I Spent a Month Trying to Quit Figma. It Failed.

Everywhere we look, product designers are sick and tired of AI this, AI that.

It feels like every day, there is a new tool, a new workflow, a new “Figma is dead” post, a new vibe coding demo, and another person telling designers they are either 'cooked', obsolete, or about to become '10x'.

Reality is completely different. So try and relax!

In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick talk about whether AI is making product design more fun, less fun, or just more overwhelming.

They get into the current AI chaos around product design, vibe coding, designers touching code, Figma, Claude, Cursor, transcript-driven workflows, AI bloat, and the blurry line between prototypes, production, and things that only look real but secretly are not.

Nick shares his first real experiments with vibe coding, including using Claude to make an interactive prototype he could not easily show in Figma. Tyler shares why he has been trying to skip Figma, why that keeps falling apart, and why polished product design still needs taste, craft, spacing, typography, and all the tiny pixel-level decisions AI does not magically understand yet.

They also discuss the return of the builder-designer, why more designers may need to understand code again, and how AI is changing expectations around prototyping, collaboration, and product development.

The conversation explores the emotional side of AI too. The fear that craft is disappearing. The weirdness of everyone creating prototypes. The source-of-truth problem. The mental load of keeping up. And why the most useful AI workflows might not be flashy demos, but boring things like transcripts, summaries, prompts, and turning messy meeting feedback into actual next steps.

This episode is about staying useful in a design world that keeps changing, without losing your taste, your craft, or your mind because someone on LinkedIn discovered a new tool before breakfast.