While it has a strong potential to let people iterate on using a design without the nuts and bolts of going back and forth with a designer, CD operates at the "leaf-node" level, where the output is generated.

However, a lot of design has a deeper life-cycle than that. There's the collaboration, pitching, review, iteration, asset management, etc.

In fact, the first step for using CD is "onboarding", where it sucks up a design system from your existing assets/resources. It presumes you already have a design.

As it stands now, CD is one way... existing design -> task specific resources. This could be very useful, but only touches on a part of what a complete design tool does. But for iteration it's not so great. E.g. task specific concerns don't have a way to feed back to the originating design. Changes to the originating design don't have a direct path to feed back to the task specific output (e.g., when a logo or branding focus changes, or maybe just spacing guidelines are updated, the ad hoc processes around CD will have to be repeated if the changes are to actually land.)

I'd think AI design integrated with Figma is in a much better position to address these more complicated scenarios.

I doubt Claude Design even cares about these deeper scenarios, BTW -- it's intended as a leaf-node tool. Just pointing out it's not about to replace Figma or other more comprehensive design tools.

The reaction that designers I know have given Claude Design couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for designers, their workflow is very different from software devs. You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs.

People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate.

Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers.

Figma will probably better integrate AI in their own offering at some point which will help designers become more productive. And that will be the end of it.

I don't think this is correct. In my experience no one buys Figma because of Dev Mode only. Dev Mode just makes it easier/faster to go from an existing design to working code. So it is/was a means to increase Figma's moat, not to get new customers or users. (Devs already needed access to Figma before the introduction of Dev Mode.)

And wait it gets even worse!

Why?

- Figma is sending Anthropic a bunch of training data from its own LLM assisted data. As much as Anthropic claims that it won’t use it, we all know what Amazon did with third party sellers.

- Anthropic hasn’t started to play hardball yet. Why wouldn’t they just hold back a model like Mythos (or better) while they use it to gut a few SaaS companies? It’s an easy way to increase their revenue!

I didn't want yet another lovable.dev or v0 with figma make, I wanted the prompt -> figma design which I could iterate on by hand once I got something in place (and also faster route to creating the prototype in figma) to play with the UX of it.

At the same time I have the feeling Claude Design is more useful to get UI context closer to Code Claude then anything (and eventually some quick prototyping), but I might be wrong.

Either way, I've been trying to upload a 95MB .fig file and I get a generic error message without any information on the issue itself (is the file too big? not the right format? Tell me!)

Would Figma in Adobe be a stronger competitor against Claude Design today than Figma and Adobe can be separately?

I'm not sure how much of that is overhyping Claude, or Google's poor marketing of their own products.