My Work as a Designer Has Changed

I barely open Figma anymore. For years, my process was: Sketch → Figma → Prototype → Handoff → Repeat

Weeks of work. And even then, you had no idea if it was going to feel right. Because the moment developers started building it, reality kicked in. New problems surfaced. Back to the drawing board. Again. And again.

Now it's: sketch → Claude Code → something real.

I still sketch and use Figma. That part hasn't changed. Getting ideas out of my head and onto paper is where the thinking happens, or doodling small iterations in Figma. But instead of spending weeks turning those sketches into pixel-perfect files, I go straight into code with AI.

And something interesting happens when you work this way. You run into problems you'd never catch in a design file. States you forgot. Edge cases that break your layout. Copy that doesn't fit. Interactions that feel right in Figma but wrong in a browser or on a device.

Figma prototypes lie a little. They show the happy path. Working code shows you the truth.

Work that used to take me a week, I can now do in 30 minutes.

One thing should be clear: this isn't vibe coding. I know exactly what I'm asking for. Every prompt is deliberate, I'm still thinking like a designer, I'm just not limited to design tools anymore. And it's not about shipping code either. It's about validation. Building something real enough to know if you're solving the right problem, before you invest months into building it properly.