If you open LinkedIn these days, your feed has turned into one long product review. Every designer has an opinion on Claude Design, on Figma Make, on whatever dropped last week.
I get why it’s exhausting; but the fact that you’re reading about it, thinking about it, forming an opinion — that already puts you ahead of most. You don’t need to have tried everything, you need to know what’s worth your attention.
This is my answer to that question, from my own day-to-day: eight use cases, a few honest caveats, and zero evangelism!
Before I get into specifics, two things that matter regardless of how you decide to use AI.
The first one is about thinking: systems thinking and analytical thinking are increasingly central to this role. If you look at where the field is going, those are the skills that compound. AI is most useful when it pushes you to articulate your reasoning, when it gives you something to react to rather than something to copy: the moment you start outsourcing the thinking itself is the moment you stop growing. I use it to reason better: not to skip thinking.
The second one is about data: I work in banking, which means I can’t paste our design system into a chat, and I can’t describe client projects with identifying detail. Before using any tool at work, check whether your company allows it. If it does, find out where the limits are. Opt out of training the AI tool with your data, anonymize by default, describe problems generically, omit anything that could identify a project, a client, or a colleague. For this reason most of my AI use happens on side projects, or with prompts deliberately stripped of anything sensitive.
Tool: Claude Projects (Skills)
When I’m unsure which interaction pattern fits a problem, I describe to Claude what I’m thinking of using, the constraints I’m working with, and any issues I’ve already spotted. It gives me a range of patterns that could work, explains the reasoning behind each, and points me to sources I can read.
The goal isn’t to get an answer and move on: it’s to understand the concept well enough that next time I don’t need to ask.
Tool: Claude Projects (Skills)
Knowing what to design is one thing. Knowing how to talk about it with a PM, a client, or a difficult stakeholder is a different skill — one that takes years to develop and that nobody really teaches you.
I use Claude as a sounding board for these situations: how do I introduce a concept to a client who gets stuck on visuals? How do I approach a colleague about a recurring problem without making it awkward? It always includes further reading, which I actually follow up on. The goal is to become more autonomous, not to outsource the judgment.
Tool: Claude Chat (in Projects); Claude Cowork
This one lives in a dedicated Claude project: I regularly write rough notes about how things are going — what went well, what didn’t, what I’m thinking about. Claude reads them, summarises, and pulls out the threads worth bringing to my monthly 1:1 with my manager.
I also use it for work that happens outside work:
how to make my MentorCruise profile stronger
how to pitch myself for a conference talk
how to improve my LinkedIn presence (profile + posts) without it feeling performative.
It’s become a low-pressure place to think out loud about where I’m going. I’ve also tested Claude Cowork in Chrome to have it autonomously edit the text in a web page in a case similar to the ones above, and was impressed with the result.
Tool: Claude Chat (+ Cowork)
When I changed jobs last year, I used it for two things: I’d give it my CV and a job posting and ask it to suggest how to tailor the CV and write a cover letter that matched the role. Before interviews, I’d feed it both documents and ask it to generate the questions I should be able to answer — a way to stress-test your own preparation before walking into the room.
As a bonus, now that Cowork is available, I’d use it to regularly search for job postings I could apply for and add them e.g. to a Notion database to make the annoying part of a job search easier.
Tool: Claude Chat, Claude Cowork, Granola
Side projects come with a lot of thankless tasks: writing up briefs, creating Notion pages, chasing benchmarks, reading through papers you don’t have time for. I use Claude to handle the scaffolding so I can focus on the parts that need my judgment.
Granola handles call notes: I run it in the background during side project calls so I can stay present in the conversation instead of half-listening while I type.
Tool: Claude Chat (in a Project)
This one requires setup: I feed Claude my writing style — examples of things I’ve written, rules about what I don’t want — and it drafts from there. Emails, LinkedIn posts, first drafts of articles. For slides I use it differently, more as a sparring partner on how to make an idea land than as something that writes for me.
The output always needs editing: starting from something is faster than starting from nothing, but it’s still a starting point!
Tool: Lovable
I built my portfolio on Lovable: fast to update, and building it was a good way to get comfortable with vibe coding as a concept. More broadly I find it useful for building small, hyper-personal tools — things that don’t exist because no one would build them for a market of one, but that would save you an hour a week if they did.
Tool: Figma Make, Claude Code
Purposefully last, as it gets the most airtime online and the least honest treatment.
In the content you see on LinkedIn, vibe-coded prototypes look like magic: designers spin up something interactive in minutes. That’s real, in some contexts but mine isn’t one of them: I work in B2B finance with a design system on interfaces that are dense and data-heavy, and that need to match that system to hold up in a review. Figma Make can’t reliably integrate our DS, so what it produces is off-brand enough to be distracting — and it breaks often enough that it costs more time than it saves.
Where vibe coding has helped me with though is prototyping specific interactions where we had open questions as a team: scroll behaviour, in-page transitions, things that would have taken me much longer to prototype convincingly when I was more junior.
Claude Code in a professional B2B context? In my opinion, not there yet.
If the LinkedIn feed fatigue in the intro resonated, these two posts are worth reading: Trevor Wherle on the tool discourse taking over the feed, and Joey Banks on why paying attention already puts you ahead.
On the skills that actually matter right now: Patricia Reiners on systems thinking and analytical thinking as the roles to grow into by 2030.
On how design leads are using AI beyond mockups: The 80% Job on UX Collective — worth reading alongside this post.
On getting more out of Claude: Anisha Jain’s breakdown of free resources you don’t need to pay for, and Axelle Malek on avoiding Claude’s token limit.
If you want to go deeper on Claude Cowork: 6 ways to automate recurring tasks with scheduled tasks, 67 Cowork use cases by field, and this Notion guide comparing Claude Chat vs Cowork vs Code — useful if you’re trying to figure out which one to use for what.
🎓 Join me at my next live workshop On May 6th I’m running Start UX Projects with Confidence — a 1.5 hour live session with Uxcel for early-career designers who want a clear, repeatable way to kick off UX projects (or design challenges during your job search). You’ll leave with a practical framework and a reusable checklist. The first edition sold out fast — grab your spot before this one does too. 🗓️ May 6th | 6pm CEST / 12pm EDT / 9am PDT | 40 seats only 👉 Reserve your seat here
📚 Mentorship Mastery If you’re thinking about becoming a mentor yourself, or want to understand what good mentorship looks like from the inside, I recommend checking out the Mentorship Mastery course on Uxcel — it’s a great resource for anyone who wants to approach mentoring the right way.
💬 Work with me 1:1 I still have a few open spots for mentorship on MentorCruise. If you’re looking for a one-off portfolio and CV review instead, you can book one under “Sessions”.
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