Design with AI: what worked for me (and what drove me crazy)
I've been testing AI design tools lately. Lovable, Bolt, Figma Make, V0. Here's what I learned from building with these tools.
Know your mode
You're either:
Brainstorming from scratch
Making an existing design interactive
Know which one before you start. It changes everything about your approach.
The biggest pain point: inference
You manually change a button color, ask the AI to update some text, and suddenly your button is back to the original color. The AI doesn't remember your manual changes—it steamrolls over them.
Three solutions:
Tell the AI what you're doing. "I'm changing this button to red, preserve this in future changes."
Be specific. "Only modify the translation function, don't touch the styling."
Work in tiny iterations. One change, test, repeat.
Pro tip: Ask what the AI would change before it changes anything. "If I added a search bar, what would you modify?", use dry-run
The tools, ranked
Lovable: Most reliable, but gets flaky with complex projects.
Bolt: Fast start with screenshots, but hallucinates features easily.
Figma Make: Most professional, but it's beta and sometimes takes forever to center an element.
V0: Promising for quick prototypes.
What actually works
Think like a front-end developer. Say "padding" not "add space."
Give context upfront. Explain what your product does.
Use "dry-run" to preview changes without making them.
Be intentional. AI builds garbage if you feed it garbage.
The reality check
Classic 80/20 rule: 80% of results in 20% of time, then 80% of time for the last 20%. Great for prototyping, terrible for pixel-perfect production code.
Simple landing pages work great. Complex apps? You'll fight the AI more than work with it. (I wrote a bit more about that on this article)
My take
These tools are genuinely useful for rapid prototyping. But they're not magic. You need to understand how things work, be extremely clear about what you want, and stay patient when the AI "helps" by changing things you didn't ask for.
Worth trying? Absolutely. Just expect some patience and specific writing skills.