I spent the week testing Claude Design.
My take: I don't think product designers are the core audience.
It feels more like a tool for people who love Canva or Gamma. That may be a much bigger market. But for product design, it doesn't yet feel like the future.
The problem is the workflow.
Claude Code and Codex have already changed how I think about design. I don't want to review static frames, specs, or pictures of the thing. I want the thing.
Build it. Let me touch it. Let me iterate on it.
Claude Design pulls me back into the older design-first workflow: make the artifact, then figure out how to turn it into software. That feels claustrophobic when agentic coding has made the opposite workflow feel so natural.
A few other frictions stood out:
It's too slow to feel like a real design partner.
It burns through usage limits fast.
And the design system support is not strict enough yet to make me trust it for serious product work.
I'm not writing it off. Anthropic moves fast, and I expect Claude Design to get much better.
But today, I'd tell designers to spend more time with Claude Code, Codex, and agentic canvas tools like Pencil.dev.
The future feels less like making better pictures of products.
It feels like designing directly with working software.
What am I missing about Claude Design?