I saw a talk by a designer recently about how he uses AI in his workflow. Some of it was just doing the same old things but faster, like building mock-ups.
What caught my attention though was his liberal use of in-the-moment throwaway tools, built straight inside Claude as artifacts. In his example case, he told Claude that he wanted it to present him with a grid of design briefs and put them into an interactive canvas where he could pick his favourite ones, and then kick off another round of generation.
Once that was done and he went for a few rounds, he asked Claude for an interactive design playground where he told it which knobs he wanted to tweak while refining the design (think density of elements, number of colors in the palette) etc.
These tools aren't meant to stick around, so they don't need to be well-made. Just good enough to help with the task at hand. Anything that could benefit from fast visual feedback and intuitive, hands-on control could use a throwaway tool.
I've resolved to actively look for such opportunities and will report back if I come across anything really exciting. Maybe you'll want to give it a go as well. If you do, let me know what you've built (and thrown away).
