> Anthropic themselves launched Claude Design which is a pretty direct competitor to Figma in many ways. While it's nowhere near functional and polished enough to replace Figma's core design product, I expect it will get significant traction outside of that
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.
> 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.
Haha, that's exactly how cc was received initially. It's just autocomplete. It's useless. It can't even x. I tried to y and it gave me z. Over and over all over the internet this was the reaction. Then the bargaining began. Oh, it will maybe speed up some simple things. Like autocomplete on steroids. Maaaybe do some junior tasks once in a while. And so on...
Agreed - For the last 20 years or so, designers at basecamp.com do all of their frontend design directly in rails/html/css and then have the developers "re-implement it". The upside of this approach is designs which really work in the browser and they found it to be faster. The downside of this approach is that it's harder to find designers who have both of those skills, but that was an acceptable tradeoff for them because they are a smaller run company.
To me, it seems obvious that AI will attack this from both directions - upskilling developers to make more design changes AND upskilling designers to make more design iterations and more changes to the codebase -- the design artifact is "new react components" (which can be re-implemented or not) instead of a figma design.
It's still an autocomplete on steroids (that's what LLMs are).
It still produces subpar code, with horrendous data access patterns, endless duplication of fucntionality etc. You still need a human in the loop to fix all the mistakes (unless you're Garry Tan or Steve Yegge who assume that quality is when you push hundreds of thousands of LoC per day).
Same here.
Oh, and Claude Code is significantly worse at generating design code than almost any other type of code.
> Haha, that's exactly how cc was received initially.
Haha, maybe by you. By many on HN, but HN is a bubble of its own. By plenty of others it was received very differently. Many of us had been doing agentic coding for more than a year already when Claude Code was released, because we found it valuable.
We will see if such groups of professional designers also form for Claude Design or other such tools.
I tried uploading our design system. Claude Design’s environment was so limited it had to reimplement it from scratch in HTML, JS and CSS. Doing that burned through more than half the token limit. Along the way it completely changed it and made up things that don’t fit in at all, neither visually or as code. The output of making a mockup is one huge HTML file with minified CSS that just can’t be used meaningfully for anything.
I guess I had expected something like Claude Code with visual tools added on top, but that’s not what this is.
As someone who does both development and design, I agree. With some caveats.
At this point, Claude now writes > 99% of my code. I wasn't an enthusiastic early adopter; it took me a while to be willing to let go of the reins. But in tandem with LLMs getting better, I also began to realize that what happens inside the code is very rarely important enough for me to care about. Like, I care that it's secure, and performant where it needs to be, etc. -- but mostly I just care about its outputs. If it does what I want it to do, then how it does this doesn't really matter to me or my clients or my users. On the development side, my attention has focused to writing specifications and monitoring the correctness of the test suite, and > 99% of the time that's good enough. It's been a lesson in non-attachment to let go of lovingly crafting every single line of code, but the tradeoff in terms of productivity has absolutely been worth it.
What makes this viable is the fact that there's essentially a "hidden layer" (the code) upon which Claude can operate. My clients don't actually care about the code, and within certain bounds (correctness, security, performance, extensibility, etc.) it turns out that neither do I. This gives Claude a lot of latitude to solve things in its own way, and I think that's a bit part of its effectiveness.
On the other hand, with design there is no hidden layer. Every single aspect of the design is visible to the user and the customer. So the design reflects upon my work in ways that code does not. This means that the conditions which allow me to relax my grip on coding just don't exist for design. It's very difficult for me to imagine delegating design in the same way that I've become comfortable delegating coding.
That said: I suspect that the use-case for Claude Design will be for applications which today receive very little design attention. There are loads of applications where design is less than an afterthought, and the product suffers terribly for it. Delegating to Claude, in those contexts, would likely be a very big win. But for applications which already have designers obsessing over every pixel, I see a very limited role for this. Figma's market is mostly the latter -- the former, by definition, is not part of the market for design tools -- so I don't see them being threatened by this for a long time.
> Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers.
There is a bunch of repetitive work in design as well, once you start working on larger projects. Yes, everything should be setup with components/reusability and what not, but just like programmers take shortcuts sometimes, so do designers, and you have to repeat the same change across many instances/files whenever you have to pay back the "technical debt".
Probably Claude Design could be quite helpful in those cases, and the same goes for other domains too, same happens in video editing and 3D work, probably any creative effort has moments of dull, repetitive "do this change across X" where any automation would be of serious help to reduce that. It seems like a quite good thing to try to address with LLM tooling, still driven by actual humans.
> Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers.
Quoting from the article, which of course you did not read:
>Looking at Figma's S1 (which is somewhat out of date by now, but is the only reported breakdown I can find) corroborates this potential weakness. Only 33% of Figma's userbase in Q1 2025 was designers, with developers making up 30% and other non-design roles making up 37%.
>A lot of Figma's continued expansion depended on this part of their userbase.
Plus, Figma uses Claude, so
>At this point Figma is effectively funding a competitor - and the more AI usage Figma has - the more money they send over to Anthropic for the tokens they use. Even worse, Sonnet 4.5 is miles behind what Anthropic uses on Claude Design (Opus 4.7, which has vastly improved vision capabilities)
> Quoting from the article, which of course you did not read
What makes you think that I didn’t read the article, but rather just disagree with it?
“which of course you did not read” is such a negative/toxic statement that adds no value.
obviously developers use the product to collaborate with designers. but it’s not the developers that are buying this product. they’re just stakeholders.
The developer seats are read-only, so they rely on designer seats existing to actually create files to inspect for development (and I’d guess PMs are using figma because designers are using figma).
If designers still want Figma then the other people are along for the ride (unless the idea is the designers are being replaced with a PM+Claude.)
A very large portion of the non-design users are using it to reference/implement the designs created by their designer colleagues. They’re not going anywhere.
Sure, if your design decisions are completely one-sided and transactional. In my experience, though, being able to comment and collaborate in Figma is important, as is being able to go find specific icons and components on my own.
> 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.
Maybe it will replace (a large share of) Figma users.
Yeah this is my take too.. I know a lot of front-end developers who pay for Figma and/or are not so invested in design that they need to do it all by hand.
They will gladly use something like this (many have already started experimenting with other similar products) to get them even 60% of the way there and then they can polish the rest in code...
Which is basically how they used Figma before. Visualize to close enough and then iterate to final in code.
If Claude Design can ingest your design system and previous examples and go further than templates and scaffolding, if it can help you brainstorm ideas and variations so you can - as the human in the loop - get to your final design faster..
There are many designers. I know a bunch who basically stopped using Figma altogether and just prototype what they're working on directly in code these days. For them, Claude Design was a very interesting addition.
People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate.
The entire workflow between designer --> dev hand off is going to change.
I think the most effective teams will be working within Claude, not within Figma.
For individual creators, this will definitely replace Figma. I bought Sketch for use as an individual creator because I wanted to create mocks before coding them. There's no way I'd make the same purchase today.
Anyways, I'm sure Claude Design will incorporate some of Figma's features such as a company wide design language.
Not sure Claude Design really competes with Figma.
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.
It's funny to see all of these dramatic articles coming out about Claude Design, when Google's Stitch[0] has been around for at least 6 months and no one has batted an eye. https://stitch.withgoogle.com/
I'm not sure how much of that is overhyping Claude, or Google's poor marketing of their own products.
On an iPhone, when I scroll down a bit to the templates and start pressing the right arrow to scroll through, the templates quickly shift off-center. Not a good look.
Anthropic today feels like 1990s Microsoft, when mere rumors that MS might enter yet another software vertical (publishing, CAD, 3D etc.) were enough to destroy the stock prices of current market leaders.
> A lot of their recent product development has been to enable further expansion in organisations - "Dev Mode" for developers (which now looks incredibly quaint against LLMs), […] all are about expanding their TAM out of "pure" design.
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.)
Only 33% of Figma's users are designers. 30% are devs, 37% are PMs and execs. That's their growth story and now their liability. The non-designers who made Figma huge are exactly who Claude Design and friends can peel off first.
While a big fan of Claude's models, I am starting to worry about the "winner takes all" game starting to play out in the open. With free inference to them (as pointed out in the article), why won't Anthropic build significantly more products related to software development, and kill all other competitors? Developers first, Designers next, would some kind of a clone of Jira / Monday / Asana be next?
Forget AI, Google/Microsoft/Amazon could all in theory have built a clone of Jira/Figma/<x> tool by now. But large companies lack the focus and commitment needed to build true competitors to these products, especially if it's not a big enough market to make a real difference to their bottom line.
Perhaps this will change soon if AI models reach the "army of geniuses in a datacenter" level, but current models are a far cry from just being able to clone Jira or Asana.
Now you’re starting to get why Anthropic/OpenAI aren’t worried about their margins. They can just clone a bunch of valuable existing software along the way and capture big pieces of those markets too.
All they have to do is hold back a super capable model like Mythos while using it to clone your entire product. There’s nothing Figma, Salesforce, Workday, etc could do.
I think Figma is cooked. Not because they can’t eventually compete but because they’re just too slow. A company of 2500 can get outmaneuvered now by a team of 5 agentic engineers. To compete Figma would have to tear down all their internal bureaucracy ans process. Will they do that! Probably not.
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 don't have much experience with Figma but looking at their prices I'd think that for someone who isn't doing a one off designs Claude Design would be much more expensive (especially if not on subscriptions)
https://www.figma.com/pricing/
Claude Design into PenPot via its MCP was a really neat flow, for something generic looking anyway. With the correct prompts and it even built out reusable PenPot components and design system tokens etc
Used Claude Design to build the landing page for my side project (strimoza.com) over the weekend. Honestly impressive for a solo dev with no design background — got something shippable in a few hours. That said, I still ended up going back to tweak things manually. It's great for 80%, the last 20% still needs judgment. Not sure it kills Figma for teams, but for indie devs it's a game changer.
> Used Claude Design to build the landing page for my side project (strimoza.com) over the weekend. Honestly impressive for a solo dev with no design background
This looks like it is out of a template, though. If you need something like this, why not use a template? The font is pretty bad, though, so a template might be an improvement here.
It’s pretty hard to read on a phone, and the prose, particularly in the bullet points, has that annoying LLM-y trait of focusing way too much on implementation details ("Bunny CDN"!) rather than telling me a single reason why I'd actually want to pay for your product.
The other commenter went a bit hard on their critique.. to each their own, I think your design is mostly fine except for that super squished title font (that is also sadly used on buttons)..
It makes it very hard to read, and if you're counting on people scanning the page to quickly understand your offering, and then stick around, you should consider fixing that.
Choose a better proportioned font to improve readability and it will make your site instantly better and easier to understand.
I honestly thought the rendering was broken when I first loaded the page (I'm on an ultra-wide monitor) but then realized it was just like that.
If i can be forthright, it looks like any other llm slop website design. The grain effect, the extra long FAQ, the reveal animations, the bad combination of font sizes and contrast ratios.. you're better off ripping off a website that has been actually designed by someone who understands what they are doing.
my 2 cents - Claude is not going after EVERY single SaaS (or maybe not yet), but after those products that are adopted by individuals that are keen at experimenting new tools (software engineers, designers etc etc).
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!)
The inference provider conflict is the structural detail the article makes but the thread hasn't focused on: Figma is paying Anthropic for Sonnet 4.5 inference to power Figma Make while Claude Design runs on Opus 4.7 — that's a permanent capability ceiling for any Anthropic-dependent product, not a temporary execution gap. Traditional SaaS moats (multiplayer, design systems, plugin ecosystems) are moats against other SaaS companies. Against the company providing your inference, the only real moat is model-agnosticism, and Figma's design workflows are hard to decouple from a single provider at this stage.
Great take. I think the only way forward for Figma will be the good old "let's cannibalise our own product" playbook. They are actually in prime position (with one of the best brands and distributions out there) to create an AI design product that dominates the market.
> Anthropic themselves launched Claude Design which is a pretty direct competitor to Figma in many ways. While it's nowhere near functional and polished enough to replace Figma's core design product, I expect it will get significant traction outside of that
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.
"Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers."
So...we can shitcan the designers and offload the work to the 10 developers still keeping the lights on?
> Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers.
Well, when you put it that way, that sounds bad for designers, and, by extension, Figma.
ps. I do like commas.
> 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.
Haha, that's exactly how cc was received initially. It's just autocomplete. It's useless. It can't even x. I tried to y and it gave me z. Over and over all over the internet this was the reaction. Then the bargaining began. Oh, it will maybe speed up some simple things. Like autocomplete on steroids. Maaaybe do some junior tasks once in a while. And so on...
Agreed - For the last 20 years or so, designers at basecamp.com do all of their frontend design directly in rails/html/css and then have the developers "re-implement it". The upside of this approach is designs which really work in the browser and they found it to be faster. The downside of this approach is that it's harder to find designers who have both of those skills, but that was an acceptable tradeoff for them because they are a smaller run company.
To me, it seems obvious that AI will attack this from both directions - upskilling developers to make more design changes AND upskilling designers to make more design iterations and more changes to the codebase -- the design artifact is "new react components" (which can be re-implemented or not) instead of a figma design.
Seems like The Innovators Dilemma playing out.
Fair point but unlike code, design (webpage), audio, video are seen by consumers. If Sora (AI video) didn't fly, how'd AI web-design fly?
It is pretty good for internal apps and dashboards or small hobby pages and websites where being generic look and feel doesn't matter much.
It's still an autocomplete on steroids (that's what LLMs are).
It still produces subpar code, with horrendous data access patterns, endless duplication of fucntionality etc. You still need a human in the loop to fix all the mistakes (unless you're Garry Tan or Steve Yegge who assume that quality is when you push hundreds of thousands of LoC per day).
Same here.
Oh, and Claude Code is significantly worse at generating design code than almost any other type of code.
> Haha, that's exactly how cc was received initially.
Haha, maybe by you. By many on HN, but HN is a bubble of its own. By plenty of others it was received very differently. Many of us had been doing agentic coding for more than a year already when Claude Code was released, because we found it valuable.
We will see if such groups of professional designers also form for Claude Design or other such tools.
I tried uploading our design system. Claude Design’s environment was so limited it had to reimplement it from scratch in HTML, JS and CSS. Doing that burned through more than half the token limit. Along the way it completely changed it and made up things that don’t fit in at all, neither visually or as code. The output of making a mockup is one huge HTML file with minified CSS that just can’t be used meaningfully for anything.
I guess I had expected something like Claude Code with visual tools added on top, but that’s not what this is.
As someone who does both development and design, I agree. With some caveats.
At this point, Claude now writes > 99% of my code. I wasn't an enthusiastic early adopter; it took me a while to be willing to let go of the reins. But in tandem with LLMs getting better, I also began to realize that what happens inside the code is very rarely important enough for me to care about. Like, I care that it's secure, and performant where it needs to be, etc. -- but mostly I just care about its outputs. If it does what I want it to do, then how it does this doesn't really matter to me or my clients or my users. On the development side, my attention has focused to writing specifications and monitoring the correctness of the test suite, and > 99% of the time that's good enough. It's been a lesson in non-attachment to let go of lovingly crafting every single line of code, but the tradeoff in terms of productivity has absolutely been worth it.
What makes this viable is the fact that there's essentially a "hidden layer" (the code) upon which Claude can operate. My clients don't actually care about the code, and within certain bounds (correctness, security, performance, extensibility, etc.) it turns out that neither do I. This gives Claude a lot of latitude to solve things in its own way, and I think that's a bit part of its effectiveness.
On the other hand, with design there is no hidden layer. Every single aspect of the design is visible to the user and the customer. So the design reflects upon my work in ways that code does not. This means that the conditions which allow me to relax my grip on coding just don't exist for design. It's very difficult for me to imagine delegating design in the same way that I've become comfortable delegating coding.
That said: I suspect that the use-case for Claude Design will be for applications which today receive very little design attention. There are loads of applications where design is less than an afterthought, and the product suffers terribly for it. Delegating to Claude, in those contexts, would likely be a very big win. But for applications which already have designers obsessing over every pixel, I see a very limited role for this. Figma's market is mostly the latter -- the former, by definition, is not part of the market for design tools -- so I don't see them being threatened by this for a long time.
> Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers.
There is a bunch of repetitive work in design as well, once you start working on larger projects. Yes, everything should be setup with components/reusability and what not, but just like programmers take shortcuts sometimes, so do designers, and you have to repeat the same change across many instances/files whenever you have to pay back the "technical debt".
Probably Claude Design could be quite helpful in those cases, and the same goes for other domains too, same happens in video editing and 3D work, probably any creative effort has moments of dull, repetitive "do this change across X" where any automation would be of serious help to reduce that. It seems like a quite good thing to try to address with LLM tooling, still driven by actual humans.
> Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers.
Quoting from the article, which of course you did not read:
>Looking at Figma's S1 (which is somewhat out of date by now, but is the only reported breakdown I can find) corroborates this potential weakness. Only 33% of Figma's userbase in Q1 2025 was designers, with developers making up 30% and other non-design roles making up 37%.
>A lot of Figma's continued expansion depended on this part of their userbase.
Plus, Figma uses Claude, so
>At this point Figma is effectively funding a competitor - and the more AI usage Figma has - the more money they send over to Anthropic for the tokens they use. Even worse, Sonnet 4.5 is miles behind what Anthropic uses on Claude Design (Opus 4.7, which has vastly improved vision capabilities)
> Quoting from the article, which of course you did not read
What makes you think that I didn’t read the article, but rather just disagree with it?
“which of course you did not read” is such a negative/toxic statement that adds no value.
obviously developers use the product to collaborate with designers. but it’s not the developers that are buying this product. they’re just stakeholders.
The developer seats are read-only, so they rely on designer seats existing to actually create files to inspect for development (and I’d guess PMs are using figma because designers are using figma).
If designers still want Figma then the other people are along for the ride (unless the idea is the designers are being replaced with a PM+Claude.)
Personally, as a developer, I interact with figma to use designs made by designers. So a portion of that userbase probably isn't going anywhere?
A very large portion of the non-design users are using it to reference/implement the designs created by their designer colleagues. They’re not going anywhere.
if you export the .fig file (even programatically) and you ingest in Claude Design you won't need to create users in Figma, right?
Sure, if your design decisions are completely one-sided and transactional. In my experience, though, being able to comment and collaborate in Figma is important, as is being able to go find specific icons and components on my own.
i believe it depends on the design system maturity too.
> 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.
Maybe it will replace (a large share of) Figma users.
Yeah this is my take too.. I know a lot of front-end developers who pay for Figma and/or are not so invested in design that they need to do it all by hand.
They will gladly use something like this (many have already started experimenting with other similar products) to get them even 60% of the way there and then they can polish the rest in code...
Which is basically how they used Figma before. Visualize to close enough and then iterate to final in code.
If Claude Design can ingest your design system and previous examples and go further than templates and scaffolding, if it can help you brainstorm ideas and variations so you can - as the human in the loop - get to your final design faster..
Why wouldn't you do that?
There are many designers. I know a bunch who basically stopped using Figma altogether and just prototype what they're working on directly in code these days. For them, Claude Design was a very interesting addition.
I think the most effective teams will be working within Claude, not within Figma.
For individual creators, this will definitely replace Figma. I bought Sketch for use as an individual creator because I wanted to create mocks before coding them. There's no way I'd make the same purchase today.
Anyways, I'm sure Claude Design will incorporate some of Figma's features such as a company wide design language.
Not sure Claude Design really competes with Figma.
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.
It's funny to see all of these dramatic articles coming out about Claude Design, when Google's Stitch[0] has been around for at least 6 months and no one has batted an eye. https://stitch.withgoogle.com/
I'm not sure how much of that is overhyping Claude, or Google's poor marketing of their own products.
On an iPhone, when I scroll down a bit to the templates and start pressing the right arrow to scroll through, the templates quickly shift off-center. Not a good look.
Don’t forget Pencil, another “Figma killer”. Free (for now). https://trypencil.com/
Anthropic today feels like 1990s Microsoft, when mere rumors that MS might enter yet another software vertical (publishing, CAD, 3D etc.) were enough to destroy the stock prices of current market leaders.
> A lot of their recent product development has been to enable further expansion in organisations - "Dev Mode" for developers (which now looks incredibly quaint against LLMs), […] all are about expanding their TAM out of "pure" design.
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.)
Only 33% of Figma's users are designers. 30% are devs, 37% are PMs and execs. That's their growth story and now their liability. The non-designers who made Figma huge are exactly who Claude Design and friends can peel off first.
> takeover attempt by Adobe, that was later blocked on competition grounds
Would Figma in Adobe be a stronger competitor against Claude Design today than Figma and Adobe can be separately?
While a big fan of Claude's models, I am starting to worry about the "winner takes all" game starting to play out in the open. With free inference to them (as pointed out in the article), why won't Anthropic build significantly more products related to software development, and kill all other competitors? Developers first, Designers next, would some kind of a clone of Jira / Monday / Asana be next?
Forget AI, Google/Microsoft/Amazon could all in theory have built a clone of Jira/Figma/<x> tool by now. But large companies lack the focus and commitment needed to build true competitors to these products, especially if it's not a big enough market to make a real difference to their bottom line.
Perhaps this will change soon if AI models reach the "army of geniuses in a datacenter" level, but current models are a far cry from just being able to clone Jira or Asana.
Now you’re starting to get why Anthropic/OpenAI aren’t worried about their margins. They can just clone a bunch of valuable existing software along the way and capture big pieces of those markets too.
All they have to do is hold back a super capable model like Mythos while using it to clone your entire product. There’s nothing Figma, Salesforce, Workday, etc could do.
I think Figma is cooked. Not because they can’t eventually compete but because they’re just too slow. A company of 2500 can get outmaneuvered now by a team of 5 agentic engineers. To compete Figma would have to tear down all their internal bureaucracy ans process. Will they do that! Probably not.
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 don't have much experience with Figma but looking at their prices I'd think that for someone who isn't doing a one off designs Claude Design would be much more expensive (especially if not on subscriptions) https://www.figma.com/pricing/
Claude Design into PenPot via its MCP was a really neat flow, for something generic looking anyway. With the correct prompts and it even built out reusable PenPot components and design system tokens etc
I’ve tried it. It’s useless.
Used Claude Design to build the landing page for my side project (strimoza.com) over the weekend. Honestly impressive for a solo dev with no design background — got something shippable in a few hours. That said, I still ended up going back to tweak things manually. It's great for 80%, the last 20% still needs judgment. Not sure it kills Figma for teams, but for indie devs it's a game changer.
> Used Claude Design to build the landing page for my side project (strimoza.com) over the weekend. Honestly impressive for a solo dev with no design background
This looks like it is out of a template, though. If you need something like this, why not use a template? The font is pretty bad, though, so a template might be an improvement here.
Please change your hero font. The extra wide style hurts reading
It’s pretty hard to read on a phone, and the prose, particularly in the bullet points, has that annoying LLM-y trait of focusing way too much on implementation details ("Bunny CDN"!) rather than telling me a single reason why I'd actually want to pay for your product.
The other commenter went a bit hard on their critique.. to each their own, I think your design is mostly fine except for that super squished title font (that is also sadly used on buttons)..
It makes it very hard to read, and if you're counting on people scanning the page to quickly understand your offering, and then stick around, you should consider fixing that.
Choose a better proportioned font to improve readability and it will make your site instantly better and easier to understand.
I honestly thought the rendering was broken when I first loaded the page (I'm on an ultra-wide monitor) but then realized it was just like that.
If i can be forthright, it looks like any other llm slop website design. The grain effect, the extra long FAQ, the reveal animations, the bad combination of font sizes and contrast ratios.. you're better off ripping off a website that has been actually designed by someone who understands what they are doing.
Did you checked it in mobile device?
my 2 cents - Claude is not going after EVERY single SaaS (or maybe not yet), but after those products that are adopted by individuals that are keen at experimenting new tools (software engineers, designers etc etc).
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!)
The inference provider conflict is the structural detail the article makes but the thread hasn't focused on: Figma is paying Anthropic for Sonnet 4.5 inference to power Figma Make while Claude Design runs on Opus 4.7 — that's a permanent capability ceiling for any Anthropic-dependent product, not a temporary execution gap. Traditional SaaS moats (multiplayer, design systems, plugin ecosystems) are moats against other SaaS companies. Against the company providing your inference, the only real moat is model-agnosticism, and Figma's design workflows are hard to decouple from a single provider at this stage.
And which model did you use to generate this comment? Please use your own voice.
I tested it yesterday. Kinda impressive, but also design output is pretty boring.
Great take. I think the only way forward for Figma will be the good old "let's cannibalise our own product" playbook. They are actually in prime position (with one of the best brands and distributions out there) to create an AI design product that dominates the market.