Claude Design
The most recommended of 5 AI design tools
Turns ideas into interactive UI prototypes quickly and hands them off to Claude Code, but it burns through tokens and usage limits fast, and its visuals can look generic.
Turns ideas into interactive UI prototypes quickly and hands them off to Claude Code, but it burns through tokens and usage limits fast, and its visuals can look generic.
255 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 145
- criticize it
- 110
- approval share
- 57%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 145 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Fast interactive prototypes and mockups
“I showed my mum what we could do with claude design. Claude whipped up a much better looking, working version of (part) of the website in about 5 minutes.”
Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “I design with Claude more than Figma now” “crunches through ungodly amount of tokens and is really slow on iteration but at least you can get some really nice prototypes extremely quickly there”
Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “I design with Claude more than Figma now” “Claude Design does such a great job of making the UI mockups interactive and providing a great base that the agents can use.”
Comment from 10 Jul 2026 in “Non-tech background, choosing between using CLaudeCode and CodeX” - Comment from 4 Aug 2026 in “LLMs reward expertise”
- Comment from 18 Apr 2026 in “Thoughts and Feelings Around Claude Design”
- Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “Claude Design”
Smooth handoff to Claude Code
“results have been excellent. I have explicit clean-up instructions in Claude Code, and the handoff skill in Claude Design is pretty solid.”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Tell HN: Dont use Claude Design, lost access to my projects after unsubscribing” “This is their first graphic design product, but it fits nicely because once you create a prototype, you can hand it over to Claude Code”
Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “Claude Design” “Claude Design is more than capable, which can then be fed directly into Claude Code to implement, test, iterate, and ship.”
Comment from 13 Sep 2026 in “Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap” - Comment from 15 May 2026 in “Ask HN: Im a back end dev, how do you go from designing the UI with AI?”
- Comment from 31 Jul 2026 in “The AI Aesthetic”
Lets non-designers communicate visually
“This is a great bridge between non-designers with taste and designers who can't fully technically implement their solutions”
Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “Claude Design” “it's that non-designers can now have a visual conversation instead of writing a 3 page spec that nobody reads”
Comment from 18 Apr 2026 in “Claude Design” “I'm not amazed by the colours, because they look LLMy, but it's much better than anything I could do by hand.”
Comment from 29 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: I got tired of travel spreadsheets so I made a travel planner app” - Comment from 1 Jul 2026 in “Fable 5 Is Back”
Clean, thoughtful product experience
“Claude Design was/is absolutely brilliant. The embedded skill in work and code is capable but the experience of Claude design was so much cleaner.”
Comment from 22 Oct 2026 in “OpenAI CLI” “It's also just a beautiful product. The interaction model, styling and integrations via exporting is all super thoughtful”
Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “Claude Design”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Burns tokens, hits limits fast
“the limits are awful. Even on the Max plan you're going to hit the weekly limit after about 10 mins of use.”
Comment from 18 Apr 2026 in “Claude Design” “It produced great results for me, in 10 mins, and then my usage was blown and now I have to wait a week.”
Comment from 18 Apr 2026 in “Thoughts and Feelings Around Claude Design” “crunches through ungodly amount of tokens and is really slow on iteration but at least you can get some really nice prototypes extremely quickly there”
Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “I design with Claude more than Figma now” - Comment from 2 May 2026 in “Open Design: Use Your Coding Agent as a Design Engine”
- Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “Claude Design”
Generic or poor visual output
“much more easier using claude design rather than Figma yet it does not produce the same output quality”
Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “I design with Claude more than Figma now” “Claude Design Studio generated this garbage UI, that I fixed manually, but it created great code j never could have that made it work.”
Comment from 22 May 2026 in “The AI Elephant in the Room” “the weird squished font makes everything look like its in the wrong aspect ratio and the site is a weird combination of too noisy/busy”
Comment from 20 Apr 2026 in “Figma's woes compound with Claude Design” - Comment from 5 Jul 2026 in “Claude Design System Prompt”
- Comment from 29 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: I got tired of travel spreadsheets so I made a travel planner app”
- Comment from 28 May 2026 in “The AI Elephant in the Room”
Lost data or credits after downgrading
“I was previously subscribed to the max plan, claimed credits, then downgraded to the pro plan and noticed I lost my credits.”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Tell HN: Dont use Claude Design, lost access to my projects after unsubscribing” “it would have been more customer-friendly for Anthropic to warn you about your data disappearing after unsubscription”
Comment from 14 May 2026 in “Tell HN: Dont use Claude Design, lost access to my projects after unsubscribing” Just an HTML generator
“This largely appears to be a HTML generator at its core, not necessarily what Figma does with layers/canvases etc.”
Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “Claude Design” “Which doesn't work for a native iOS app, so it's HTML rendering something that would then be rewritten in iOS”
Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “Claude Design”
Other AI design tools people recommend
The four most recommended other AI design tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude DesignThis page | 145 | 110 | 57% | 7 | — | — |
| Figma | 113 | 103 | 52% | 12 | — | — |
| Google Stitch | 25 | 14 | 64% | 9 | — | — |
| Diffui | 7 | 1 | 88% | 5 | — | — |
| Pomelli by Google | 6 | 14 | 30% | 2 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 294 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I'm not amazed by the colours, because they look LLMy, but it's much better than anything I could do by hand.”
“Claude Design was/is absolutely brilliant. The embedded skill in work and code is capable but the experience of Claude design was so much cleaner.”
“Claude Design is more than capable, which can then be fed directly into Claude Code to implement, test, iterate, and ship.”
“I like the way Claude Design handles this: if you come back to a chat after the cache expires, the chat UI shows a message like "start a new chat to save 300k tokens"”
“Claude Design feels (and from the blog post) sounds like the typical IC passion project that got just polished enough for a "beta"”
“Don't you think Gemini and Claude Design are doing justice to huge chunk of designing tasks already?”
“I love using Claude Design for any kind of app and web development, because it gives much faster visual feedback loop”
“you can bang out the aesthetic first in Claude Design and then serve it to Claude Code to follow”
“Claude Design with Fable 5 is an absolute killer app that you’d have to pry from my cold dead hands.”
“Claude Design does such a great job of making the UI mockups interactive and providing a great base that the agents can use.”
“it just guesses at where everything should be that isn't directly connected with a node, and it is hilariously bad”
“Claude design is probably the most familiar gesture in that direction for most people but I think it's only scratching the surface”
“Claude Design is great translating my thoughts and suggestions into something, that's consistent and better”
“it's fulfilled my needs better than v0, lovable, playwright via LLM or just iterating in the coding LLM”
“I have been able to iterate with Claude Design in a way that I wouldn’t illiterate with a human coworker.”
“much more easier using claude design rather than Figma yet it does not produce the same output quality”
“I showed my mum what we could do with claude design. Claude whipped up a much better looking, working version of (part) of the website in about 5 minutes.”
“It's great for one shots and it makes sense when you're trying to build a vertical product development stack like Anthropic”
“crunches through ungodly amount of tokens and is really slow on iteration but at least you can get some really nice prototypes extremely quickly there”
“It produced something that looked good for a second, then you pay attention and realise it’s a disaster.”
“Claude Design Studio generated this garbage UI, that I fixed manually, but it created great code j never could have that made it work.”
“I've made fully functioning and pretty decent looking frontends using just Claude Design and Claude Code”
“it would have been more customer-friendly for Anthropic to warn you about your data disappearing after unsubscription”
“I was previously subscribed to the max plan, claimed credits, then downgraded to the pro plan and noticed I lost my credits.”
“results have been excellent. I have explicit clean-up instructions in Claude Code, and the handoff skill in Claude Design is pretty solid.”
“I find the approach from claude design incredibly wasteful of tokens, and time-consuming since it needs to build a full website.”
“the weird squished font makes everything look like its in the wrong aspect ratio and the site is a weird combination of too noisy/busy”
“Claude Design can ingest your design system and previous examples and go further than templates and scaffolding”
“It produced great results for me, in 10 mins, and then my usage was blown and now I have to wait a week.”
“the limits are awful. Even on the Max plan you're going to hit the weekly limit after about 10 mins of use.”
“it's that non-designers can now have a visual conversation instead of writing a 3 page spec that nobody reads”
“It's also just a beautiful product. The interaction model, styling and integrations via exporting is all super thoughtful”
“This is their first graphic design product, but it fits nicely because once you create a prototype, you can hand it over to Claude Code”
“It jumped to 11% on the first prompt and now increasing steadily. I think I will hit the limits without seeing a hi-fi version.”
“this tools removes the friction which actually prevents me from being more focused on the valuable parts of the design process”
“Which doesn't work for a native iOS app, so it's HTML rendering something that would then be rewritten in iOS”
“This is a great bridge between non-designers with taste and designers who can't fully technically implement their solutions”
“this might be a game changer (for show dont tell), and fast itterations in design meetings”
“This largely appears to be a HTML generator at its core, not necessarily what Figma does with layers/canvases etc.”
“Impressive technology, but that old skool artisanal weirdness of yore only becomes more valuable and nostalgic.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.