---
title: "How I design with AI"
author: Dan Birman
url: https://dbirman.com/design-with-ai
updated: 2026-11-09
summary: "Most of my design work happens in code now."
---

# How I design with AI

September 2026

Most of my design work happens in code now. I still sketch and I still open Figma, but what I show people is usually a working prototype built with Claude Code or Cursor.

A few years ago that would have been unusual for a designer. Now it’s the fastest way I know to find out whether an idea is any good. Jenny Wen, who led design for Claude at Anthropic, has said that mocking up and prototyping used to take 60 to 70% of her time, and now it’s closer to 30 or 40%, with a new chunk spent pairing directly with engineers. My week looks about the same.

## Start with what the model can do

On most products you can draw the screens first and build them after. With AI products that order breaks, because the model decides what’s possible. On Tommy Geoco’s show, Jenny said design often has to follow what the model is capable of, instead of starting from a design vision.

So I start by poking at the model. I run the same prompts through several models on OpenRouter, read the bad answers as closely as the good ones, and design for the failures I see. At Ruli, most bad answers traced back to vague questions, and no model can fix a vague question.

## Prototype on real data

Fake data is polite. Real data has long company names, missing values, and the one trade that’s wildly off the market. A pricing chart at Caplight can look perfect in a mockup and fall apart the first time it meets a real order book, so I build against real data as early as I can. Sierra’s design team works the same way, jumping from Figma into Cursor to test ideas on real data within hours.

## Keep a kill list

AI tools make it cheap to generate ten directions, so most of my job is deciding which nine to throw away. Ryo Lu at Cursor argues that when you can go from idea to code in minutes, taste and judgment become the bottleneck. I agree, and I think the evidence belongs in a portfolio. That’s why the case studies here show what we killed next to what we shipped. At Ruli we tested three versions of the composer with lawyers and dropped all three before the fourth one worked.

## Design the uncertain parts

I spend the most time on the screens where the AI isn’t sure. What happens when it’s missing context, when two sources disagree, or when it’s wrong? At Ruli we set three rules for this: show what the AI is doing and why, make every AI action reversible, and let people flag and correct answers.

## What I still do by hand

I decide what not to build. I write product copy myself, because the tools default to a generic voice. And I do the last pass on details like type, spacing, timing, and the words on a button. The tools get me to a decent draft fast. Getting from decent to good is still slow work.

## The tools right now

Claude Code and Cursor for building, Figma and Figma Make for exploring, and OpenRouter for comparing models side by side. The list changes every few months.