Post

My training as a designer is built on cycles: idea, refinement, execution, refinement. Tools looks like Paper 🗘 #Prototype 🗘 Browser. The speed was on paper, in #Figma or Miro: cheap, fast, safe to fail. The slow part came later, in the code editor and the browser. Thinking faster. Building slower.

Lately I’ve felt a tug the other way. So today I worked only in the browser, anchored by research and requirements docs. I prototyped in #Claude with real data and real browser behaviour, ignored brand and visual design, and focused on modelling data and refining interactions.

Once the content and interactions worked, I passed them back to Figma purely for styling. Claude drew the coded prototypes onto #Figma artboards almost instantly **with tokens, styles and components intact**. The speed and quality of that handover totally blew me away. Minutes not days.

(Can't share links yet but will happily once the work has matured)

The bigger promise is the impact on the #DesignSystem. Held in code, it can finally be the real source of truth instead of a stale Figma library. Figma stays a place to explore and style, while code holds the system truth. For product teams that could close a gap we have lived with for years.

As a designer, coding with LLMs gives me the speed I used to only find with paper and pencil. Everything my training taught me says that’s the "wrong way round". I tried it anyway, and I'm rethinking my assumptions about speed, quality and what a design system can finally become.