May 3 2025
First impressions -
Prototyping with Cursor, Loveable, Copilot & what it means
Cursor
Copilot
V0
Loveable
Storybook
Interaction Design
Human-computer-interaction
See through software
For the first time in life I have experienced something in tech that felt like a paradigm shift. All the hype with Deepseek, Chatgpt etc, I honestly didn't feel it, didn't understand it. But then came Cursor, Loveable and V0, and these felt like a leap.
I do not quite understand the fear people have this will kill design. If anything that's gonna kill design is investor's pressure to make money at any cost and if that means laying off people, shipping low quality product for short term gains, it will happen no matter what. Anyway that's not the point of this blog.
The point is : TLDR: Super-fast prototyping is addictive, is a world full of possibilities for everyone, and it is a gateway to faster evidence-driven design.
A month ago..
I found myself midnight in a rabbit-hole using Loveable to prototype something for my work. I also wanted to see the hype for myself.
The first 10 mins were shocking. As I went on feeding it prompts after prompts, it started losing its charm very soon. Very good at creating random things but not so good at following instructions and building on past instructions. I got frustrated pretty fast, hated the back and forth and then ran out of my limits.
But I was still hooked, I had a somewhat working prototype in 20 mins, which was honestly incredible, and I didn't want to stop. I immediately downloaded Cursor, paid for it and exported the loveable project.
Now, I was not only giving Cursor instructions, was also looking at the code and editing it where I could using my instincts. I could fix small things fast.
Over a week I watched Cursor writing code, and found myself writing too and refactoring things to make things more manageable. Till this point who knew what the hell was refactoring?
As of now..
Since I have learned how to use it, and a bit of how react works, past 1 month, I am basically living in copilot and cursor. I have created working playgrounds for POC's experiments etc and rapidly testing them with people as I go.
It took me half a day to create a very complex prototype and see the interaction details for myself. I cannot stress enough on the fact - how horrible, tedious and time consuming it was to use figma variables for testing/ validating interactions.
It's like going straight from riding bullock cart to bullet train
The whole ineffective, inefficient process of prototyping interactions in bits and parts without being able to see how the whole functions when the parts are stitched together is completely eradicated. I don't have to ask and wait engineers to publish everything on storybook, so that I can see how they behave.
It used to be like designing a car without being able to turn on the engine or drive it. Even if the car could start locally, you won't be the person driving, you have to watch someone else drive. And now I can't believe we lived like this for this long.
You can do things you never imagined…
As someone who learns by doing and think visually, it has been very difficult to learn coding as it is so abstract that there is nothing that could have helped me paint a picture of how it all comes together. Now that's not the case.
When I am watching Cursor write code I am seeing the concepts being turned into abstraction live. And that has helped me so much to grasp the concepts.
In 2 days from asking it to build things for me, I went to data modelling. And I swear I am not using buzzwords here, I didn't know I was creating data structures until my partner said I "what you are doing has a name". Isn't it incredible?
For designers those who don't want to code..
There is no way out.. this thing is very good but not that good where you can just feed in prompts and have it build things, at least for a while. There is also no way you can vibe code your way out of it.. you have to learn to code for a while. But good thing is, it's easier than ever.
This could be a gateway to software design too..
I have lately been dealing with legacy systems and how they were designed - some engineer's idea, that pretty much dictates the UX right now. When I was working on my prototype of a complete overhaul, I found myself unintentionally modelling data structures, I was still focused on the UX, what it would mean to the user. Reflecting back, it was a point where all disciplines could collapse into 1 person.
Think about from the POV of human-computer interaction, where designers mostly focus on the human part and design the interface of the computer, now because you have found a gateway inside the computer, you can change things beyond the interface. If we are bridging the gap between human and computer, the ultimate goal now is to make the computer require no bridge, so much so that it skips all unnecessary borrowing of human's embodied cognition.
No more staring at a picture and deliberating what can it do…
Greatest thing about this is, we have skipped so much unnecessary deliberation debates, where you are looking at a picture of a car and imagining what would it be like to drive this car.
It's not the developers who are going to steal your job, neither do PMs, it's the other designers.
Product design is a lot of things. When I think of things I am good at, I don't think it's the tools. Tools are only as good as those using them. It's always the meta thought. Am I good at Figma? I don't know, but how do I structure my boxes and auto-layout, and how do I name them, is it just OCD or is there a logic? It's the meta thought that matters - the boxes and the names are an attempt at mirroring the stack for the developer to consumer, and for me to think about how it will be built. No I am not trying to be good at Figma, I only try to be good at thinking about what anything means, and what is the implication.
Point being, what I appreciate in myself and other designers is thinking in systems, being thoughtful, being curious and proactive, looking underneath the surface, reaching out to people, being resourceful, borrowing from different disciplines. These are the things will always be in dearth.
But there will be designers, who can bring their ideas to life faster than anyone else, and that will make them efficient & unique. Not being slowed down or blocked by the constraints of hosting, engineering, tools. If someone wants to be showing static images of a car to their stakeholders & users to solicit feedback, rather have them drive it, it's not gonna work out anymore.
These tools are making evidence driven design possible, super-fast and incredibly efficient.
It will rid you off the most painstaking process of deliberation, debates that go no where. It will make you and everyone else accountable. I cannot stop ranting about how many times I have to deal with people with more power vested in them who would talk out of their asses rather provide valid authentic feedback. You could look through them and their mental gymnastics solely devoted to serve their ego. And you are left wondering what is this game we are playing and why? Why wasn't this part of the job description? So far I have adjusted to this by seeing the ego itself as a stakeholder, and I am not the only one, everyone knows it, everyone abides by it, no one says it.
There is a hope here that, you might be able to skip this whole exhausting draining drama by getting to the evidence faster at lightening speed and move the conversation to talking about the evidence. It hopefully will put an end to all unnecessary debates. It probably will hold us designers accountable too, for we can see our biases not playing out the way we thought.
I think we all should as soon as possible start playing with it to see where the future is headed.