We see some discussions (an example LinkedIn post) where experts are beginning to question the relevance or role of design tools such as Figma because of the emergence of AI app development tools such as v0, Bolt, or Lovable.
I have tried my hands in v0 and Lovable—just to feel the space. Here is an example of my self-talk exercise of ten minutes—an app where agencies can plan polls for quadratic voting for their community projects.
If the founders are experimenting with a product idea, these tools serve the right purpose for their own clarity of thought—for the product stories, scope, and customer success.
These AI app development tools are feature design tools whereas Figma is an experience design tool.
At present, design is just a lorem ipsum for them, a filler in the code. They should think from a design-first approach.
Remember what design had been doing to content for so many years? Just filling the containers with lorm ipsum before the rise of content strategy and content design in the last 15 years. These AI app builders are doing the same to design now.
Design scales for the experience and not for the features—when we can focus on granularity, the specific use cases, the adjacent possibilities, and we need that kind of control on the canvas to design useful interactions for the customer success moments. If you want to build the product intelligence in design, these idea to launch tools are woefully inadequate.
For a moment, think of any three or four digital products that you really like using—it could be Slack, Linear, Miro, PayPal, a calendar, or small utilities to buy convert tickets. Can these AI *app to launch* tools help you design that kind of experience? Certainly not in the present state—and so we should not raise questions on Figma.
These AI tools are good for MVPs and not for designing full scale products. We can build the minimum viable design to give the skeleton and a structure to the product and its use cases.
This is what separates design from experience.
PS: To say that content plays such an important role in the product onboarding and in the user experience is asking too much in these AI app to launch tools.
