AI flipped my design workflow

I used to spend days in Figma. Pixel-perfect prototypes. Auto-layout nightmares. Obsessing over spacing and hover states before I even knew if the idea worked.

The process felt productive. Dragging rectangles, tweaking corner radii, duplicating frames for every possible state. But looking back, I was doing the same work twice. Once in the design tool, once in code.

Now? I sketch rough flows on my iPad when I need to think through something complex. Quick boxes, arrows, annotations. Nothing pretty. Just enough to externalize the idea and see if the logic holds. Sometimes I skip this entirely and just describe what I’m building.

Then I pull together a moodboard in Figma. Screenshots of interfaces I like, color palettes, typography pairings. Not a prototype, just vibes. Enough visual direction to know where I’m heading.

And then I open Claude Code and start building.

The prototype IS the product.

What changed isn’t the tools. It’s where I spend my creative energy. Instead of simulating an app in a design tool, I’m making the actual thing. The thinking happens in sketches and conversations with AI, not in endless Figma iterations that will get rebuilt from scratch anyway.

There’s something freeing about this. I used to delay sharing ideas because the prototype wasn’t polished enough. Now I ship rough versions in hours. Real buttons that click. Real flows that work. I learn faster because I’m testing reality, not a simulation of it.

Figma’s still in the mix for moodboards and visual direction. But the execution? That’s just a few prompts now.

Design got simple again. Not because the work is easier, but because I stopped performing design and started just… designing.