efecto

Stop telling new designers to skip Figma. It’s still the industry standard. That advice will cost someone a job.

Stop telling new designers to skip Figma. It’s still the industry standard. That advice will cost someone a job.

Stop telling new designers to skip Figma. It’s still the industry standard. That advice will cost someone a job.

opens an AI tool, types "make a landing page for my startup," gets an ok looking page in 20 seconds, immediately tweets "designers are cooked!" my friend, you don't know what kerning is. why certain typefaces feel trustworthy and others feel like a crypto scam. why that button feels dead or why ur page with ten fonts looks like a garage sale you have no idea how contrast guides attention, why a headline needs to breathe, what optical alignment is designers spend years training their eye on stuff that's invisible when it works.... typographic scale, color systems that hold up across contexts, spacing that creates rhythm, hierarchy that tells your brain what matters first... the stuff you can't prompt for because you don't know the words to describe what's wrong the AI gave you a layout. which is cool... but that's maybe 1% of what makes a product feel designed. the other 99% is judgment across hundreds of screens... what happens when a name is 3 characters vs 45, when empty states need to feel intentional, when accessibility breaks, when the design system collapses under its own weight and the confidence... "yeah it's not pixel perfect but just need to tweak some spacing" ... the spacing IS the design. that's like saying you built a house, just need to adjust the architecture AI is incredible for exploring ideas. efecto is literally a vibedesign tool. but there's this weird thing where people who've never designed anything used by real humans now think the hard part was drawing the first screen it never was

vibecoder asks claude code to build a chat app, gets a working prototype in 20 minutes, immediately tweets "just killed slack and discord"… brother you don't even know what a distributed system is. you don't know what database replication means. you have no idea how websocket connections behave at scale or what happens when 50k people are online at once and someone's message needs to show up in 200ms across 3 continents slack has engineers making $300k+ who have spent a decade solving problems you don't even know exist yet. race conditions, eventual consistency, message ordering, presence systems, file storage at scale, search indexing across billions of messages your app works on localhost with 2 connections. that's not the same thing as "killing slack" that's a college homework assignment the prototype is maybe 0.5% of what makes these products actually work in production. the remaining 99.5% is infrastructure, reliability, edge cases, and years of iteration on problems that only surface when real humans use your thing at scale and the worst part is the confidence. "yeah its not perfect but ai one-shotted it, just need to adjust a few things and deploy" - the few things you need to adjust IS the entire product. thats like pouring a foundation and saying you basically built a skyscraper, just need to adjust a few things ai is genuinely incredible for building tools and prototypes. i use it every day. but there's this weird thing happening where people who have never shipped anything to real users at scale now think the hard part of software is writing the first 200 lines of code it never was bro