I admit I'm having a visceral reaction to this analogy. A bicycle is a sophisticated product whose form is almost pure function. Despite being apparenty simple, almost no regular person can draw even a reasonable facsimile of a bicycle from memory ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0_vXZ-3LFU ). Which is to say, for actually designing a functioning bicycle, the devil is in the details, and details are exactly where vibecoded apps fall down. Our lower bound for this analogy should instead be the downhill go-kart cobbled together from scrap wood you found in the dumpster.
Figma has been in trouble for a while. All the designers at my company switched to Cursor nearly a year ago. They made live mockups that don’t even need a spec to implement, because the expected behavior is already captured in the prototype. Claude Design makes it just marginally easier.
Not to mention all the people hiring UX just because they don't want to deal with it themselves, not because they need something that requires a lot of skill.
Stitch has been around for a few months from hole and it does a better job than this. I bet designers are in the honeymoon phase of people don’t know this exists and this does my whole job phase.
Feels like a lot of them are using Bootstrap, curated Tailwind elements or Wordpress templates. In which case the challenge Anthropic faces is convincing them the extra flexibility and magical "type into prompt" approach to customization of Claude Design is worth the compute cost...
Figma is answering a different question which is "are you prepared to spend time and money on full time designers to have pixel perfect layouts agreed with managers and consistent across platforms" and non-AI tooling has been orders of magnitude faster and cheaper at generating something that looks good enough as end results rather than mockups since before it existed.
