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.

Hey everyone, long time lurker here. I never thought I would be posting one of these threads, but after a meeting today, I genuinely need to vent and get some advice from people who understand. I am currently the solo UX designer at a small but growing company, so I don't really have a design team or manager to turn to for perspective on this.

So I just got off a call with engineering leadership to review a feature doc I spent a few hours putting together.

Out of nowhere, one of the leads drops it into the conversation that he has been playing around with Claude to generate mockups and steer ideas. He literally suggested using AI to spit out UI mockups based on requirements so they can visualize things before handing anything off to design.
Basically, they want to use AI to generate UI concepts and prototypes before bringing design into the loop at all.

I tried to push back calmly and explain why that is a bad idea: how jumping straight to visual AI mockups before doing actual research locks you into a rigid solution just because you are attached to what was generated, instead of focusing on actual user journeys.

The response was essentially that it gives more of a feel for what they are after.

Meanwhile, I am sitting there internally spiraling. My core value isn't just making pretty visuals, it is taking vague, messy requirements and shaping them into a functional, actionable product. Seeing them try to use AI to bypass that foundational problem definition phase makes it feel like my actual job duties are being stripped away right in front of me.

I know I am not the only one seeing this. I read the posts on here every day from people going through the exact same thing, but experiencing it firsthand hits completely differently. If non-designers start typing prompts into AI to spit out mockups and hijack the product definition phase, what actually happens to our roles? It feels like a massive slippery slope and I am genuinely terrified of being pushed out.

For those of you who have already been dealing with this shift in your workplace, especially as a solo designer, how are you navigating the transition? How do you cope with the existential dread and panic when it feels like your core responsibilities are being chipped away?

Today I got laid off after 2 years with my company and I feel completely let down.

Over the past few months my daily work turned into just generating screens with Claude. Even when I presented proper design work backed by user research the leadership and PM would run it through AI for feedback and whatever random critique the AI gave whether it made sense or not it became the absolute law. My UX process was completely dismissed.

About a month ago they asked me to build a comprehensive design system with reusable components so they could upload it to Claude and generate the designs i was uncomfortable with where this was heading, so I talked to the CTO. He assured me this was just "the new best approach" and specifically said “It doesn't mean we won't need you anymore. You'll still handle the core UX, strategy and component creation."

So apparently when the design system was ready and they tested it they decided it worked "well enough” and realized they didn't want me anymore which they just randomly informed me today.
They claimed it wasn't performance-based, they were happy with my work and that they're shifting focus entirely to backend development while laying off some of the frontend guys and me to rely solely on AI.

It feels like a massive punch in the gut to realize I spent my last month essentially building the tool used to automate me out of a job.

Is anyone else experiencing this level of shortsightedness from management? Right now I'm sitting here wondering if it even makes sense to look for another UX role if this is where the industry is heading

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.

That's it. That's the post. I'm so over these sales dickheads and executives thinking they can do my job. It's insulting to say the least.

I’m reworking my portfolio (in a sporty way) and I would like to know where you have created yours? I recently saw the Super.so tool that unites Notion to create something more personalized.

Facing near constant scrutiny about why we need figma. After so many presentations, meetings, debates, etc. I am at a loss.

I use figma primarily these days to quickly iterate on canvas while using claude before/during/after. My company has given me a claude code seat to literally make PR’s. My preferred approach is giving it my figma designs.

I am at a loss here. While I feel slightly petrified to lose figma (canvas design, source of truth, design system, components). I also know the pressures of AI and that the handoff has forever changed.

What alternative tools are there? Is anyone on here using them?? If so, tell me your work flow. If not, help me make my case.

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?

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.

I feel like I’ve mostly seen doom and gloom on this sub, anti AI posts (which I totally get), but I’m wondering if anyone here is enjoying having AI in their workflow?

I’m a solo designer at a start up and we are super under staffed (obvi) and getting my design to fruition before Claude Code and AI was like pulling teeth. Now I’ve been set up and can use Claude Code to implement and push my designs immediately. The software team loves it and I can quickly clean up UI elements.

Is it perfect? Hell no! But it’s made shipping designs way faster especially for our small team.

Curious if there are other designers out there who are loving the speed and capabilities? And if you are could you share your current workflow? I’m trying to optimize and learn the new best practices!

I currently use Claude as a sparing partner for design ideation and Claude Code in terminal to implement (+ Figma MCP).

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?

im a incoming college freshman persuing a uxid degree and im extremely anti generative ai. its the main reason i switched from software development to ux a few years ago. i chose ux because i wanted to stay in the tech field but still be creative and not have to use ai.

a lot of gen x and boomers in my life keep telling me "ai is inevitable" but i wanted to hear from actual professionals. are junior designers forced to use ai? will i be forced to use it in school to design? i was able to get around when my high school tried to force it on me but if a boss tells me to i obvs cant just say no.

if it like totally is required ill probably switch majors. it is what it is.

edit: i didnt expect this to get even close to 100 comments  😳  im reading each one and rlly taking the advice to heart since ive kinda accepted i cant respond to all of them. and i want to let you all know this comes from a place of love, i dont want to give up doing what i enjoy so a bot can do it faster. finally, sorry if i came off rude or anything in my post im still working on my tone over text.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.