Notes on how AI changed our design process

There are a lot of articles about designing faster with AI. Design quicker, design better, ship in a day. What people talk about less often is what actually changes in your process, and what it costs you along the way.

So these are my notes.

Some context first. I work on a B2B and B2C platform for corporate meeting, event planning and travel management. At one point the product entered its startup phase, and our company's OKR became Time to Market for AI features, to outrun competitors. We had to speed up. That is where AI came into play, and where we ran into challenges we were not ready for.

Everyone became a designer overnight

The first challenge had nothing to do with tools. With so many easy-to-use AI products around, every product owner, stakeholder, and even client suddenly had their own prototype and their own opinion on how the design should look.

Suddenly I was no longer just presenting my designs, I was advocating for them against everyone's so-called design concept. People became very opinionated about their own version, and I had to prove my expertise every single time I presented. So instead of spending time on research, on thinking through the flows, on the actual craft, we were spending it on defending why our version was the one to build. Which leads directly to the next problem.

When you lean too much on AI, you lose your ownership

It became harder for designers to advocate for their solutions. You cannot really explain why the flow is split into these steps, cause you did not design it that way, AI did.

There is an idea that AI does the designer's job instead of the designer. And to some extent that is true, it really can. But then ownership, one of the most important parts of our job, quietly slips away. And that is not what any of us want.

So, even with AI, you have to stay in charge of what you deliver. Validate and challenge everything AI gives you, and bring your own reasoning to it.

The rushed transition to Claude Code

Then came the tooling shift. We moved from Figma to Claude Code, and it happened fast, under pressure to cut delivery time. A lot of questions piled up immediately.

• Do we keep Figma updated? We had built a lot of prototypes, components, and flows there. But in startup mode things changed so quickly that Figma would be outdated within a week or two. And what if we wanted to come back to it later?
• What happens when we run into something technical we cannot fix ourselves? Designing in parallel and pushing to GitHub nearly cost us a full day of work a few times. And even with the design system connected, we would still spot raw values instead of the actual components. In our case it was not critical, but imagine you need to support multiple modes or theming. That is where you lose the control Figma gives you through variables and components.
• AI also has bad days. Sometimes you ask it to nudge something 20px to the right and it designs you a completely new cards UI. Thankfully it was rare, but it tends to happen exactly when you need a quick fix right before a demo.
• The last thing is the loss of freedom. Without the Figma canvas, some things simply disappear. You cannot mark a screen as done, in progress, or not started. You cannot lay out every screen and edge case in one place, and on top of that you have to figure out how to embed those edge cases into the prototype itself, which is not always possible. There is no easy way to show developers what is final and what is not, and in startup mode approval and development run at the same time. In Figma you would just label a frame "approved" or "in progress" and everyone sees the status at a glance.

None of this is a dealbreaker. All of these problems have solutions, and you will figure most of them out. But it is worth knowing about them upfront, because working around them takes time.

What actually got better

But there is another side to this. AI genuinely sped us up. We stopped delivering static screens and stopped wasting time relinking prototype noodles. We started shipping fully functional prototypes and validating them with the product owners much faster. We could also think beyond the screen: build the sophisticated interactions we actually wanted instead of just describing them, and pay attention to responsiveness and how the product feels overall. And because much of what we built was handed to developers as code, their work sped up too. What we designed and what got built were finally the same thing.

So, would I recommend it?

AI will absolutely enhance your design workflow. But it is not a magic pill for every product. If you care deeply about process, if you have a large designers' team and established workflows, if you need to strictly follow a design system, or support a lot of theming, then rushing toward AI may not be the right move yet. Start exploring it as it matures, and one day it may cover exactly what you need.

And if there is one thing I would say before you make the jump, especially when it is the business pushing for it: know the challenges before you rush in, and make sure your clients and managers understand the risks and the trade-offs.