June 7, 2026
Mockup? I hardly know her
I design with Claude more than Figma now
Designers are ditching mockups, and the comments are already roasting Figma
TLDR: A Jane Street designer says AI now helps them build real product ideas faster than traditional mockups, sometimes skipping design tools entirely. Commenters are split between “Figma is basically dead” and “cool, but now everything looks the same,” with a side of blogpost-snob drama.
A designer at Jane Street just dropped a spicy confession: they now design with Claude, an artificial intelligence chatbot, more than Figma, the popular design tool once treated like holy scripture in product teams. Instead of making polished mockups and long documents, they describe the idea, ask Claude to build a working version, tweak it endlessly, and show real people the live prototype. Their big pitch is simple: why spend days making fake screens when you can make the real thing and test it immediately?
And oh, the comments had feelings. A big camp basically yelled, “same!” One person said Figma is now mostly for “logos and random assets,” while another claimed even large projects no longer start there because a rough working prototype is faster and more useful. That’s the pro-AI side: fewer meetings, fewer mockups, more doing. But the honeymoon isn’t flawless. Critics complained AI-made designs all have the same slick, slightly soulless “modern website” vibe, like every app was raised by the same Pinterest board. Another commenter dragged the blog itself, sniping, “Has the bar to publish Jane Street blogposts been lowered?” Ouch.
There was also some vendor drama: Figma’s own AI efforts got called out for lagging behind, while Claude was praised for pumping through absurd amounts of work, albeit slowly. The vibe? Excitement, skepticism, and a tiny funeral for traditional design workflows.
Key Points
- •The author says earlier attempts to use Copilot, Cursor, and Gemini were disappointing, but AI became much more useful after joining Jane Street.
- •The article describes a workflow shift from Figma mockups and specification documents to building working prototypes directly in the codebase with Claude.
- •A featured example is a prototype that added LLM prompting to a JSQL input used in internal user-facing tools.
- •The author says this approach enabled extensive iteration on real product behavior, including UI details, copy, prompts, and interaction patterns.
- •According to the article, the author has increasingly used AI for larger prototypes over the last two months, sometimes skipping Figma entirely, while also noting that presenting reviewers with fully built features may reduce early input.