Figma is something I'm still learning and not 100% fluent in, so jumping ship entirely to a different tool wasn't really on the table. Doesn't mean I'm not testing out other options though, and like many of you probably, I've been especially intrigued by vibe-coding tools lately. They're primarily for making both designing and coding more accessible for people who don't do either, but there's also something satisfying about watching your idea come to life with a few natural language prompts.

So when Anthropic launched Claude Design a couple of weeks ago, I was already primed to like it. What makes Claude Design more interesting than the average vibe coding or prototyping tool is that it's actually a bit of a hybrid. It generates designs from natural language prompts, sure, but it also gives you a small set of actual design controls to play with after the fact. But it's still not replacing Figma for everything…

What Claude Design actually nails

The speed-to-something-usable is hard to beat

The thing I appreciate most about Claude Design is that you can start without even really knowing what you actually want yet. So I can open it with a vague idea, describe the vibe of it, and it gives me something to react to or evaluate within seconds (sometimes minutes if it's multiple screens). That's a completely different starting point to opening a blank Figma canvas and trying to materialize a layout from scratch - which, when you're still learning, can feel like the hardest part of the whole process.

But where it really shines is through something called Tweaks. After every generation, Claude spins up contextual editing controls and sliders that are specific to whatever it just made. These might include specific color palettes, font weights, spacing, padding, corner radius, or whatever it thinks is worth adjusting in the build. So I can fiddle with the adjustments without repromting, which means I'm not burning through as many tokens or risking Claude changing something I actually liked in the previous iteration. I've said before, it legit feels like a design tool within another design tool.

I also like that I can ask for two or three layout variations in one shot, sketch directly on the canvas with the Draw feature as a reference, or drop a screenshot of an app I like and have Claude pull structure from it.

But you can't actually nudge anything in Claude Design

Direct manipulation is still Figma's home turf

Yes, an editor letting you edit things is the most obvious requirement on the planet. But it's the line that separates an actual design tool from a vibe coding tool that happens to produce designs, and it's where most of the time you save up front gets eaten on the back end. You'll find a decent amount of control in Claude Design, such as background color, font family, font size, click on any element to see its properties, sliders for padding or corner radius, and so on.

But its biggest limitation is that none of the controls actually let you move elements on the screen. I can change what something looks like, but I can't drag it 10 pixels to the left or shift it into a different spot in the layout. To move anything, I have to go back to chat and prompt for it, which means describing in words something I could do in half a second with click-and-drag. And there's no guarantee it'll keep the integrity of the whole build once I reprompt.

It might sound silly and obvious, but manual control over elements is non-negotiable when it comes to designing. And Figma rules in this area, and it's why it's still the place where finishing a design actually happens.

Once a layout is roughly right, the work shifts to features Claude Design doesn't have at all. There's Auto Layout for handling responsive spacing automatically, Constraints for telling elements how to behave when the frame resizes, and Components for keeping every instance of a button or card consistent across screens. These aren't fiddly extras, they're the difference between a static mockup and a design that actually holds up when something changes. None of it is promptable (I mean technically it could be if you wanted to write a wildly detailed prompt with every element size and behavior spelled out, but that kind of defeats the purpose of vibe-designing).

Figma is basically the last half of the design, and without this manual control, something will always break the visual hierarchy or user flow.

Prototyping is where this matters even more. Claude Design can absolutely turn a static mockup into an interactive prototype - like CSS animations, hover states, even 3D effects. But you don't get to wire up the flows yourself. In Figma, I can draw an arrow from one frame to another and define exactly what happens on click, where it goes, and how it transitions. In Claude Design, the interactivity is generated for me, and if I want a different flow, I prompt again and hope.

You don't have to pick sides, anyway

Just use them together

Claude Design is still in beta and it's pretty impressive thus far. Meanwhile, Figma has been holding its own for years, so why not just use it to fill in Claude Design's shortcomings? Claude Design for exploration, Figma for production.

The easiest version of this workflow is just screenshotting a rough Figma wireframe, pasting it into Claude Design with a vibe prompt like "use this layout but make it feel more playful", and pulling ideas I like back into Figma manually. I've been doing this for a while and it works without any setup.

The bigger question was whether I could actually get a Claude Design project out of Claude Design and into Figma as editable layers. The export menu has options for PDF, PPTX, .zip, standalone HTML, send to Canva, and a handoff to Claude Code - but no native "send to Figma". But you've still got options…

After a couple of false starts with the HTML and zip exports, I landed on the html.to.design Figma plugin paired with its Chrome extension. Capture the Claude Design preview, download the file, and drag it into the plugin. And that's it. It shows up in Figma as a full multi-layered frame, and everything is editable. Now, I can finish my vibe-coded designs with manual precision in Figma.

Figma is still the proper design tool, but why not just use them together to fill one another's gaps?

Claude Design is definitely one of the more interesting design-related tools I've used. It's a prototyping tool, kind of a vibe-coding tool, sort of a design tool… it's a bit of everything. But it's not a Figma replacement. Perhaps a Figma Make replacement for creating stuff with prompts, but it can't do what Figma does by a long shot. I don't think it needs to, anyway, because you can just use them together. Claude for experimenting, Figma for pulling everything together and building a precise, working prototype.