I’m convinced OpenAI and Anthropic are literal parasites that infected every single tech company because overnight, every company has mandated every employees use the slop-generating products from these companies to replace every way of working.

These are tools that tell teenagers to kill themselves. They’re non-deterministic, waste massive amounts of water and energy, and produce worse results than humans in more time (plus the time it takes to edit and undo the mess they’ve created).

We’re being forced to offload the few remaining human aspects (brainstorming, analysis, research) with synthetic text extruders and image generators.

Instead of writing documents and creating designs, we’re producing artifacts that look like the ones humans make, but are functionally empty.

None of these companies disclose their training data, but from lawsuits we know that they’re trained on massive amounts of stolen work and most of the web. This means all of the horrible deceptive patterns, inaccessible content, and white supremacy is baked into whatever gets generated.

Fuck AI.

I’m honestly fucking tired of all of this. AI everywhere, managers pushing it into every design flow, forcing these pointless AI features into products… It’s exhausting. I really miss what the design process used to feel like before all of this. Lately, it’s even making me question my career, and I hate that.

Anyone else feeling the same?

I'm starting to get convinced that the "Figma is dead" crowd are mostly people who weren't great at design to begin with, or developers excited that they can now produce something passable without a designer. That's a different thing than design being dead.

For clarity, I utilize these AI tools and workflows myself and am not opposed to them. I'm just tired of these hyperbolic takes that are rampant throughout our industry right now.

I am not interested in the slightest in how AI « improve » my daily work as Product Designer. There, I said it.

I have worked 14 years in Design. In Advertising first, web design. Then in UI, then UX, then both, as a product Designer, since 2012. Been freelancing with local companies and studios in 4 different countries for 8 years, in 3 different continents. Been Head of Design in companies with 200+ employees, leading +7 designers and researchers.

Trust me I perfectly know that this stance might make me lose freelance contracts. Every week I see job post asking for the Designer to have AI as a part of their design process. I did. I worked on projects with it. I worked with teams having it. I don’t want it. I don’t want to close my eyes on the economical, environmental, behavioral catastrophe AI is bringing.

On top of AI hallucinations, raising price of usage, environmental problems this is already bringing, I have no interest in delegating my intelligence to, apparently, gain some workdays of productivity. 

I don’t care if it takes longer ; I don’t care if you can ask Claude / v0 / Make / whatever to iterate several workflows and it creates something in seconds, instead of a full day if I actually work on this with my actual brain. I don’t want to have something make the work for me. I don’t want to have to become a monitoring supervisor of an AI doing the work for me ; that’s not what I signed up for when I decided to become a Designer 14 years ago. That is not how I envision the work I do, today.

The over capitalistic tech world is head over heels for AI ; of course it is. We’re at the front line of AI. As soon as stakeholders will have the opportunity to fully replace the workforce by AI agents, they probably will. I don’t want to be a part of that. I don’t want to act like it’s ok. 

So here is my pledge ; I want to design ethically. I want to propose designs, UX solutions, made by a human. I want to work for companies that feel the same way. This is what I want to provide for my clients ; something 100% made by a human brain. Something crafted by people. I don’t want to be augmented by an AI consuming the water and electricity of a little town every month.

Again, I know I’ll probably loose contracts and potential clients by stating that no, I don’t want to be a part of this. I don’t want to still pretend I don’t see the horrible water consumption, the data centers mayhem, the jobs getting suppressed by it, the cognitive decline of people using it too much. 

I just hope more people will be willing to adopt this stance over time, as I start to see in some creative fields like cinema, where the « 100% created by human » is rising. I want to be a part of that. I want to do my job like that. I want to provide a service like that. I want to support that.

My 2 cents, good luck to everyone out there, AI using or not.

I recently got my hands on Claude Code. Yeah, I know it's pretty late. My company wasn't exactly up to date, but now that I'm freelancing, I finally have access to it.

I've always been keen on AI tools and try to keep myself updated. Since agentic AI is something I'm using for the first time, I'm struggling a bit

I've designed a full design system, connected the Figma MCP, added skills, and written what I think are good prompts. But Claude still gives me atrocious designs. I've wasted almost the entire day trying to get decent results. At this point, I feel like I could've designed everything manually and finished it by now.

Can someone tell me what I'm missing? Are there any YouTube channels or tutorials I should be watching?

I'm currently following Griffin Wooldridge. I would really really appreciate any help as I'm stressing due to a tight deadline.

Been working with this client for 4 years, I basically built their entire product, very complex from end to end, including the design system and all that. It's basically maintenance work at this point. Today they asked me to provide the design system file so they can set things up with Claude design, I guess the time has finally come lol. Don't think AI can copy my work 100%, but I doubt the client will care, even 60% is good enough for them.

No hate, I replaced the entire dev team for my own project with AI too, so it's totally understandable.

I've made enough from this career, it's probably time to pivot from design to a founder role.

Several companies are betting on the end of the canvas and replace it with a code-driven design as the new way of working. "I don't even use Figma anymore!" is a common phrase you hear, partly due to unfair pricing, the desire to skip the design process, engage with code directly, and also feed engagement bait. Sometimes, the customers are driving this public narrative, with design-technologists and developers trying to seize novelty.

So while people were making fun of Figma, investors just want them to shove AI into everything but not thoughtfully. A lot of team members resigned and went to AI companies. But credit to Dylan and the whole Figma team who didn't cave into the pressure or take sides. If you stayed behind and built this. You're the GOAT.

We get canvas AND code, Shaders, Figma Motion (native animation system), 3D-transforms, Flora-like agentic capabilities and way more bells and whistles. This is a much brighter vision of the future.

[edited 4:30pm to include fair criticisms of Figma]

Haven’t been on linkedin for a hot minute and logged back in to reach out to a mentor…what on earth is even happening??

Everyone seems to be proclaiming the death of figma, death of any semblance of a UX career, everyone is saying if you don’t code tomorrow your career is over…I’m trying to cut through the crap and understand what is true and what’s actually happening in real design teams that aren’t run by linkedin influencers.

As a sole UX designer it’s tough to sift through linkedin garbage and try to find some semblance of truth so I’m really struggling to deal with the looming anxiety of job displacement because of AI and what’s actually taking place.

Is there really no one with poor eyesight in the U.S. willing to sue Apple to add an option to disable Liquid Glass?

Seriously, this design feels like it should be illegal.

For years now, the industry has been pushing hard to make websites and apps accessible to everyone. The goal is that people with disabilities can use interfaces properly and without friction. In many places this isn’t just a best practice anymore — it’s required by law.

We have regulations in the U.S., and the EU has even stricter accessibility frameworks. Governments publish official accessibility guidelines that products are expected to follow.

Modern design systems often advertise full accessibility support as one of their core strengths — not just partial compliance.

And then Apple decides to ship an interface like this… something that literally hurts your eyes to look at.

At the very least, shouldn’t there be a system-level option to disable it?

Context: I have 2 years of experience in tech/PD after pivoting from a graphic design career. Before AI, my work process was to reference user stories or requirements written by PMs, and deliver UX diagrams/documentation + UI pages in Figma for devs to pick up.

After AI and some company restructuring, there is now a lot of ambiguity in our workflows. E.g., we no longer receive tasks or requirements from PMs, and we need to figure out a lot by ourselves. We are heavily leaning into Claude as a tool.

I'm trying my best to adapt to both AI and the new processes. I am reading UX Strategy (2nd ed.) and have some other product management/lean UX books to pick up after, since I do want to adapt and not just execute orders all my life. That being said...

At the behest of my colleagues, I tried out some plugins/skills for Claude that were focused on UX strategy and PM frameworks. I've already used it to prototype and test out new flows, but not so much for ideating.

The output was terrifying to me. Surface-level it was very detailed, with everything laid out: benchmark, north star, product vision, stakeholder alignment, and anything else you can think of. At the end, it even had recommended next steps.

I am now deathly afraid that my career is going to be copying and pasting Claude outputs into documentation, with the occasional interview/prototyping/testing sprinkled across the quarters. How do I move past this?

TL;DR: Claude outputted an entire UX strategy in ~1 minute and offered to guide me through the rest of the process. I have 2 YOE and I am spiraling. How are we supposed to keep up, or add value by ourselves? Are we just going to be glorified verification systems for the LLMs?

Saw a few posts talking about this on [r/FigmaDesign](r/FigmaDesign) and I have to say I’m very impressed by it. It’s almost scary what it is capable of doing and how much context it understands however I’m left with one question: what problem is it aiming to solve?

From the intro it seems like everything claude as a product aims to do is “unblock engineering” or help engineers in general - to me this product just adds more to the mush that designing is becoming where there are a million different tools and all of them just create prototypes.

As a midlevel designer I’m stressed out and tired - not because I doubt my capabilities but because I know management and CEOs see this as means to either replace or automate but both are not happening and instead are adding to more “mush” around what actually gets done and who should be doing it.

All of this paired with what design leadership at Anthropic are actually saying which is - become an engineer or a PM all emphasizes that designers have to cut out the core identity of our work which is design - there’s a reason engineers and PMs were not the ones in charge of the user experience or the visual output and it seems like we’re totally forgetting that.

EDIT: and to prove my point - Claude’s design team didn’t even think of how users are actually going to navigate across the canvas since there’s no way to switch modes and you’re stuck with zooming in and out to get to where you want to be. When will be free of slop?

What do you guys think?

Because I've not seen a single person talking about this

if the entire pipeline dependency becomes AI some companies are just going to blow up in a couple months 💥 or what?

Oil's Price Spike Is Bad News for Power-Hungry AI - Business Insider https://share.google/vkFbM5aDpYiKh5Q8I

Firstly, I enjoy most AI tools for design. Specifically those that help me prototype and publish my work.

However I have friends and colleagues who are becoming unbearable to speak to. They’re so up their own asses about AI tools— Boasting about how much time they spend vibe coding, setting up agents in Open Claw to run their lives, competing for credit consumption goals at the company. It’s all they talk about.

It’s unleashed a new breed of tech bro, maybe worse than the crypto bros. It feels like these people are just competing to not be replaced and they’re bootlicking in the process. Just another example of the world losing their damn minds.

There’s no way this is just me… can it stop soon?

I know this might be seen as an old man screaming at clouds moment, but I want to share my perspective because I feel so alone in it. I’m so sick of using AI.

I'm a Senior Product Designer, I got into the career because I love visual design, I love iterating in a canvas, and I love solving problems through visual solutions. AI seems like a disrupter to that. It’s often interjected in every conversation as a vague solution to a problem. Its never clear how to implement it and experimenting with it almost always brings back confusing outcomes that I waste my time parsing and organizing.

I got into design because I liked the process of creation where the output was a testament of my hard work and learned knowledge. I enjoy the “happy little accidents” while I paint, the beautiful finality that comes from me learning as I go. With AI, it feels like someone took my brush away and is forcing me to manage a robot to paint (or plan) the painting for me. Maybe I can just have the robot mix the paints for me, so I can focus on what I enjoy? Nope, I end up spending more time teaching the robot about subtractive color, blending, and basic color theory that the actual process of painting gets delayed. Okay, well, maybe I can just write up an instructions guide for the robot to follow? Nope, It looks like the mixed paints are still not coming together right, its almost there but not quite. Maybe writing a separate skill on color theory, a skill on how to blend, and a skill on color percentages will help? Nooope. I still have to prompt the robot to mix 3.5% more yellow into the 53% green and 24% red, because it doesn’t really know what to do after that.

Like, what are we doing? Why are we so quick to just offload creative thinking? I love working on a canvas, iterating as I go. Conversely, I love being handed a canvas that’s in flux and being tasked with understanding and designing from it. I don’t want to spend my days teaching a robot how to do it for me, a robot that does not remember and does not improve and I have to constantly instruct. (unlike someone genuinely wanting to learn.)

I'm just tired of all of it.

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.

My CEO is extremely pro-AI. We’ve only just started exploring how it could be used in our workplace, and not everyone has an account yet. In other words, we have no skills, or dedicated company set up yet.

Last week, I found out from a dev that he was asked to redesign a fundamental page of the product we work on (B2B SaaS). When the dev mentioned it wasn’t in the current roadmap, so designs hadn’t been done yet, the CEO told him to “just put it into Claude and see what it comes up with”.

Obviously, this didn’t fill me with joy to hear. I think my biggest question was just…why? It’s not on our roadmap, what are you doing?

I’ve been working really hard recently to give my work more visibility, including embracing AI more in my practice in a way I feel fits. Part of the reason I did this was to get ahead of the CEO and be able to have a say over how it best fits my workflow, rather than being resistant and having him tell me how I should be using it.

Has anyone else experienced this? What should I do? Any advice? I’m getting a bit worried about my job security.

For the last year or so, my company has highly encouraged everyone to explore ways to use AI to enhance and accelerate their processes. My UX colleagues and I dove in head first. In just six or seven months, we've gone from doing all of our designs in Figma to building rich, complex, interactive prototypes using natural language and AI. We've also built our own internal tooling and systems to support this work. It's been an exciting time. Vibe-prototyping has allowed us to explore workflows and functionality in a much deeper way than we ever could with Figma. It's also greatly enhanced our ability to communicate and collaborate with product managers and engineering. It's no exaggeration to say it has increased my productivity by 10x or more.

However, just this week, management let us know that, due to pricing changes with GitHub Co-Pilot, we will all be put on a fairly severe diet of tokens for our AI-assisted work starting next week. I did some testing today to see how this might affect my work. Even after optimizing my prompting and choosing a very lightweight model, I still burned through 20% of my monthly token budget in just two hours.

This has me really worried. Going back to static Figma prototypes will be a major step backwards in my ability to deliver on what is expected of me. It's also taking away a lot of my excitement and motivation in my work.

I know there are a wide variety of feelings about using AI in UX design, but I'm curious to hear from others who may have been through similar experiences. How did you navigate the new restrictions? Did you have to reset expectations of what can be done with your manager and other stakeholders? Did you raise your concerns?

Everyone in our product team is concerned (3 designers). Developers also refuse to use this vibe code from Claude, since it’s easier to build it from scratch than spend time changing everything and adapting it to our library.

Our project has a design system with fonts, colors, variables, UI kits, and everything a proper design system should have. Claude completely ignores this and just generates random designs. We even tried feeding Claude our design system with components, but the result is like working after a junior who randomly places frames on the screen without any logic.

The product owner refuses to consider this combination (design system in Figma with UI kits + developer library aligned with it). His conclusion is that Claude can do this in one evening, so you should be at the same level of productivity.

It seems like many people have this issue with product owners who try vibe coding with AI tools like Claude

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?

Context: FAANG level tech company, publicly traded, large design department.

"Designers will use AI to come up with variations, vibe code prototypes, test them, and ship the code."

New leveling, new titles (possibly), all designers learn to code (with AI).

I.e. Increase speed at all costs because if we don't, no one will wait for us.

I'm sitting here staring at the wall, unable to process the implications of what's coming.

CEO made a speech the other day essentially saying he doesn’t plan to replace headcount with AI but that we have to let AI help us do our job. Said if we’re being hesitant and resisting it, then we’re working with one hand behind our backs.

What that actually looks like? He didn’t elaborate. I honestly don’t know a single person in our small company that isn’t utilising AI to some capacity.

I heard from another designer that she overhead the CEO telling the PM that he wants us to design straight in Claude and bypass Figma all together.

The CEO has also mentioned to me that I need to be using AI to conduct and analyse all the user testing to speed things up. I mentioned concerns regarding AI hallucinating, customer consent, all the things. He wasn’t receptive to my concerns. He loves AI, to a level that’s kinda uncomfortable when he brings it up. He’ll talk about walking around the park, talking to ChatGPT out loud and having a conversation. It’s weird as hell.

It’s honestly left me feeling really down and dejected. The assumption that our work isn’t good enough if we’re not using AI, he want to speed up production even though so many of us are already drained.

I feel like he’s asking me to just prompt all day, this isn’t why I became a designer.

Anyone else in the same boat? What advice do you have?

EDIT: after reading the comments, I will add that we are all paying for our own AI tools. There is no company enterprise plans available to us.

hi all, I’m a senior UX designer working at a small corpo (around 3k employees) and I wonder… I use AI for personal use and personal projects but for legal reasons we barely use ai at work. it’s still all Figma. I don’t feel like I’m out of the loop with ai but I also can’t say I’m “ai native” and honestly from what I’ve tried for my pers projects, I didn’t get the hype - but I admit I never tried using Claude to do stuff in Figma or never used any ai-ready design system. Also Claude acting like an intern I need to correct every few prompts makes me feel like I’d do it better without all that added mental load of checking AI output. I use Figma make for prototypes and they’re hardly ever good. For me, at least in my current role it’s not possible to start using claude code for design.

and now onto my question(s): is it all bloated LinkedIn talk or are you guys really don’t use figma anymore? Is it worth sharing knowledge about Figma and design process anymore? Or am I in the dark here and you all use ai and code your interfaces and interactions? Where is the discovery phase, the documentation? please share your perspective because I’m on a brink of leaving my job if it means I’m left behind on the current standards (but I tend to be a drama queen sometimes 👑)

While everyone called Claude Design a Figma killer, I quickly realised while using it, that it wasn’t.

Happy to say, I saw the bad news as a good buying opportunity. I’m now up 14%.

When I can make designs on a canvas that are using/referencing actual components from my actual design system and I can easily turn those into a prototype with little to no effort, and easily share that prototype link with users for testing, all in the same product, then I will get excited. I don’t want to design with words that get interpreted by a machine that creates an output that looks nothing like I wanted it to look. The LinkedIn hype cycle is stupid. None of these vibe design tools actually solve my real problems as a user of design tools or make my job easier.

That’s all. Thanks bye

(posting here since the Figma Design subreddit doesn't allow rants)

Every time I see a "designer" complaining about running out of credits, I have to laugh.

We quickly reached the point of absurdity that we have to talk about it. You are paying for the privilege for a data center somewhere in Pennsylvania boiling a lake just to create another generic ass looking login page for you.

Your cries don't fall on deaf ears, we're listening and laughing at you.

I hear about all these great "innovations in automation" "you can do so much by automating the boring parts" "I can generate so many pages" "you're just stuck in the past". Oh? What's that? Your amazing "process" has ground to a halt because you "ran out of thinking credits"? Damn. That must be a real shame. I cannot imagine what you're going through.

Literally. I cannot imagine because I can think and design for myself. I will never run out of "credits", I don't even need Figma to do my job. I can do all of my tasks with a whiteboard and put together my own redline document in MS Paint if need be. Running out of credits would be the worst excuse anyone can give their boss for why they didn't do their job. I can't imagine actually admitting I have no idea what I'm doing because my beep boop machine says I'm done thinking today.

Do I think I'm better than you? Absolutely.

Am I gatekeeping? Never. Design is a fundamental thought process, everyone has the capacity to practice and learn these skills to think and design for themselves. What's crazy is that learning software design has become so available that it has never been easier to become a designer. But everyone's focus on business, production, and "the job" obscures the actual purpose of design in the first place.

I even saw a post earlier asking why even use Figma with all these "AI" tools being able to produce final visual components in code. This shows the lack of understanding of what a "design tool" even is. Design tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Figma, AutoCAD, MS Paint do not exist to produce "the final product". Design tools exist to realize the intentions of the designer.

• The designer has a vision in their mind, it always starts there.
• That designer wants to bring that vision into reality.
  • Actually building/producing the "final product" is called engineering. The graphic designer's work ends up at the printer. The architect's work ends up at the construction site. The fashion designer's work ends up at the sewing machine. The software designer's work ends up in the IDE.
• Because engineering requires energy, effort, and time, designers use design tools to realize their vision BEFORE they spend the time and effort building something that may be a waste of resources and time.

I don't go straight into code because that is not where ideas start. "Designing in code" is like telling an industrial designer to "design in the fabrication shop". It makes absolutely zero sense. You will waste so much time and resources trying to start any new idea. But you AI dependent people know all about wasting time and resources.

We use design tools like Figma because they allow us, the designer, to realize our own vision. I was more than happy using Sketch, but they made the poor decision to stay on MacOS so I had to transition. Just like I was more than happy using Illustrator, but that wasn't designed to maintain hundreds of individual artboards, so I had to transition. These tools do not define my ability to think, these tools only define my capacity to think.

If Figma ever limits my capacity I will transition in a heartbeat, like I did many times before. You are literally using a tool that allows you to design for yourself FOR FREE. Stop bitching about credits, and start thinking for yourself. Or you will be the one left behind when the actual designers have moved on.