Is it worth paying for Claude AI because of Claude Design?

Reedsy.com allows freelancers to register by filling in a few details about themselves and adding 5 projects they have worked on. Of course, they should be in the book field. I don’t have such references, and quickly making 5 websites for 5 different books, while not that complicated in the age of AI, is another matter if they are supposed to be polished and well thought out. And I wanted it to be worth it. The perfect opportunity to try Claude Design AI.

To use Claude Design AI, you need the paid version of Claude. Based on examples online, it generates very nice designs, but it also burns through tokens very quickly, meaning you can’t create much before the AI refuses to continue. What is the reality?

In short, on Sunday I paid for Claude and started creating one book website in Claude Design. By Monday, Claude was no longer talking to me :-)

The first website for the fictional book Andy's Travel Logs

turned out quite well: https://czech-this.com/books/andys-travel-logs/
for a first attempt.

Everything is created in the web version of Claude in Design mode, where you enter a prompt and after a few minutes the website is ready. To do anything further with it, Claude recommends handing it over to Claude Code. There are still more things to finish there, because what Claude Design produces would not do very well in today’s online world from a web-processing perspective. It would be invisible to search engines and even to AI bots. So the whole thing then needs to be rebuilt, fine-tuned, adjusted, and so on. That takes a lot more time. But the design itself, I’d say, is created very well. However, it burns through tokens very quickly, and then you may have to wait a day before they refill so you can continue. Or you can pay extra.

So far it looks like generating one design uses up so many tokens that there are none left for creating another.

The second and third websites

After creating the second design (this time for a fantasy book about witches and wizards), a message appeared saying that Claude is doubling the number of tokens for Claude Design. I have to say, though, that after creating the third design (a website for a book by a photographer from the Middle East), I again had nothing left for a fourth one, so I’m waiting again.

But that relatively fast token drain has its upside. It gives you time to rest; otherwise, you’d just sit there creating and creating.

I have to say that the first website - Andy's Travel Logs - I don’t like quite as much in hindsight, but I’m still happy that it went fairly smoothly. The second website - the fantasy book - isn’t exactly my cup of tea, but for what it needs to present, it fits perfectly, and the effects match it beautifully. Overall, I think it turned out very well, mainly thanks to a much more specific prompt combined with well-prepared materials (images, etc.). Again, I had to fine-tune a lot of things there, which I no longer do through Claude Design, but through Claude Code, which doesn’t consume as many tokens.

And the third website for the photographer had an even more specific prompt, and I think it turned out very well too. With each design, it seems to be getting better and better, which is probably a logical progression. There will definitely be missteps and maybe even a step back now and then, but I’m already curious how the website for a personal development book and the website for a book dedicated to an architectural project will turn out.

I have to say I like the paid version of Claude, and with regular AI I wouldn’t be able to generate designs like these so easily. But it also needs to be said that there is a lot of work after the design is generated, and I’ve mainly noticed that working with Claude Code is, compared with working in VS Code with GitHub Copilot, damn slow. Claude seems to be sipping coffee and smoking a cigar while doing all that creating. It’s a snail :-)

As for coding, I definitely wouldn’t switch to Claude just for coding and would stay with VS Code and GitHub Copilot. The speed of the workflow is crucial in this case.