Every week another AI design tool launches with a slick landing page and a Twitter thread promising to replace your design team. Most of them don't survive a real client engagement. A few quietly become indispensable. This is the short list we actually keep open in our browser.
We're an AI-native agency, which means we're not interested in pretending these tools don't exist. We're also not interested in shipping slop. The honest answer about AI in web design is that it's incredibly useful for the first and last fifteen percent of a project — exploration and polish — and pretty mediocre at the long stretch in the middle where craft actually lives.
Below is what's earned a permanent slot in our stack, what we use situationally, and what we've quietly uninstalled.
What we reach for first.
Figma AI and the new generative panel.
Figma is still where the actual design work happens, and the AI features baked into it have gotten genuinely useful. First Draft is fine for round-zero exploration when a stakeholder needs to see something. The auto-rename and visual search features save real time on cleanup. None of this replaces a designer — it replaces the boring parts of the designer's day.
Midjourney and DALL·E for hero imagery.
When a client doesn't have brand photography and the budget won't stretch to a shoot, we generate. Midjourney v6 is still the strongest for moody, editorial visuals. DALL·E inside ChatGPT is faster for iterative prompting because you can refine in plain English. The trick is treating outputs as raw material — color grade, retouch, composite. Don't ship the first render.
Claude and ChatGPT for copy in the layout.
We do final copywriting separately. But for design comp copy — the headlines, sub-decks, and microcopy that need to fit a layout before the brand voice is locked — generative LLMs are faster than lorem ipsum and far more useful. The mistake is shipping that copy. The benefit is shaping the layout to real-feeling content from day one.
What we use situationally.
v0 and Lovable for live prototypes.
When the design needs to behave before it gets coded — a complex form, a multi-step flow, a dashboard with real interactions — we'll spin up a v0 or Lovable prototype. It's faster than building a Figma flow that simulates state. The output is throwaway. The conversation it unlocks with stakeholders is not.
Galileo AI for unfamiliar problem spaces.
If we're designing something we haven't designed thirty times before — a niche B2B dashboard, a vertical-specific marketplace — Galileo gives us a quick scan of the design conventions in that space. We don't copy. We orient.
Khroma for color systems.
Trains on palettes you actually like. Useful for the ten minutes when you need a starting point and don't want another generic gradient.
What we tried and dropped.
Several tools promise full-website generation from a prompt. The output is always the same: a generic SaaS landing page with five sections, a hero, a features grid, three pricing tiers, and a CTA. They're fine for someone who needs a website. They're useless for someone who needs the website that makes their business work.
We also stopped using AI for accessibility audits. The false confidence is dangerous. Run real tools — axe, Lighthouse, manual keyboard testing. Don't outsource accountability to a chatbot that tells you everything is fine.
The honest framing.
AI tools are leverage. They make a senior designer faster. They make a junior designer dangerous. The best designers we work with use these tools constantly and the work doesn't look AI-generated — because the AI is doing the boring parts and the human is still making the decisions that matter.
If you're hiring an agency right now and they're either pretending AI doesn't exist or pretending it does everything, run.
The right question isn't 'does this agency use AI?' It's 'where do they choose not to?'