Claude Design users lose project access after canceling, but export tool recovers data

A Hacker News poster reports losing access to their Claude Design projects after canceling a Claude Code Max subscription to try Codex, breaking an expectation that prior sessions remain viewable post-cancellation. The poster also describes losing promotional credits that were granted as compensation for service issues once the billing cycle ended, with the credits not restored after resubscribing. They attribute much of this to complex billing and entitlement logic that sales teams design but engineers struggle to implement cleanly, producing rough edges that consistently favor the vendor.

Commenters point out a workaround: Anthropic’s data export bundles Claude Design sessions in a design_chats directory as JSON, accessible even when the active account has no Design entitlement, and the JSON converts back to usable code via any modern LLM. Others note that in consumer-protection jurisdictions, providers are legally obligated to return account-associated data on request regardless of subscription status, so the data is recoverable in principle even when the UI hides it.

A secondary thread debates whether LLMs are suited to UI design at all. Critics argue multimodal models technically ingest images but lack genuine spatial reasoning, visual hierarchy, and affordance understanding, producing messy UX unless tightly specified — leading some to recommend image-generation models for early visual exploration before handing off to code.