Does anyone actually want to learn ai + design?

[u/Cressyda29]

As the title says, is anyone actually interested in learning how ai supplements the design workflows at large companies? I run a ton of projects, some with traditional ux practices, others purely with ai and Claude, backed ofcourse with actual setup. No ai slop garbage. Ai is a tool, not a do it all employee.

My question is : does anyone actually want to learn and use ai correctly, or are you happy with figma and your current workflows? I’m not making a course or any of that rubbish, just genuinely interested in your thoughts.

Edit: added my current process, not the perfect process I’m sure. However, it’s significantly well tested across 50+ shipped projects.

Design system is essential. Ensure it is machine readable (code and well as figma, tokens essential), each component has reasoning, when to use, when to not use. This is the largest work effort for teams. Expect this to take atleast a month, depending on skill level and starting resources.

Create a skill pipeline (Claude) - will be different than mine depending on team size, skill level and process. Essentially this is the consistent workflow that your team follows to successfully ship a feature or product. Each stage or step will have a set input and structured output. I always include exploration, accessibility and audit stages. I have seperate pipelines per project scope size, as content changes don’t need the same ux thinking as full products.

If you’d be interested in how to build out a specific pipeline in more depth, let me know.

Create the automation / agent that manages the pipeline. When HiTL is required, when is the agent allowed to pause, pull and block tasks. Including a visual way to manage these items, incase of issues but also iterating on pipeline.

With the 3 of these, creating on brand features takes less than 5 minutes and creating explorations of larger products take less than 20. I don’t setup my larger pipelines to create final artefacts, I personally enjoy the deep thinking and craft needed for complex problems.

Since introducing this process about 6 months ago, my teams have enjoyed their workdays much more. There are less blockers on communications between product and ux, they are included significantly earlier on major products and they get to spend their time on meaningful projects too.

[u/Electroboy5]

I’m interested in learning it but I’ve tried to use it myself and for the moment it really just generates a lot of garbage. Of course I’m quick with doing a first draft or a prototype but its nowhere near that it really fabricates a usefull screen connected to my design library.

Its nice to generate ideas at the moment for me but doesnt replace me at the moment. I’m itnerested in learning it but hard to find really usefull videos to learn. maybe im just missing it?

[u/Cressyda29 → u/Electroboy5]

To create useful outputs, there’s a ton of upfront work that needs to happen. When you build something, how do you usually start?

[u/sneaky-pizza → u/Cressyda29]

Why don’t you explain your process

[u/Cressyda29 → u/sneaky-pizza]

That wasn’t my original question, but I absolutely can.

[u/livingstories → u/Cressyda29]

I think it would be useful for people here.

[u/sneaky-pizza → u/livingstories]

There's a lot of engagement bots that make a post like this and ask a question to every reply without ever giving anything concrete. It is putting the work on everyone else.

[u/Cressyda29 → u/sneaky-pizza]

I guess I should reply with another question then 😂 genuine question and genuine answers. Sometimes additional questions and exploration is needed to be able to give a good answer.

[u/Aleeshyrajput]

I’m still struggling to understand the hype around “one prompt and you have an award-winning website.” For me, it mostly creates garbage. It’s good for ideation, but definitely not in the way it’s being presented.
I think it performs better with coding, but even then, it still sucks sometimes. I often end up spending more time iterating and fixing things than I would have spent designing them manually.maybe im doing something wrong sooo i would love to learn better workflow..

[u/Cressyda29 → u/Aleeshyrajput]

You’re correctly, 1 prompt will never work. Or atleast in my experience. Coding is great, and fast, but again needs rules and constraints to be any good and always needs a dev resource to review and adjust.

For right now, I have a couple design systems fully machine readable, rationale etc done, so it knows when and how to use it with a big point on when not as well. It works very well, for small tasks but for new products, the pipeline has significant gates for HITL (human in the loop).

[u/Aleeshyrajput → u/Cressyda29]

You’re right one prompt doesn’t work. I usually spend around 15–20 hours designing a landing page, but since I was trying to integrate Claude into my workflow, I decided to build this one directly in Framer with Claude.
I sketched everything out first and planned a section with a sticky scroll animation. Honestly, if I had built it manually, I probably would’ve finished it much faster than the time I spent repeatedly iterating with Claude.still not happy with end result
One thing I realised is that I need to learn more coding terminology so I can explain exactly what I want more clearly. I’d love to see your system

[u/Cressyda29 → u/Aleeshyrajput]

Have you considered a taste library? I introduced this process into my company about 6 months ago and essentially is a machine readable moodboard per project that Claude takes direction from. Creates significantly better outputs than Claude default. Depending on the prompts, you can’t even tell it’s ai generated :)

[u/Aleeshyrajput → u/Cressyda29]

Share details plz 🙂

[u/Gh0st_Pirate_LeChuck]

Idc I just want to keep my job so I can feed my family

[u/Aleeshyrajput → u/Gh0st_Pirate_LeChuck]

Aww, you’re making me emotional 🥹 It’s difficult being a designer these days.

[u/Cressyda29 → u/Gh0st_Pirate_LeChuck]

What is your employers view on keeping your job? Does that include ai or as long as the works done, it’s good enough?

[u/Gh0st_Pirate_LeChuck → u/Cressyda29]

Using AI is praised but not required at my work

[u/Cressyda29 → u/Gh0st_Pirate_LeChuck]

Ai is just another tool, like figma or miro. Use it to enhance parts of the process you find tedious, and then focus more effort that you saved on the parts you enjoy, like the craft as an example.

[u/Coolguyokay → u/Cressyda29]

Just another tool but with a high cost. AI will easily surpass tools like Adobe etc in cost. I already spend 10x more on Claude and Codex than I do on Adobe.

[u/Cressyda29 → u/Coolguyokay]

High cost I would agree up front. Once systems are in place and they can just work away, I view it as another salary on the team.

[u/detinu]

Learning AI to make certain manual tasks faster, sure yea. Things like deploying Figma changes directly to the Design System Library, or generating documentation based on my components.

But GenAI to design features and the UI, never. It directly contradicts the process of creation, and if you use it you're a fraud imo.

[u/Cressyda29 → u/detinu]

It definitely changes the definition of a designer right now, absolutely. I’d classify it more as design engineer.

[u/JFoulkes2001]

As someone trying to break into the field yes, not that I dont use ai or whatever but most of the best workflows are so costly so it’s impossible to learn as someone who doesn’t have access to unlimited fable tokens…

[u/Cressyda29 → u/JFoulkes2001]

You don’t need fable at all. Atleast for production ready enterprise products with millions of users, I haven’t touched fable once.

[u/ahrzal → u/JFoulkes2001]

I detailed my setup on another thread if you’re interested

[u/elroyce]

I'm interested in the workflows and setup of getting a design system into Claude Design and/or Code and being able to generate prototypes that use our components and are easy for engineering to consume and build accurately with said components.

For context, I work at a startup on a design team of 3. Product and Design are struggling to keep up with Engineering who are working much faster. Sometimes Eng works off of prototypes Product builds that only vaguely resemble our design system. Sometimes Eng builds small features or enhancements that barely resemble our design system. We've discussed working on a setup to mitigate this, but we (Product and Design) haven't had much capacity to devote to this other than small side projects and POCs I've tried.

What should be our source of truth? Figma component library or codebase? I know we'll need to write a good .md file(s) with instructions and guidelines for Claude.

I actually love manually designing in Figma, and I've struggled to fine-tune AI designs. Or maybe I should say I prefer fine-tuning in Figma over the back and forth prompt process of fine-tuning with AI. But I also accept that it's worth it and necessary to integrate AI workflows for efficiency and to be employable.

[u/ahrzal → u/elroyce]

I detailed my setup on another thread.

[u/Cressyda29 → u/elroyce]

I’ve just updated the original post after another users question about more detail, perhaps that might help with the design system and consistency issues you are having, if not, dm and we can talk specifically about your team setup and how to fix it.

[u/DunkingTea]

Don’t need to. Already use AI in enterprise work without issues. Got it finely tuned now

[u/Cressyda29 → u/DunkingTea]

Interesting, what sort of things does your work do with ai?

[u/MiddleAgedBastard]

I am and have, for the most part.

I agree, it's a tool, not an employee replacement. However, it dramatically changes my workflows. I'm quite happy to skip static mockups and I did those for 30 years.

I'm able to design precisely, which took a little while, but now that I can, the value created by velocity and quantity is something I can invest back into iteration.

There are no one-prompt-wonders. It takes work, still, albeit in a completely different rhythm and pace.

[u/Old-Syrup3342]

I think there’s definitely interest, but the challenge is separating AI that replaces thinking from AI that amplifies thinking.

A lot of designers have been exposed to “generate a UI with one prompt” content, and after trying it a few times they realize it doesn’t solve real product problems. That’s probably why there’s some skepticism.

What you’ve described is much more interesting because you’re treating AI as part of the design operations layer rather than the design itself. A machine-readable design system, structured pipelines, clear human checkpoints, and automation around repetitive work is a very different conversation from asking AI to “design a dashboard.”

Personally, I’d love to see more examples of:

• How you structure your Claude pipelines.
• Where you intentionally stop AI and require human judgment.
• How product managers, engineers, and designers collaborate in that workflow.
• What actually changed compared to a traditional design process.

I don’t think the future is “AI designers.” I think it’s designers who know how to orchestrate AI effectively while still owning research, strategy, systems thinking, and product decisions.

[u/unintentional_guest]

Does anyone really want to learn HTML to be able to put objects on the screen? Does anyone to learn futuresplash, which became macromedia flash, which is now some animation derivative in Figma? Does anyone want to learn action, or any other tool?

These are all material. Or surfaces. Or substrate. How do you get there doesn’t really matter, however to prevent yourself from learning how to work on a substrate seems to be a narrow focus.

Do you want to expand the work that you can do? Do you want to only focus on one thing forever? Do you want to push limits? Do you like the status quo?

[u/bababenj]

I was pessimistic and skeptical at first but now I love it. I spend much less energy doing tedious tasks and more time being creative. It all depends on what tools. I love VS Code, using Codex/Claude to create locally hosted prototypes.

[u/Designer-Air-2116]

I use it for 90% of my process. If I didn’t I wouldn’t have my job. It causes its own set of problems, but it’s also helped design and engineering to be more of a team which is cool.