After Vibe coding, meet Vibe design
Turns out “I’m not creative” was just… a tools problem.
Not so long ago, I saw a LinkedIn post from a designer claiming that the new wave of “developers” emerging with the rise of agentic coding meant designers will become more and more relevant and everybody would come begging designers for help because “AI can code, but AI cannot design”.
I remember thinking: “Well, that is a bold statement, seeing how fast AI moves”
2 weeks later, Stitch by Google started to pop up.
I gave it a try.
It was meh. But looked promising.
One month and a major update later, it feels much more powerful, has nice integrations to export the designs, and boy do the designs look legit. It just seems to love neon yellow for some reason, that’s my main complaint.
You can brainstorm colour palettes, share existing websites or mockups as reference to 10x the output quality and relevance. If you’re great at coming up with ideas, but mostly think in features, and not UI/UX, this is tool is your soulmate!
Here is a workflow to best leverage Stitch:
Dump your project idea into a new session with your favorite coding agent, ie. Claude Code, and have it recommend the overall architecture that you validate.
Once your high level app structure is locked in, ask it to generate the prompt to Stitch → this is key because your coding agent will include very specific and critical details that make the integration seamless later on
Start a new project in Stitch with that prompt, have fun tweaking the design system and testing multiple iterations of the screens.
Once your satisfied, export the design back (as code zip, or MCP) to your project and get your coding agent to integrate (and ideally streamline) the design system and the screens
Et voila! You now have a very good first version of a professionally designed app/website, congratulations!
The best part? Stitch is free to use and the credits allowance is pretty generous (not like Lovable’s)
So you can finally unlock and unleash that creative side you thought you did not have.
This is not saying designers are doomed - the same way software engineers are definitely not doomed - but this means you can get even further with AI now and build high quality software, all by yourself.
And that’s super empowering don’t you think? Just don’t call yourself a designer :)
What have been your approach with design when building apps so far? I would love to know!
I just now came across pencil.dev and that looks really interesting. Right now it's free (sits on top of your own claude subscription via mcp) and I'm def going to use it to gain familiarity.