Design tooling, LLMs, and why I still use a pencil. A friend and I were talking about AI and the question of where I lie on the spectrum came up: "I'm now on the handmade, artisanal, craftsperson end of the spectrum." A client project recently moved into the LLM layer. Some of the team had already been working with an LLM to wireframe and prototype some aspects based on my initial Figma designs. I'm far more judicious and faster (it is my design to be fair), but it's interesting to see how Figma Make and Claude extrapolate my basic design system file and screens into primitives and code. Things got... lost in translation. Extraneous primitives, too many primitives, borders got ignored. The results look like the blurry part before something comes into sharp focus. Figma Make was sluggish at best. Claude was being non-deterministic of course. Surprisingly, what worked better than using Figma MCP to interface with Claude, was to pass along flattened PNGs and screenshots into Claude Code.…
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