CLAUDE CODE FOR DESIGNERS - Update 1

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]So last week I released the Claude code for designers, the comprehensive 4 and 1/2 hour course for designers who want to get into agentic design, specifically working with Claude code.

[00:00:13]And um even between me finishing the recording and uploading the video, let alone after me uploading the video, a lot of new things have happened.

[00:00:25]Specifically, Anthropic, the company behind Claude code, has released um three major updates.

[00:00:32]And I do want to address those because if you have started watching the Claude code the long um course, you might be wondering how does it fit into the full picture? And if you haven't started watching that video yet, which I definitely recommend you do, um you will Well, I think you can just maybe watch the first 5 minutes to get a feeling for which parts of that long video have slightly shifted. And um then watch the all the video first, the long course, and then come back to watch the rest of this video.

[00:01:02]So having said that, um let's zoom into our Miro board.

[00:01:08]And I want to talk about the three big changes. So the first change is that obviously um Anthropic has released a new flagship model called um Opus 4.7.

[00:01:24]So when I was uh recording the video and also when the video came out, Opus 4.6 was still the flagship model, um which is their best but slowest model. And now Opus 4.7 has came out. Uh so that's I would say the smallest change. Then we have also the release of the new desktop app from Claude, which yeah, gives you another option for how to um use Claude. Actually, it's not a completely new product, not a completely new desktop app, it just big update, which for some of you might mean that you want to use anti-gravity.

[00:02:03]Um and lastly, obviously, big news, Claude uh design came out, Claude design.

[00:02:12]So I do want to address all all three of these because I have seen some comments uh also say telling basically, "Oh, Claude design dropped. This makes this whole course, so the course on Claude code, obsolete." And I definitely disagree with that. I think it If anything, it makes it even more um relevant. And um yeah, I just want to explain how this fits into this full picture.

[00:02:35]So if you are If you haven't watched the long video yet, you can stop here and just first finish that and then join us here. And if you did, let's dive in.

[00:02:45]So the first thing I want to chat about is the release of the new flagship model, which is Opus 4.7, um which the announcement was made last week on Thursday, April 16th, which is 1 day after the video was released. And as always, Anthropic, you know, introduced or released this kind of graphic, which gives you the benchmarks.

[00:03:08]So the most important benchmarks, let's maybe just take a screenshot of this.

[00:03:14]Bring it in here.

[00:03:16]So we can draw.

[00:03:18]So the most important um benchmarks, in my point of view, were these.

[00:03:26]And for design community also, very important is this one.

[00:03:32]So let's go through them one by one. So first one is the fact that um Opus 4.7 is better at coding.

[00:03:39]This is a huge jump from 53.4% and 80% on the SVE Bench Pro and Bench Verified benchmarks. So this is where these models get 100 or so exercises to do, and their percentage of how many they actually finish is how well they did. And typically, we don't see this big of jumps, which is like 7% jump and again, seven Well, actually, it's like almost 11 percent jump. Uh yeah. It's usually less, like two or three percentage point points. Here it's 11 and seven uh percentage points, which is huge. So when I saw this, I just thought, "Wow, okay, this is a huge huge improvement."

[00:04:24]And it is.

[00:04:25]But I think a even bigger news for us is that the visual reasoning went from 70 to 82 and 84 to 91%, which is again, huge huge jump. And what [snorts] this one means is that Claude is just better at understanding images.

[00:04:43]And I was in the long course talking about the fact that Claude cannot really see images um because it translates them into well, numbers, and it that's still the case, but it just gotten much better at that. And it means that we are the stage where actually just dropping a screenshot without dropping any or describing what's in the screenshot is enough for the model to actually really properly understand what we're trying to say.

[00:05:10]So these are two big advantages of Opus 4.7. So it's better at coding and it's better at visual reasoning, visual skills.

[00:05:19]Um the downsides are is that it's more expensive. So Opus 4.7 is more expensive than Opus 4.6, even though on the surface, if you read the um announcement, it says that the price is the same.

[00:05:35]Which is true, but it's incomplete view.

[00:05:38]So yes, uh price per tokens is the same, which is this one, $15 per million tokens, um which I believe is Let's see. Price.

[00:05:53]Yeah, 5 million. So $5 per million input tokens and 25 mi- dollars per million output tokens. That's the same. However, uh Opus 4.7 just uses a different tokenizer, uh which means that for certain tasks, it will just use way more tokens. So even though the price is the same, it is more token intensive, um up to 35% more. And um well, if you have tried using it, you have maybe seen the same thing for yourself, that some things that were pretty easy to do with Opus 4.6 now just took way more percentages of your usage.

[00:06:30]Um so yeah, that's something to keep in mind, and that's why I have also started to be more cognizant of how I use Opus and maybe sometimes also downgrade to Sonnet. Um also, if you are Well, if you're using desktop app, you can also just change the intensity of how model is working.

[00:06:54]Uh well, I'm going to cover this a bit later, but just a quick preview, what I mean is >> [snorts] >> in the desktop app, you can basically choose the effort, right? Low, medium, high, extra high, max. So that is going to have an effect on how much how many tokens you're using. I'll come back to the desktop app. So yeah, these are the big, I think, strengths, but yeah, the weakness is the price. The weakness is also that um if you're used to working with Opus 4.6, uh Opus 4.7 it just has a different well, personality. It's much more direct, less warm.

[00:07:32]Um it takes your instructions more literal. So do does a little bit of less of um trying to code thing things with you, uh to problem solve. And yeah, for some use cases, that's great, for some, it's not that great. Um but it's just something to keep in mind. So if you haven't used Opus 4.6 before, I think you will just get used to the way 4.7 works. It's a phenomenal model, it's the best at the moment.

[00:07:56]Um and um I think these are just like minor points to keep in mind.

[00:08:01]The thing is you cannot go back to Opus 4.6.

[00:08:04]As you can see in the drop-down menu, we don't have this option anymore. So it's you can just use 4.7 or Sonnet 4.6. I'm expecting Sonnet 4.7 to also come out soon.

[00:08:15]Um so yeah, you can't really go back.

[00:08:17]So that's it. So we have a new model.

[00:08:20]Um it's way more capable. So if you have any old code uh bases, any codes, like old prototypes, you can just, you know, maybe have Opus 4.7 review um those. And um yeah, I think that's pretty much what we have to cover here. So for you to know that that is uh big change. One additional more imp- No, actually, let's cover this when we get to the desktop app.

[00:08:51]So if you have watched the whole 4 and 1/2 hour course, you have seen me talk about three different environments, meaning that you can use Claude code in terminal, in desktop app, and IDE, integrated development environment. And my suggestion was to use it in anti-gravity.

[00:09:09]However, last week, um Claude completely redesigned their desktop app, and it made it much better.

[00:09:17]So let's have a look.

[00:09:18]And I'll also give you my uh Where is it?

[00:09:22]Uh desktop app.

[00:09:24]And I'll give you my take on what you should do.

[00:09:27]So what you can see is that um well, if you haven't used it before, you won't see the differences, but basically, what you can do now is you can just run multiple sessions.

[00:09:40]Hey there. So you can like parallelize better. So um new session.

[00:09:46]And I can drop this one here. So you can have this like split view.

[00:09:53]Um hey.

[00:09:56]Let's do another one. So, new session.

[00:10:00]Hello, channel coding. We can put this one here. So, you can just see that basically you can have multiple instances of Cloud Code running on the same desktop app, which was not possible before.

[00:10:12]What's also there is this really cool feature which wasn't there before. So, you can have a preview of websites. You can have preview of the changes, which is diff.

[00:10:22]You can also open up Cloud Code in terminal. You can see the task or the plan of Cloud Code. Um so, you know, when you're actually engaging with it like, "Hey, um how can you help me build this and that?"

[00:10:35]When you're actually finished with the plan mode, it will just natively here show you like a full-fledged plan. And you can see just by clicking here. And you can also see an overview of the tasks that's going through. So, cool little features.

[00:10:50]Um what is also cool is just the way you can control the model here. Um you can choose basically your folder that you will work in. You can choose multiple folders. You can choose the permission modes here. You can also now just uh if you press and hold this button, and there's also a hotkey, which I forgot which one it is. Uh command D maybe? Let's see. Command D.

[00:11:12]Yeah, command D just lets you then talk into um Cloud Code and it will just show up that exactly in this chat box.

[00:11:21]And then when you release the buttons, it stops.

[00:11:24]Remedy just lets you then talk into Yeah, as you can see maybe maybe that's just my poor English, but um I found usually with Anthropic uh products that their voice-to-text just doesn't work as well, at least for non-native speakers like myself. So, I usually use another tool for that.

[00:11:43]Uh but yeah, just for you to know it's here.

[00:11:46]And also really really important here, we have this uh choosing models, uh choosing effort, which is just very very convenient to just have it with a click of a button.

[00:11:55]What we have here is also like the overview of the usage from your 5-hour, which is like the like the more basic block of how uh Cloud measures how much usage you still have left to the weekly overview, to the Cloud Design overview, and to the Sonnet only bucket as well. If I click here, okay, I see all of it.

[00:12:16]Which we don't need to see right now.

[00:12:18]So, give me a second.

[00:12:21]Okay, we're back here. So, um Yeah, so basically as you can see much more user-friendly.

[00:12:29]Um just way better user interface than we had before. And frankly, when I say this, it just feels like the best beginner setup for most people.

[00:12:38]I have now used it for the last 3 and 1/2 4 days, and my feeling is still I don't know, something me personally still prefers Antigravity.

[00:12:49]Uh just because I can have the whole like folder open all the time. Let me just show you what I mean. Give me a second.

[00:12:56]I personally just enjoy having like a full folder overview here at the left.

[00:13:00]And also there's just something about this user interface that's just works better for me personally.

[00:13:05]Um also being able to switch between tabs just in the same way I'm switching in Chrome, it's just something that's very intuitive to me. So, I might keep using this.

[00:13:15]Um but I think for most of you, maybe you could just uh well, let me go back to this.

[00:13:21]Uh if you're just starting out, I think you might get used to using Cloud's desktop app because it doesn't also uh require any installation. So, if we go back to the overview, you might remember that basically what we had to do in order to get um Cloud Code working in the integrated development environment such as Antigravity, we had to do a lot of manual work. We had to install the software. We had to uh install the extension. We had to connect it and so on.

[00:13:50]It wasn't awful, but also it's just additional steps. So, if you're just starting out, I think Cloud gave us one more reason to just go with the desktop app now.

[00:14:01]Um last thing on the desktop app is that now we also have the auto mode.

[00:14:08]You might remember me talking about it also in the other the longer video. The auto mode is the one where basically Cloud decides itself when it actually just bypasses permissions and when it actually stops and asks you for permission.

[00:14:21]For example, when it's deleting something or when it's doing any high-risk moves. So, uh in general, my recommendation on the old video was to use plan mode when you're starting and then just click to bypass permissions.

[00:14:33]Uh well, now I would just go with plan mode in the beginning and then auto mode after that.

[00:14:37]So, um which brings us to the biggest news, which is Cloud Design.

[00:14:45]And the Cloud Design was introduced primarily also because Google Stitch came up with this product and Anthropic saw how successful it was, but also Opus 4.7 gives you a chance to do a proper like design product, agentic design product because it's just so much better visually.

[00:15:04]So, based on all of this, they had a confidence that they could release a product such as Cloud Design, which is essentially um if you remember me talking about the landscape of agentic tools, we have the general agentic tools such as Cloud Code and Codex.

[00:15:24]Um then we have the more uh design agentic tools such as Google Stitch and Figma Make.

[00:15:29]And then we have the traditional design tools like Figma and Adobe. So, where basically Is this all locked? Let me just unlock this.

[00:15:40]Did it work? Yeah. So, basic Cloud Design fits here. So, let's say not the general agent tool, but it's a specific design agentic tool. And it goes from language to pixel, which means you are mostly uh well, you are mostly uh giving instructions to this model how to work through language.

[00:16:05]Which is very frustrating for a lot of designers.

[00:16:08]But I'll come to this in a bit.

[00:16:10]So yeah, we have the Cloud Design introduction.

[00:16:14]I'm sure most of you have seen it until now, but basically um the way it works right now, it only works in the web. So, it doesn't work in the the desktop application. You have to go on the cloud.ai/design, and you have to be a paid uh subscriber.

[00:16:29]So, pro max or enterprise. And you can see here you can do many different things. You can build new prototypes. You can build slide decks. You can go build something from a template.

[00:16:40]And you can also create design systems.

[00:16:44]Um so, I have played with um different things. And well, the first thing I need to say is that at the moment, Cloud Design is extremely token inefficient or at least the token usage that you get as a user, you just burn through it in like 60 to 90 minutes if you actually are using it in the way that feels intuitive. And the way it feels intuitive is you just, you know, you create something. You start a new project. You create a new system. And then naturally, you want to be working with that design natively in the Cloud Design. And that's basically what burns all of your credits. If I show you my usage to the moment, I'm at 73% uh Cloud Design weekly usage, even though I'm a max uh 5x max user. Um I even heard some rumors that actually pro and max have the same usage on the Cloud Design. I'm not sure if that's true or not. Um but just for you to know that basically everyone people with 20x max, so 20 times the usage with 5x max and pro are complaining about the fact that when you use Cloud Design, you just burn through your credits in like 60 to 90 minutes, which is an issue which I think Cloud or Anthropic will address and solve.

[00:18:03]But I think the bigger issue is just that what people actually want to do and what feels intuitively doing with Cloud Design, which is just you creating something and then also working with that something inside Cloud Design, it just it's unusable because in 60 minutes you're basically done with your with Yeah, with your weekly limit and then it's well, then you can just buy more tokens and have additional usage, but it just gets very expensive very very fast.

[00:18:36]So, what I have tried is I have tried basically uh well, I have mostly played with design systems.

[00:18:44]Uh haven't tried using slide decks uh or building anything else.

[00:18:48]Just based on the fact that when I use design systems, I was just burning through my tokens so quickly that I realized that actually yeah, I won't have enough tokens until the end of the week to use do anything else. But also frankly, from looking from how others from what others have tried doing with Cloud Design, it seems that this might actually be the best use case anyway.

[00:19:09]Um So, basically what I have tried doing was create a design system for a couple of things that we have running at the DMBA.

[00:19:19]You might remember that we did the section in the long video where um Tom and I showed you how to basically create an AI native design system.

[00:19:28]And I think Cloud Design is just completely made that whole section well, more or less obsolete.

[00:19:35]So here, basically I would just suggest you to use Cloud Design.

[00:19:40]Specifically, the function for design systems. So, you have to click here, and then you click create, and then you can create the new system.

[00:19:49]And uh well, the way this looks like is that you get a prompt to um add the company name. Uh you can add some other notes, but very importantly, you can also add some assets. So, if you have a product already that exists, you could just drop in the GitHub uh code, and it will just do a really good job of turning this into a design system. So, for example, at the MBA, we have these student games.

[00:20:14]So, for each of the modules that we teach students, so there's a particular business topic we teach our students, and uh we have a game that they play in a um like a Zoom video call setup. So, we put them in groups, and then they play a game. So, we have these games, and uh we want obviously them to follow this design system.

[00:20:35]Um so, that's kind of how this looks like at the moment. So, what I did was basically just um drop the GitHub link uh in here, you know? So, when I click create, I drop the GitHub link of that uh repo, and basically just just creates uh the MBA game design system.

[00:20:56]A really, really good design system. Uh and it Cloud Code native design system.

[00:21:01]So, it's just figure out what the borders are that we're using, the um colors and accents, the buttons, the supply uh display type, typography, how we show data, uh the background colors, and so on. So, um previously, we just relied on Cloud Code having a look at the previous game, and just try to replicate this.

[00:21:31]The way we will use this now is basically, you can just retroactively take the repo, the code that you already have, or design that you already have.

[00:21:41]You can create a design system, make sure it looks good, and then you can just click share here, and then you can hand it off to Cloud Code.

[00:21:48]So, you can send it to a local coding agent, which would be if you're using anti-gravity, or the Cloud Code web if you're using the desktop app, right? So, if I'm using this app here, I could just basically okay, click this, and it should Well, this is now opening it in the uh web browser, but you get the point, right? So, you can do this, and just hand it over to Cloud Code.

[00:22:10]And then, when I'm developing a new game, it's just going to follow these the system by default. So, this makes creating design system from something that you already have way, way easier.

[00:22:22]But, if you're starting from scratch, the way that works, I have tried it as well.

[00:22:26]Um basically, I asked it to create a system for a community that So, in the long video, in the 4 and 1/2 hour Cloud Code for Designers video, uh in the pinned comment, I'm basically saying, "Hey, if you like this video, and you would love to have some kind of a community where we keep track of what's going on in terms of the gigantic tools uh for design community, um then join the waitlist."

[00:22:52]So, I started playing a little bit with how that web page and that brand could look like if we do a gigantic design community.

[00:23:01]So, basically, I just dropped like a long prompt. Actually, let me go back here. So, what I did was I clicked on creating a new design system.

[00:23:13]Um this here, and I did not fill out any of these things, because I did not have anything. I just dropped in here like a really comprehensive prompt. So, I used Cloud Chat to give my idea of what I want, which is a terminal-inspired ASCII visuals uh type of craft terminal vibe, um and it's just really created like a good, good uh design system. So, you can see here, basically, we have the terminal feel of the font, we have um a lot of like visual assets that definitely are inspired by uh the terminal use, and also by Agentic tools.

[00:24:00]Uh so, it really like one-shotted what you see here.

[00:24:04]Um and now, basically, the whole design system is here with everything. Like, I could go now into this, and give it more feedback, um and we could get to the next stage, but, you know, uh for creating design systems from scratch, um yeah, it's pretty, pretty phenomenal. Now, one thing to point out is that when I did research for um this video, I had a look at basically the output that other people are getting using Cloud Code, specifically design system uh function, and it seems that there's a certain aesthetic that Cloud Design really loves, and it is this a paper white background with uh with orange.

[00:24:56]So, actually, if you review, I don't know if you just open up some videos online of people reacting to Cloud Design, most designs are somewhere similar to what you hit what you see here, right? Um maybe it's just that Cloud itself has this kind of look and feel of the paper white with orange, right?

[00:25:18]Because that's their brand as well.

[00:25:20]Uh Cloud branding.

[00:25:25]See?

[00:25:26]Um it might be that it has a bias for this color scheme, so just keep this in mind, you know? If you're creating uh design system from scratch, that is the kind of the vanilla of what you will get. It's It's good, it's solid, it's like impressive what it can do in 10 minutes, but then make sure to just do some tweaks where you can actually um make it look different from just the vanilla Cloud design result.

[00:25:55]Now, um I will not go through the full shebang of how to use Cloud Design. I mean, what you can see here is just it's visual. On the left-hand side, you have the chat, you can give it feedback. This is what I meant with you typing in, and then it actually trying to visually change things. There's also additional uh ways to command with this user interface. You can do comments, you know, you can click here, and you can just add comment to the specific uh element. You can also draw here, and then basically tell it what you basically want it to uh Yeah, basically draw, and then also drop a comment. Uh discard drawing, discard drawing. So, you can basically just give it also more visual inputs of the changes you want, uh which is very, very nice.

[00:26:43]Um still, I find that and I talked to a couple of friends, designers, who find this user interface very, very frustrating in the fact that well, most designers love to create design themselves, something that they create in Figma, or either from scratch, or when they see something like this, then they would like to change it. So, my suggestion would be to, based on what I have seen so far, is that the best use cases for Cloud Design are basically what I shared so far. One is to retroactively try to create design system of a code base that you already have, which is what I've done with this game, or to create a design system from scratch, have something that feels like a good starting point, and then do not keep tweaking the design here, but rather just, you know, export it to um you can hand it off to Cloud Code, which would be my suggestion. So, you can just do this, and then you can change things further in Cloud Code. There's two reasons for that.

[00:27:49]Or, you can also just uh where is it? Share. You can also send to uh Canva.

[00:27:57]No option to send to Figma yet, but I assume that's not going to take long until they implement this as well.

[00:28:03]Additional benefit of handing off to Cloud Code when you have a draft that you want to work with is that then you're no longer using the tokens from the you're no longer burning these tokens, but then you're burning these tokens, right? So, the Cloud Code tokens, which there's many more of.

[00:28:22]Which means that that is one way where you can basically improve this flow is you just create design systems, and then basically maybe even improve them in Cloud Code, or just use them in Cloud Code, right?

[00:28:37]So, just to make this a little bit more clear, what I'm trying to say is what I have found so far is uh first of all, there is some kind of Cloud Design slop, which is this paper white with orange color. So, definitely work on color schemes. That's a big one.

[00:28:53]Um but I think design systems are its strongest um feature. Uh you can do it like from code base.

[00:29:09]And it's really good at recreating just like a recreating any AI native uh AI native design system that you can use, or the rest of your team can use.

[00:29:19]Um Oh, by the way, you can also share that with your teammates. So, if you have like an enterprise plan, everybody um who's in this plan can basically view, use it, edit it. Um if you're not using the enterprise model, this becomes a little bit more complicated, and then yeah, you might want to use some other option of exporting this out.

[00:29:40]Yeah, so if you have a product already, you can basically build an AI native design system out of it. If you don't have it yet, uh then the second option is to build a draft from scratch. So, my point is don't rely on it yet to do the whole thing for you. Just get something just get some variations of what feels like a good starting point and then hand over to Claude code to actually get to the next stage because mind you Claude code also uses open Opus 4.7.

[00:30:15]Which is very good at visual reasoning.

[00:30:16]So, you can do the same things. You can do a lot of the same things that you're doing in Claude design in Claude code just with more efficient or like with a bigger token usage allowance that you have.

[00:30:29]Yeah, so that would be my take on Claude design. So, it's at stage where visually it can still create slop.

[00:30:36]Um it is definitely showing in which direction we're going and it kind of also hm let's say I wouldn't say proof, but goes in the same direction of the way I see the future of this landscape which is some divide between the general agentic tools which will become the working horse because you can use them for so many other things than just design as we talked about automations and other stuff.

[00:31:06]Uh also the handover is better when working between design and development.

[00:31:11]Um then there's going to be some UIs that are specifically made to feel more visual such as Claude design and they might be clunky just because of the way visual agents work.

[00:31:25]And that's why there's still going to be some space for these tools where we work with basically pixel to pixel where like I have an idea. I just want to do it myself. I don't want to um give you input through language so that you can change stuff in uh pixels, right? So, I think this landscape is shaping to go roughly in this direction. There might be more of these like you being able to actually um well, manipulate pixels within something like Claude design. We're not there yet. But that might be the next frontier. If not, we will end up with these kind of a handover between agent being able to turn language into pixels and then us needing to polish things up in something like Figma or Adobe.

[00:32:13]Okay, so that's frankly it. Let's see if did I forget anything.

[00:32:19]Opus 4.7.

[00:32:22]No, I think that's more or less it. So, the big picture here is yes, there's a lot of news, but the fundamentals are the same. So, the way the technology works, its advantages, its limitations are still there. We are getting new tools and that's why it's frankly a very good time to start playing with these tools.

[00:32:42]One thing I would advise you to do is just the best way to learn these tools is to just start using them, to pick a side project, your pet project, maybe a business idea that you had for years and just pick a tool, you know, take a desktop app and just try to build it with that and you will just learn a lot of these things. And you will also take certain tangents that I didn't cover in this course. You will just find your own rabbit holes. You will learn a lot because LLM itself is a really good teacher as well. You can just tell it, "Hey, simplify this for me. I'm not sure what you mean."

[00:33:14]I think what this course gives you is just like a good really overview of understanding what the landscape is and what the map is and now you can just explore on your own.

[00:33:22]And um obviously um I'm also interested in exploring further this in some sort of community. So, if you're interested in me building that, again just check out the description in the first comment below and maybe join the waitlist.

[00:33:35]That's it. Have a great week. Bye-bye.