Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
samhenri.gold
samhenri.gold
Then I looked at the usage and it said I had used 95% of my Claude design usage for the week!
This isn't a real tool. This is a plaything, if that's what they're providing as examples.
It's a wrapper around that. I definitely appreciate the better design output from Claude code but it has a ways to go before it can replace serious design contenders.
I was quite happy with what I pulled off using the first design system: I wanted a new footer section for my IPAAS startup, it generated four options, the fourth of which was quite good. We iterated on it for a bit, then I pulled it into Claude Code (that integrated feature is very cool), CC built it, I deployed it, done. (Bottom section of https://tediware.com/ if you're interested, the bit with "Origin story" on the left and the signup panel on the right).
It was not a complicated build by any means but I liked the concept it developed and it was dead-easy to make it all happen. I think the ideas in the UI are very good. Still rough, but you can see where this could go, and it's got a ton of potential.
Granted, not every component on every surface will need this amount of scrutiny. But I'm usually the outlier developer warning teammates that design is not a solved problem. Granted, there's a huge difference between an existing app and its evolution and throwing a nextjs landing page up in search of any life.
"make things pretty" would be a graphic designer or artist. Are you saying the entire arm of Product design is a made up value?
So you can take bootstrap (or even raw html) and create something useful. Then you make it nice, not the other way around.
You would have to be a big outlier to feel the need to create a custom widget. Most widgets have been defined since decades.
But i don't think that's what tailwind and bootstrap are doing. But people very much use these tools to "solve design".
The layouts, widgets, and primitives in these tools are not primitives. I can't deny they get tons of people very far very fast. But my main disagreement is that all of this isn't design and it's not what designers do. You touched on what i agree with: UX flows, diagrams, stories, journeys, personas, etc, these all need to be designed and connected in reality using various primitives for the medium.
Then you slap a cohesive paint job on it, interaction elements, tone and terminology and yes, there is that element of design too.
Design with a capital D is a completely different realm than whatever you’re talking about. Not even in the same ballpark.
The fact that you are using this language tells me you are probably more advanced than the average individual, and likely have higher expectations.
My sister-in-law has a small apparel company. She’s developed quite a bit of skill over the past six years but she really struggled at the start. She had great ideas, but translating them to something she could apply was frustrating. *Anything* that could have helped her there would have been worth a look.
I am terrible at frontend, but I’m a decent engineer, and I needed to do frontend with AI a few weeks ago. The first thing I did is figure out how other people manage this; apparently there’s a whole design system made of atoms, molecules and organisms that works well.
I asked Claude about this, set up a workflow together, and now I have a design system markdown, maintaining the design standards using the atoms etc vocabulary, and it works really well.
If I can pick this up in a few days, most people that are serious about design are able to as well.
• Claude Design uses Opus 4.7, which is more expensive than earlier models.
• It's just Day 2; it's not a finished product. It's ridiculous how quickly Anthropic iterates.
• If you've been using Claude for a while, Design already knows your style and preferences. You'd have to start from scratch using a different AI design tool. I don’t doubt that'll pay dividends in the long run.
We don't know that for sure—they've dropped prices before:
1. Claude 3 → Claude 3.5/3.7 generation (mid-2024 to early 2025): Haiku went from $0.25/$1.25 to $0.80/$4.00 per MTok — this was actually a price increase for Haiku, but Sonnet stayed flat at $3/$15 while delivering significantly better performance, effectively a price-per-capability reduction.
2. Claude 3/4 Opus → Claude Opus 4.5/4.6 (late 2025): This was the big one. Opus dropped from $15/$75 per MTok down to $5/$25 per MTok — a 67% reduction on input and output. This is the most significant explicit price cut Anthropic has made, delivering a far more capable model at one-third the price.
BTW, Github Copilot is pricing Opus 4.7 at 2.5x the cost of Opus 4.6 at promotional pricing (so maybe it'll be 4-5x). But Github's request based pricing is insane, completely divorced from their actual costs (you can achieve 1+M tokens for $0.10 if you give it a large request), so I'd assume they're losing a lot of money.
The cost of a thing, is relative to its source costs. They are subsidizing API pricing, if you consider all the costs to provide the service, including all model creation, training, etc costs.
But that doesn't mean they will be more expensive, longer term. The cost of compute will go down as time goes on. Each year it will get cheaper. Same for power requirements, computing density, cooling, and so on.
I remember trying to store and play mp3 files on older computers. I could typically hold a few on a disk, and if I wasn't doing anything else I could play one. Barely. Now you'll be hard pressed to play an mp3 and see the load results in top or what not.
The same will be true of AI in 20 years.
Everyone can do baremetal at home and run on it, or VMs, containers. Many don't.
However, you'll still want the best model and toolset. So there is some place for them to pivot to. Something for them to sell or licence.
It will be interesting to see where the all lands, a decade from now. Who will be left?
If you need LLMs at scale to serve many customers, then hosted solutions make sense for the availability aspect. But by this point models can be offered by any generic services provider, like AWS or Cloudflare. Pure AI companies that just offer hosted models and nothing else will go extinct if they don’t expand to offer more services.
LLMs a couple of years ago that'd be impossible to run on consumer hardware are now running on consumer hardware. I'm less concerned about compute power; it's more about memory.
It could be several years before new RAM capacity comes online. Even then, it won't be cheap.
I expect in the future, hosted frontier models will be a utility like electricity or cable tv. Part of a package most people will subscribe to.
I want robust local LLMs as much as the next person—Gemma E2B, 3.2GB does my word completions as I type. It's gotten to the point where it knows what I'm going to type before I do!
But I don't see Anthropic going out of business anytime soon. As good as some of the open source LLMs are, we’re still a long way from being able to frontier models at home.
AI is very emotional for a lot of people leading to bias takes in both directions. We like to think HN is more rational than average, but we’re all human.
And then I was scrolling Twitter, and saw someone else post their own "success story" and the design was nearly identical to the mock up Claude Design made for me. Lol. The homogenization problem will continue to plague tools like these to some degree, much in the same way AI generated text or code or imagery has a sort of homogenous tone or feel to it.
We used to have everything having personality but being consistent as far as UX goes.
Now everything looks like tax forms and the UX is all over the place.
Sometimes, I'll manage to find the brand with the new colours and logo. But often even then, I can't find the specific product from that brand. They've changed it so much I can't tell which version I picked before. Which makes me look for something more like what I used to have.
Good job "standing out" guys. I'd say literally maybe 1/3 of the time, I've just literally lost products. I don't know the name, just how it looks.
Whenever I said “this is a website, not an app” I would get confused looks from designers.
UX people fight some of the BS, but “looking pretty” usually wins over “being useful”.
If older software was more consistent, it's only because the OS didn't provide nearly the same degree of customization options that HTML and CSS provide developers today. Not because of some pride in consistency.
Still, to me, good design is intuitive. I look at the thing, and I know how to use it. If it looks great and distinctive, even better. But most outlandishly distinctive design I've (consciously?) found is terrible.
Obviously, these short sentences hide a lot:
- To know how to use things, I must have prior experience. But different users have different prior experiences and acquired design patterns (i.e. interaction patterns)
- My knowledge of the domain is also different from that of other users.
- The way I interact with the system is affected by many factors (e.g. accessibility related concerns, zoom, etc.)
- Intuition is not magic. It comes after training as well. Good design is discoverable. Extraordinary design reinforces its own patterns seamlessly, so that I learn it without even knowing I'm learning (see: hidden tutorials in game design). I also include here the incredible attributes of good design that far predate computer-related design (e.g. how an icon should be recognizable just by its silhouette, or how apps "invisibly" teach us what each color or even section of the screen means).
- My incentive to learn (sometimes "tolerate") the design depends on many variables. Some of these include the design's "taste", yes. Others depend on how much my boss/client is paying me to "use this shit".
I wouldn't say I want a world where everything looks the same, but I certainly want one where everything works the same, and some geniuses once in a while add something new to my list of known (and loved) design patterns. I am not anti-design-experiments, but I will take a predictable UI that looks like windows 98 everyday over some "distinctive" shit that breaks all manner of expected behaviors (from keyboard shortcuts, to colors, to button placement, to relative sizing, to........)
If it's an interface and not an art object, then the design is secondary to the function of said interface.
Good hammer is a good hammer, not a "distinctive" hammer.
Someone IS designing all this, they just aren't optimizing for what you wish they were.
If I’m slamming the brake pedal in a car, I want consistency.
Too much software in the latter thinks it’s part of the former.
I mean, really difficult.
Coming up with a design that relies exclusively on platform standards is easy, “low-hanging fruit.”
I write stuff for iOS/MacOS/WatchOS. There’s tremendous pressure to follow platform standards. In fact, if you use SwiftUI, it’s very hard to deviate from them. SwiftUI makes it easy (crazy easy) to follow the herd, and downright miserable, if you want to blaze your own trail.
90% of the time, that’s actually a good thing. I get pretty sick of designers that refuse to compromise, and believe that their graphic opus is more important than usable UI. It’s even worse, if the designer is an engineer, with little background in graphic design.
A designer that knows how to compromise, and work with usability, is a unicorn. If you have one, keep them.
Like the code that LLMs produce, I expect the designs to be fairly low-effort, but that will be a good thing, overall. They will be effective and usable. We need more of that.
Anthropic has managed to figure out a lot of reading in between the lines.
I'm not sure how this will be any different.
Building the same design system component in code versus in Figma is going to be slightly more succinct in code; Figma’s primitives don’t have the sort of conditionals and control flow that code has. But code is much less malleable than drawing on a screen, and creative freedom is harder to achieve in code.
UI can fix the gap where code feels less malleable than Figma, but complexity comes largely from the worlds that humans create, and humans apparently want to create 8 modes for 4 products and 2 light/dark modes. If you want the same setup in Claude, it’ll be a little easier to maintain, but not much less complex.
with a pelican on it
Figma is answering a different question which is "are you prepared to spend time and money on full time designers to have pixel perfect layouts agreed with managers and consistent across platforms" and non-AI tooling has been orders of magnitude faster and cheaper at generating something that looks good enough as end results rather than mockups since before it existed.
This one seems pretty decent?
* https://github.com/2GT-Media-Group-LLC/mikrotik-manager
It was recently Vibe coded by an IT savvy non-dev (or non-traditional-dev anyway ;> ):
* https://www.youtube.com/live/qhZ5q6tlwq0?si=tAtmb04_WwhyaGkn...
Note - If you want to try it out DO NOT deploy it on a hostile network. ie the public facing internet
So tools like Figma is nice in that regards as it's simpler to iterate on (From simple to hardest: Sketch on whiteboard|paper, Wireframe tools like Balsimiq, Figma|Sketch, css code) because it's pure fiddling with various properties. Figma has direct feedback while the code may require a compilation phase.
Different fields.
It's says something about the way things are now that we no longer go straight to building the digital interface, but instead make a fake digital interface first.
Perhaps because I have a similar bio to yours, I am allergic to this view.
But yes, the "design to code" gap has always been where designers' intentions were butchered and/or where frontend developers would discover/have to deal with designs that didn't take into account that some strings need more space, or what to do when there are more or less elements in a component, how things should scroll in real life, how things should react to a variety of screen sizes, etc.
this short meme video is funny/not funny because it hits too close to home - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/r6JXc4zfWw4 - but yes, "designers don't code and developers don't design", roughly speaking
and then of course you meet some people who do both really well... but they are pretty rare. :-)
You mean Fireworks. Photoshop was for graphic design. Web designers used Adobe Fireworks. Figma is a successor to Fireworks, not Photoshop.
As someone who has done front-end development for both web and mobile devices for a very long time in the pre-Figma days I was handed a lot more designs that were mocked up in Photoshop than Fireworks.
Everyone used whatever they were familiar with regardless of the purpose of the application.
I like that HN’s design is timeless. It’s a shame people usually ignore it, or are critical of it.
It's timeless in that it was never good to begin with, it is just actively malicious now for anyone using it from a touch interface.
True but it shows that good design doesn't matter.
Also: Craigslist, Reddit, LinkedIn...the list goes on.
I don't believe that people who can design and code are as rare as folks seem to believe, either. What seems more likely is that there are a LOT of coders who are extremely fluent in CSS but aren't particularly gifted when it comes to making things look good.
It wasn't that long ago that designers understood that they couldn't just hand off a 2D comp of what they want to see. The job isn't done until the output can be integrated into the app. Nobody gets to launch cows over the wall and go for lunch.
It's kind of horrible, but I guess it's better than previous alternatives. But, it's not better than a tool that works with code directly and mostly automates away the tedium or translating a visual design into code. I haven't tried Claude Design, but I know I don't find Figma enjoyable (but I'm not much of a designer...I'm more comfortable with code than with pages and pages of options in a GUI).
> Figma accidentally excluded themselves from the training data that would have made them relevant in the agentic era.
Their binary format is so much of a "let's reinvent everything" which I think come from the fact it's a tool you can use for web design, android app design, ios design and anything-you-want design that it became a jack of all trade and so mapping it to web is not a perfect 1:1 translation.
And for being useful to agent, any people who got to implement the figma from a UX guy know that even human can't know truly the intent of most figma design, so how a LLM could ? Common source of question that even the UX guy has no answer for:
1. Ok this button looks great, but in German how will it look ?
2. Oh and actually this button does not look great when i put in CSS, it wraps on two line, you cheated again with the letter spacing, did you ?
3. How does it look on a phone that is not an iphone ?
4. You know that doing a border with a gradien is not possible in CSS, so what should i put ?
5. How does it look on a 4k screen ?
6. etc.
So I can't wait for these tools that are html behind to catch up, even more if we can have the prompt with it. (As a developer I never got to see the prompt the product manager made to the UX guy)
I was wondering if PenPot (https://penpot.app) might be sitting pretty in this new agentic era, considering that they took the direction of designs being actual markup, unlike the canvas approach in fig - if that’s even something that interests them.
This article is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the design space, and figma as a company.
Just a few of my thoughts:
- Figma was always about building a successful company over a successful product. Figma started with a much more ambitious aspiration, and had the ability to deliver through talent like Evan Wallace. A lot of it started with showing how capable webgl was in the browser. And yet, a lot of things like 3d features don't exist because they had the awareness to really hone in and focus on building a specific thing that made them money because everybody in the company ended up with an expensive seat price.
- Seriously, Figma is a company that's about design tool second, and about getting a product that businesses use first. To that end, it's already succeeded through the IPO, subsequently, who knows what the market is going to look like. Figma having a war chest is in many ways much better than having a technically impressive demo that might evaporate.
- People at Figma, 100%, know everything in this article. And not just figma people, like anybody and everybody that's tried to build a design tool has had these thoughts. It's very obvious that ui/ux is the interesection of design/dev/pm. It's also very obvious that it should stick close to the source of truth, to something like code. - The problem is, that it's almost underselling it to say that it's MASSIVE challenge to execute on these ideas because of how easily it bleeds into building not just a design tool, but a coding, data management, architecture, etc. tool
- I could talk at length about all the challenges and potential solutions, but that's neither here nor there.
- On AI, I guess other people's guess is as good as mine, but my gut feeling is that while data is important, SOTA AI is generalist enough that the base models, the thinking they're able to do, is better than having a lot of custom data. Especially because ui design is front-facing - you can just scour the web in contrast to private financial documents, or legal documents for example.
But the fundamental problem is that it’s hard to get a design system right long-term, especially because it’s so intertwined with your code and whatever component library you use, which is a layer your designer will never touch. I don’t really see Claude Design fixing the fundamental Storybook hell of designing reusable and pretty components and layouts, but I don’t see Figma or any other tool solving it either.
What’s the solution? It feels like something that needs to be fixed more deeply at the component level.
Maybe you could make it work if everyone agrees on a base set of headless components to use, but we seem to be moving in the opposite direction with things like ShadCN.
FWIW Claude Code is decent at scaffolding those out if you have a good set of examples for it to work from.
But the argument is that is unneeded as we move forward as making changes and extracting things and such becomes basically "free". I'm not so convinced, but I do see the argument.
Claude Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806725 - April 2026 (732 comments)
Or maybe because you could just send a Figma link to anyone in your org and it opened in the browser vs having to tell them to download some Mac app and open a specific file that will get outdated over time.
We've got an LLM using CSS and emojis and maybe pelicans riding bikes (SVGs).
I'm actually glad they're focusing on code, and code adjacent tooling only.
But I think it's part of a larger mistake Figma is making: they seem to have shifted to an extraction mindset too early, assuming they'd captured the market, right when the ground beneath them is starting to shift.
It's most visible in their pricing model evolution, which is now explicitly anti-collaboration. Figma used to be the obvious default because you could quickly share files with non-designers, so they could view and make small edits without fuss. Now that requires a paid "seat", along with a confusing mess of permission flows.
It's platform wide too. I taught a college design class recently, and had students sign up for Figma because it seemed archaic not to teach them to use it. Instead of just giving any ".edu" address a free account (like they used to) students are forced through a 3rd-party process of uploading transcripts to prove education status. A few of my students got rejected or ran into confusing errors, and never got access… Now I have to re-evaluate whether its worth using when teaching the class again. (And this is for a population with near-zero short-term purchasing power, but huge potential long-term value… why add barriers?)
This is such a weird self-inflicted wound for a collaboration platform to make. The big tools that won on collaboration (eg. Google Docs, GitHub) have understood that low-friction sharing is critical to becoming the default choice. And that being the default is a flywheel that drives adoption, both in users and in tooling.
It makes more sense if you see it through the lens of Figma trying to juice short-term numbers for their IPO. But it's sad to see because it had so much long-term potential.
Google docs is a heavily subsidized product and not representative.
Also tool pricing seems hard, but I can’t really get behind saying that a company should bait and switch with their pricing models harder.
It seems like a really weird point to make, when you could just as easily argue that Figma giving their services for free to students is a gift that levels the playing field, by allowing students without means to gain experience with industry standard tools they might not have been exposed to otherwise.
It’s not zero-sum.
No. The key difference being transparency. You know when signing up for a free trial what the actual long term costs will be and can plan for it.
We might be talking about different things. I was mostly replying to this line from the OP:
> But I think it's part of a larger mistake Figma is making: they seem to have shifted to an extraction mindset too early
I’m not sure if this was just awkward wording that seems to condone these type of strategies.
All these loss leading, vendor lockin strategies have distorted markets heavily. Complex tools cost a lot of money to develop; and if another player is just going to burn piles of cash from elsewhere to undercut you, it becomes a game of capital allocation and not individual product quality/costs. It’s terrible for consumers and a big reason why even common chat apps are barely functional.
But I appreciate the reminder to not cede ground in wording, thanks.
Design systems live in Figma. Not going to be so easy to migrate and Enterprise customers are moving slowly.
I did not say anything of the sort.
"Designers" => "Design"
>Front-end, UX, design, and product have become one role.
Ok so, are your "designers" (now part of one role) not debugging react code? If they are then you mislabeled the question as leading to avoid discussing in good faith. If not, then you lied about the "one role" and it turns out that they haven't BECOME "one role".
This motte-and-bailey strategy is unproductive and disrespectful to the people you are addressing.
i.e. The OP doesn't need to answer yes to their question for OP's claim to be true, yet their question pretends otherwise. (non sequitur)
In response I suggest that the engineers using AI also lack code judgement (because they are not reading it either). I don't think questioning the AI use is the actual topic here, it is the shifting roles. Who says it's the designers that are taking the new meta-role? It's probably the FE's honestly.
The role shifting doesn't mean that it's the best path forward. I'm simply stating that it is happening.
Do you think it is reasonable to expect a person with an arts degree to know this?
Of course it is.
The only people who think your fucking college degree determines your knowledge level and ability are teenagers and people who are so deeply untalented that it’s the only way they feel qualified.
There are plenty of people with arts degrees who know this, and PLENTY of dogshit engineers with CS degrees who don’t
We've had a customer send us a prototype of what they wanted built with AI, and they don't have a college degree in anything. It followed our codebase patterns without any prompting, included tests, and all we had to do was wire up the backend.
Worth noting that you've slipped from "checking whether something works is easy" to "well, it's probably not as harmful as a very notable failure if it fucks up."
The bar lowers so quickly.
I want to be wrong because I'm watching the death of my entire career, but everything I've seen is pointing to this as an inevitability. We are shipping better and more secure code, and doing it easily twice as fast. Many development teams can be cut in half today with no reduction in output. I don't want to say it out loud at work yet, but we're actually producing too much.
Teaching programming is a bit of mostly solved problem, today anyway.
Is that bad? Not to anyone who has managed dev teams and is familiar with the incredibly tortuous and painful business of trying to corral a bunch of humans with varying skill and enthusiasm levels to create software. We have tied ourselves in knots with things like Agile just trying to work around the fact that software development is so slow and arduous.
Many times back in the waterfall days I have written up design documents to kick off dev teams on multi-week or month projects. Now I could feed those into Claude Code and get results in days. This stuff is exciting beyond belief in just getting shit done.
This is a golden era for any established company with an existing customer base. My question to them would be "with Claude Code, why aren't you carving through that massive backlog of feature requests that has been building up over the years?".
A lot of people seem to look at this as job threatening, and it surely is for junior devs. But for companies that already have a strong senior talent bench, it's time to raise the ambition levels and ask not how many jobs can be shed, but instead just how fast and hard can we go now we have these new superpowers.
It's a golden era for business, but the industry will employ many fewer people.
Every one of those transitions has resulted in more programmers - though not necessarily the same programmers.
I think we're about to cycle back to "custom code" except now it's for everyone, by AI - you don't need to find the to-do app of your dreams; you can code one for yourself in a fever-dream.
The era of "write Wolfenstein 3D in a few months and make millions" are gone, but they've been gone a long time already.
I've seen the "debugging" and "coding" that non-coding designers are attempting to vibe-code. 90% industry is definitely toast, but not the 90% you're thinking of. Most industry is going the way of Microsoft that cannot even display a start menu in under a second
It's like a masterpiece painted by an artist with their nose 5 inches from the canvas at all times.
So a fashion designer can mass produce clothing? So an interior designer can build a house?
This designer should has never held.
For example designers and developers both use the computer as their primary medium of working. Their outputs resemble each other very closely, despite having a different underlying form.
Contrast that to the interior designer building a house, well those are different mediums. There is no efficiency gain from the interior designer designing the plan and also implementing it. Where as with a designer working in code there is one.
Fashion designers do indeed make clothing by hand, it's a very important part of their craft. This example disproves your stance.
That’s not what I said. There’s the problem. I said mass produce.
What Figma achieved technically in the 2010s was amazing. Coded the app in C++ and then used WASM to deliver it as a multiplayer web app.
But now it's trying to be too many things. Why did they ever feel the need to add slides and this other stuff.
Their MCP is poor (sure, they'll improve it).
The app struggles with larger files and performance is sloppy.
And don't get me started trying to design data grid heavy apps.
And they could easily follow Adobe's lead. Enshittify and lock you out of your account whenever they feel it's necessary (remember what happened with Venezuelan Adobe users a few years ago?)
Either Penpot gets their act together and will become the opensource design canvas for open-weight AI models or we will see another open source solution that will fill this space.
You can go that route with Affinity Designer [1], owned by Canva, who partnered with Anthropic on Claude Design [2]:
We’ve loved collaborating with Anthropic over the past couple of years and share a deep focus on making complex things simple. At Canva, our mission has always been to empower the world to design, and that means bringing Canva to wherever ideas begin. We’re excited to build on our collaboration with Claude, making it seamless for people to bring ideas and drafts from Claude Design into Canva, where they instantly become fully editable and collaborative designs ready to refine, share, and publish.
[1]: https://www.affinity.studio
[2]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-design-anthropic-labs
After Canva bought Affinity, you now have to authenticate with your email from time to time when you launch the desktop app. Annoying and why do they do that?
Might go back to Affinity 2.
Sure, but they stopped updating Affinity 2; at some point, it's going to stop working unless you never upgrade your operating system.
It turns out there’s no way to use Math in variables built in to the product. The most common plugin is 99 dollars. To add what is obviously mustache JS. To browser based software. It’s not good.
Figma is a work tool only and I'm disappointed by its MCP tooling which feels late and behind where it should be, I just feel forced to use Figma Make which stays in their walled garden without practical utility and connections to my actual codebases
[0] https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-des...
[1] https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/
[2] https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/how-figmas-multiplayer-tech...
Fireworks, Sketch, XD, Axure, etc all had these (or most of them) in some form before Figma even existed. Even illustrator, photoshop, etc have had the applicable ones for decades.
I have a complicated nextjs webapp, and I havent had to write front end code in six-nine months now.
Bringing a Figma killer to the market is converting a conventional software sector into an AI one. So it's more disruptive.
What a counterproductive way to end an otherwise good set of points. Gives the appearance of bitterness and a desire for vengeance.
I suppose that a layout engine made sense in the context of Flash, and you saw the future of the web as a set of keyframe animations. But the notion that there's a lot of value in creating a very heavy, high-friction abstraction between the UI/UX and the platform it ultimately runs on was always going to be a loser.
In the end, it turns out we're all just web developers, regardless of your weapon of choice.
And here I am with Claude Code... That so far generated a 2000-line CSS file for a 7000-line app consisting of literally three web pages [1]. Where almost every single color, component, class and style is duplicated at least two times. Where custom classes are fighting with Tailwind classes (yes, there's also Tailwind ON TOP of custom CSS) that are fighting with inline hardcoded style= declarations.
Figma is definitely going to suffer the vibe-coded design slop-app from Anthropic.
[1] 7k lines are almost justified for the functionality in them, and I tried to keep an eye on the code. It's harder to keep an eye on CSS
What?