Claude Design Is Actually A Trap

Claude design dropped and it changed everything about design. But in reality, it's way more hype than most people realize. And this is exactly why what you've been seeing on X isn't the full story. If you think Claude Design is doing something groundbreaking or that those insane demos floating around are proof you need to switch to it, you are actually wrong here. The tool itself isn't even the reason those designs look so good, and the way people are using it is quietly working against them in a way most haven't caught on to yet. Claude Design was marketed as a revolutionary product for the design industry. The moment it dropped, people started calling it a Figma killer or the end of designers. And the impact was big enough that Figma's stock kept decreasing and its valuation took a hit. It is a tool for creating realistic prototypes, wireframes, designs, pitch decks, and other different types of designs. But the reality is that it's more hype than anything. It is literally Claude Code repackaged as another tool and sold as one because Claude Code can do the same and possibly more. There are features like editing and comments in claude design. But nothing here is something claude code cannot do if you give it the right tools. And when we say this is claude code repackaged, it is not because we didn't test it. We gave it a simple prompt asking it to create a community website and answered the questions it had. It created two designs that were impressive on their own and much better than the way Claude used to generate landing pages previously, but they still had a lot of problems. One version was cut off at the pricing section and there was no footer at all. So, we tested how Claude Code would perform with a similar prompt. We used Opus 4.7 on high effort to compare the two, and the design it produced stood on par with Claw Design's capabilities. There were a few issues like the font color of the signup button not being chosen correctly. But overall, it was a really well-built design, and this was despite not having the design harness and without any special prompting that Claw Design has built in purely on its own with us providing almost nothing. But the demos you must have seen around look impressive and there is something hidden behind them. Most of what is circulating on social media is based on hype rather than what the tool actually does on its own. People generate designs by following extensive workflows and then present them as if cla design built everything in one shot. But those same workflows can be run in claude code directly without needing cla. So even though this product is built for designers, they should just use claude code instead of claw design because this way they will be able to try out different variations, experiment more and get the same, if not better results than claw design. They can iterate more times with claw code instead of being cut short right when the design is actually getting somewhere. Building on top of what the site already is instead of starting over every time gives them better control over the direction of each design. And because everything Claude Code produces is real code, what they end up with is not a throwaway prototype, but something that can be shipped directly into the product without being rebuilt by someone else afterward. And on top of all this, there is a cost problem with claw design. Claude code can do the same things at a much cheaper cost. While claw design is built separately and counted toward limits that run weekly, and it does not count toward your other limits, but it burns through usage at a much faster pace than you would normally expect with models through other clawed apps. This hits designers the hardest because the quota is so low that they cannot really experiment the way they need to and their limit runs out after just a few design iterations. And this is exactly what a lot of people are complaining about. When someone was working with it, they ran out of their design limit fast just after around 20 design iterations even when they were on the highest max plan. And plenty of others say they hit the limit in just 1 hour and still end up with a simple design that is easily implementable with clawed code in one shot. So, it's not really usable in practice since they are hitting the limits before they can even finish the workflow they are working on, making it much worse compared to Claude code limits. The reason Claude Design's work looks so impressive is actually the Opus 4.7 model drop, not the tool itself. Opus 4.7 is again the state-of-the-art model with amazing capabilities and is performing better across all of the benchmarks. But the upgrade that actually matters here is vision. This model has substantially better vision and can see images at a much greater resolution than it was able to previously. Claude Opus 4.6 was able to analyze images at a resolution of 1.15 megapixels while the 4.7 is able to analyze 3.75 megapixels. So that implies it is able to understand design from a reference much better. If you give it a reference design, it processes that reference with much better clarity and picks up on things it would have missed before. With this model upgrade, Anthropic filled the only gap where clawed models were lacking and needed extensive work, which was front-end design. This model is more tasteful and creative when completing a task, and on its own, it produces higher quality interfaces and designs. So, when Claw Design dropped, it was featured with a lot of hype because of its insane designs. But in reality, it was the model that got better. It was not the tool that got so insanely good that it resulted in the different visuals you see. Claude design was another clever way of selling something and creating hype around it by anthropic. Now you can get the same benefits you get in claude design in claude code 2 or possibly better. You can replicate claude design's questioning flow in claude code by creating a simple skill. When you create a project in claude design, you give a prompt and it asks a lot of questions so it can properly ascertain the design direction. It asks far more than Claude codes planning mode does, but a skill can do exactly the same. The skill contains instructions on how to run a questioning session, just like claw design, using questions to fill in the gaps the prompt creates, and asking about what needs to be built. It defines when to trigger follow-up questions and how the flow should actually work. It also includes example questions for running the session, a library of questions, and even asky layouts of sites so it can determine the positioning of elements in the landing page. So, if you give it a prompt, it uses the skill and asks questions related to the gaps it identifies. Just like claw design, it asks multiple questions across different areas and once it has all the information needed to implement, it starts building. The best part is that it directly outputs code. So there is no design to code handoff. And with this approach, you can iterate as much as you want without worrying about running out of limits in just an hour. The UI generation from the same type of prompt along with the similar questioning flow in Claude code was more or less similar to what Claude design generated. The main difference is that Claw Design had an edge in certain aspects where it made the website more immersive by adding small animations to make it look more engaging. 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Start shipping studio quality videos without touching a camera. Click the link in the pinned comment and try Hen today. Most of the scroll interacting designs you might have seen on X when people were showing off claw design are just sites using video backgrounds which makes them look far more premium and gives the impression that they are more impressive than they actually are. Most of the demos are often just prompts copied from sites that provide readytouse prompt templates. These prompts include a link to a video that is meant to be used as a background along with detailed guidelines on how to implement it. So any agent is capable of implementing this kind of website, not just claw design, as long as it is given similar prompts. But these are only sample prompts for showcase sites. In reality, production-grade applications are built using libraries like Lennis, which is used in many production apps, as well as Gap, which is one of the most popular libraries for implementing smooth animations that make the website experience far more immersive than before. To test this, we actually downloaded a video and in our prompt just told Claude code to use the video as the hero section along with the color themes we wanted, and it implemented the rest of the website on its own. We only had to correct it once where we had to explain what the video was about. And it incorporated the style perfectly into the landing page, making it much better than the previous version. The website was implemented really well, which is quite powerful given how simple the prompt was. And it included different animations and interactions that made this part of the site much more powerful and interactive than before with Claude's capabilities. Now in cloud code, you can also supplement it with more tools with ease compared to claude design because claude code is more technically capable and can implement things more seamlessly. You can even use an open-source skill like scrolltyelling which basically enables scrolling storytelling animations in your project. So with this skill, Claude can easily implement multi-level storytelling from a simple prompt and work to create animations that go much further in depth than what Claude design would be able to do on its own. Also, if you are enjoying our content, consider pressing the hype button because it helps us create more content like this and reach out to more people. Using Claude code instead of Claude Design makes it easier to implement UIs because with Claude Code, you can integrate built-in design systems with ease by incorporating components from Shad CN, Aceternity, or Hero UI, which already include a lot of pre-built animations. This reduces the need for the model to figure out how each component should look and behave and instead lets it focus on improving the overall design. So the output is much easier to reach compared to working directly in claw design by default. You can also use front-end design skills or other specialized skills tailored to your project built using a skill creator that analyzes the current state of the project. This helps it implement features more effectively without wasting time. Claude code is also more flexible because you can connect MCP servers to it. For example, you can use a shad CN MCP server so the agent can install the right components on its own instead of being explicitly told what to use and where. Similarly, you can use various MCPs that help build UIs more effectively rather than relying on a purely generated design. Even with models like Opus 4.7 and tools like Claw Design, straightup generated designs often reveal that they were produced by a model because they tend to follow similar patterns. But using established libraries helps reduce this issue and makes the output feel more natural and less predictable. The biggest advantage of using cloud code instead of cloud design is that you can connect it to Git. Now, even though you can connect GitHub to Claude Design as well, there's a huge difference in how they both work. Claude Design's Git integration is fairly basic. It mainly allows it to fetch files from a connected GitHub repository and use them to understand designs, but its purpose is mostly limited to reading and referencing. It does not really make changes to the repository. Clawed code on the other hand is very different. It can perform full git operations like commits, branching and more. So if something goes wrong in your implementation or if you prefer an older version after making changes, you can easily revert back to a previous version using git. That's something you wouldn't be able to do with claw design as you use it, which makes claude code a much stronger approach for designing different prototypes. Instead of going to claw design or using Figma, it is more effective if you just make mock-ups straight in HTML. for trying out different variations. You can also make use of parallel agents and work trees to divide tasks similar to how claude design explores designs but in a git managed way so you can keep the best version and discard the rest easily. You can simply give it a prompt to use sub agents in separate work trees and ask each agent to implement a different variation of the same design. With that, Claude will spawn agents in separate workspaces. Using parallel agents helps you save both time and effort while exploring multiple directions at once. Now, once each agent has finished its work, you get multiple variations that you can review at any time and choose whichever one best suits your needs. From there, you can make changes and continue building the app based on the exact style that you like the most. And despite not being generated by Claude Design, each of the generated designs still has an aesthetic look with proper SVGs created entirely through code to depict elements and a much better overall balance. You can then merge your preferred version into main and remove the work trees that contain the designs you didn't like. The skills used here along with other resource are available in AI labs pro for this video and for all our previous videos from where you can download and use it for your own projects. If you found value in what we do and want to support the channel, this is the best way to do it. The links in the description. That brings us to the end of this video. 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