The Irony behind the Productivity Potential of AI generative Tools

For my side project, I need to do a user survey. I created a short form with YouForm (a simple but powerful survey tool! referral link) to be filled by users I will reach out to in real life. I will give them a small card (like a business card) with a QR code on it that links to the form.

I used Figma Make because I tried to use Canvas, but their AI tool keeps generating designs that look like templates from Microsoft Publisher circa 1998. Figma Make is also less busy in terms of UI (it looks a lot like Lovable, or maybe this is the other way around ?), it’s more a playground to ideate.

The massive shortcoming is that you cannot export the result in Figma Design, their main tool! It feels like a dead end. Hopefully, with the $ 411 million raised this week following their IPO, those oversights will be promptly filled.

One thing that I noticed with all those AI Generative apps is that they are really valuable to lower the barrier of entry between ideas and draft. They really embody the saying that a picture is worth 10,000 words. This study about the productivity boost (or lack of) using coding AI agents has made a lot of noise recently. Regardless of the validity of their findings, I can understand one of the observations made by commentators of it: those tools are kind of slow, so when you prompt them, you have to wait for the results, and so you context switch more easily. It’s true that they make things faster overall for me, but in their practice lies a trap to avoid if you are the kind of person to be distracted easily.

PS: if you want to read more about the S1 of Figma and their recent IPO, CJ Gustafson got you covered.