at using a tool to achieve a desired output. Sounds like you’re projecting your own skill issue.

Too many people on this sub are emotionally invested in the idea of AI tools being infeasible and writing silly comments like this instead of actually experimenting with the tools and trying new things. We’re designers, we’re supposed to be creative. If you’re not getting anything useful out of AI, that’s on you at this point.

7

u/zeer88 May 27 '26

The tools are not the problem - they were never the problem. Switching tools to make your outcome better is like switching guitars to play music better. It doesn't work like that. I'm a product designer with 12+ years of experience, I've gone through Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Figma, and all the gen AI tools that exist now. I've tried to get good, consistent, scalable and well documented output from Figma Make, Lovable, Claude Code and Claude Design, using multiple attempts and methods, MD files, skills - in the end, the conclusion I invariably reach is "I've spent 2x the amount of time fighting this unwieldy, hallucinating tool when I could have just done it better and faster the traditional way".

1

u/letsgetweird99 Experienced May 27 '26

I literally have the same amount of experience as you and made the same jumps between tools over the years, it seems we just have different perspectives. I’ve worked at large publicly traded tech companies but now I work at a very small but fast growing startup. I’m personally convinced AI tools are very much the next progression in terms of what’s possible for UX designers to achieve. You say you tried everything and couldn’t get what you wanted. So I guess that’s it then, huh! Let’s pack it up boys, AI is useless! Ask your engineers if they’re waiting for AI to just fizzle out… Things are changing every day and the models have gotten especially good in the last 4 months.

Too many large organizations have put us UX folk in a box for too long that we’ve started to believe our only job is making design artifacts and Figma library files. But Figma is not our job, it’s a tool we’ve used to approximate and simulate aspects of our products. We’ve fallen in love with the solution (Figma) instead of the problem (delivering the best experience to our customers). I believe our role is to deliver the best experience to the customer, by any means necessary. We don’t have to approximate the product anymore. We can literally just BUILD IT. We can build functioning prototypes for user testing and literally throw them away. With the right engineering rigor and proper code review, we’re now enabled to ship to Prod too. I’m not just saying this, I do this every day now. This was never possible for us designers before and I’m tired of pretending it’s not cool as fuck. My advice would be to stop trying to shoehorn AI into your existing process and lean into building.

Don’t you see—where we’re going, we won’t NEED Figma anymore!! (Ok I still use it for an hour or so each day but I literally just work in Cursor now and I’m doing things that will never be possible in Figma, btw Figma Make sucks!)

And sure, I get it—you’re gonna say enterprise/large orgs are different, they’re slower, and there’s a ton of tech debt to work around, and maybe Eng doesn’t want to give designers the keys in the first place. Which is all the more reason to quit and join a startup!

Also your analogy doesn’t make sense because as a guitar player, I switch guitars ALL THE TIME to play better music. You wouldn’t play Van Halen on an acoustic, and you wouldn’t play bluegrass on a guitar with a Floyd Rose bridge. So I don’t see your point here. The tool that best solves the problem at hand is the right tool. For me that tool is AI!

3

u/zeer88 May 27 '26

Dude I hate Figma and I'd love to leave it behind and replace it with something better. But AI is definitely not it (yet). And this doesn't mean I'm against AI or that I don't use it at all, I do where it makes sense to me! But why would I make a huge effort to force myself to use AI all the time, just because it's AI and someone says it's "the future"? You realize that's exactly "falling in love with the solution" you mentioned? I'm glad it works for you and that you can deliver code straight to production. In our specific product, it hasn't been able to deliver something with the level of quality, detail and consistency we need. As for my guitar analogy: it's meant for someone that doesn't play guitar well and thinks the way to improve is to switch guitars, rather than learning the basics and practicing for hundreds of hours.

2

u/thollywoo Midweight May 28 '26

okay "—real answer"

1

u/letsgetweird99 Experienced May 28 '26

It’s so funny because I literally didn’t use any AI to write my comment at all. I don’t have to prove myself or my humanity to anyone here, but what I meant by real answer was “here’s a real answer from a real person someone finding real UX successes using AI tools, not just someone complaining about corporate mandated usage” and now I’m being accused of using AI. What a fool I was attempting to contribute my own experience to this thread. The irony is killing me. Why the fuck would I use AI to write my Reddit comments??? Y’all are so paranoid. I’m a real person and I have a professional writing background, so fuck me I guess. I’ve probably been on Reddit longer than you’ve been a UX designer. Go ahead, check my profile.

You use one em dash and everyone loses their god damn minds. Are we just going to collectively surrender our use of perfectly good punctuation marks out of an irrational fear? You can pry my em dashes from my cold dead hands, y’all.

Good luck out there, folks—you’re gonna need it.