These sort of issues are what you trust the judgement of a good designer to navigate through. I have no doubt that Claude Design can be better than no designer, and probably better than a bad designer, too. But better than a good designer? I'm more skeptical of that than I am of software engineering.

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.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195136

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Finally, someone of consequence not kissing the ring. I hope this gives others courage to do the same.

1: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-hydrogen-hoa...

I miss the old social media. I'd love to have it back. Having moved several times to various corners of the world, I have dear family and friends who are scattered across multiple continents. It's difficult to maintain ongoing 1:1 connections across such distances, but I used to be able to keep up with them and their families -- and them with mine -- via social media. It felt genuinely communal.

And then the posts from them became increasingly interspersed with -- and eventually outright replaced by -- advertisements, rage bait from random people(?) I didn't know, and then eventually AI slop. All with the obvious goal of manipulating my attention and getting me to consume more advertising.

It felt absolutely gross. Not something I wanted my personal life to be associated with. I stopped posting. So did my friends. The end.

But I still miss the old social media, and would use it if it actually existed (not just as a technology or a business model, mind you, but as an actual network with the adoption needed to create those kind of connections).

It's already an uphill battle, because humans in large organisations seem to have an innately conservative bias which says that "nobody ever got fired for choosing ${giganticEvilStatusQuoCorporation}". That, combined with the fact that the US hyperscalars have, I dunno, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of ability to put their thumb on the political and regulatory scales, make this an uphill battle. There will need to be a specific plan for leveling the playing field.

What is that plan?

I'm at a point in my life (personal bandwidth hovering near 0%) where I'm not getting involved in anything unless I have not just a good reason ("this is a noble agenda; somebody should do something about it, and hey, I guess I'm a somebody"), but a damned specific reason ("I have unique capabilities which can help this specific initiative in this specific way").

Anyhow, in this particular domain, I'm pretty sure there are people who could be MUCH more useful contributors than I. I'd love to forward the "manifesto" to them -- except I know that they're in the same position as me: essentially zero bandwidth. Any new project they get involved with means dropping something else that's currently on their plate, and is presumably important. They're not going to do that on a lark. They'll need need a damned good reason to participate, before deciding to spend time on something new.

To be honest, ANY real power-players will be in this position. They don't have free time on their hands; they won't just join up in the vague hope that maybe it'll be a place where things can happen. You will need power-players on-side, and without a much more specific proposition, you're not going to get them.

But I'm glad you've joined. Job no. 1: that manifesto needs to do a lot more manifesting before it's fit for purpose!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131151

Points: 8

# Comments: 2

About 30 years ago, a family came down from the mountains near San Luis Obispo to ask whether my mother could teach them piano. They were an unusual family -- a mother and a number of children; apparently their father wouldn't leave his homestead up in the mountains. The children were all homeschoooled. They were perhaps a bit raggedy, but all quite brilliant and free-thinking, and quickly became excellent piano players. Our family became friends with theirs, and eventually we were invited to visit their homestead up in the mountains.

The homestead was an off-grid hand-built house and working organic dairy farm, lovingly stuffed to the rafters with various arts and crafts, including a large collection of medieval-style musical instruments which the patriarch of the family, Hal, had built by hand. Hal was an enigma within an enigma: he refused to talk about his past, looked like a Santa-clause mountain man, wouldn't engage with the outside world in person, but was relentlessly curious about it -- able to keep up with conversations about the latest in politics and technology. He also had a keen interest in the archaeology of the upper Colorado plateau, and soon we were making trips to the Cal Poly library to check out the latest archaeology books on his behalf. One day, on a whim, we looked for his name in the index of one of those books, and that's when we found out that we already knew who he was.

Haldon Chase[1] had been at the absolute epicenter of the Beat movement. He was the one who introduced Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac, and most of the other Beats to each other. He'd gone by pseudonym "Chad King" in "On the Road". At the time he didn't have a Wikipedia entry, and at the time all anybody knew is that he had vanished at some point. Of course my family felt privileged to know the rest of the story.

Thinking now about Hal's life, in the few retrospectives I've seen of it, he's framed as having rejected the whole Beat lifestyle. I'm not sure that's accurate. In many ways the life he managed to carve out for himself was the apotheosis of much of the beat philosophy: genuinely free-thinking, self-reliant, non-conformist, creative, and in his way, spiritual. All very Beat. What he certainly rejected was the the limelight. The publicity, the drama, the ego. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with any of that. So he managed to get away and just live a good (if unconventional) life. His kids have all gone on to live really good, non-messed-up lives as well.

So when reading stories about messed-up Beats and their messed-up kids, it's worth considering that there's a kind of anti-survivor-bias at play: where everything worked out, where the trauma didn't explode dramatically or get passed down the generations, you're probably not going to hear about it.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haldon_Chase -- mostly but not entirely accurate.