My First Solo International Trip
After a long 17 hours of travel from Detroit Michigan to La Paz Bolivia I was exhausted and it was 1am so I did what any reasonable person would do and I blew up my sleeping pad and called it a night I the corner of the airport. I got so many strange looks but I had nowhere to go, didn’t speak Spanish and had no service on my phone. This was a surreal experience because I was really excited to have finally arrived but I felt weary because I didn’t know what I was doing and I was in a foreign land.
After a really poor night of sleep in the airport I woke up and got airport coffee before connecting to the internet and calling an uber to the city center of La Paz. The uber ride was my first real experience of the Bolivian culture and let me tell you, it was hectic! The airport sits at about 17,500 ft of elevation and my uber was taking me down 2,000 ft to the city center. As we cross the mountains I could see a vast network of clay buildings that made up the biggest city I have ever seen in person. It was so beautiful to see the city filling up the valley between mountain ranges. There seemed to be so much life and I couldn’t wait to explore. In the distance I could see mountains outside the city limits and a whole world that I was going to explore. The rest of the uber ride was hectic as I was unaware of the driving norms of La Paz Bolivia. My driver was weaving in and out of traffic, there were people walking right through the traffic, moped weaving through, and a million different horns honking. It seemed like chaos but my driver was unfazed as he navigated the traffic and dropped me off at the bus station in the city center.
I wasn’t planning on staying long in the city and I booked a bus ticket to the Uyuni Salt Flats set to depart at 9pm. I spent the day exploring a bit of the markets and restaurants taking in the local culture along the way. There were kids running all over the place and they were extremely friendly to me, running up and jumping in my lap and trying to play with me, or sell me something I was not entirely sure. Either way, I was shocked with how friendly everybody was, especially the kids. It was great to experience that kind of community on my first day in the country.
After exploring for the day I sat down to wait for my bus to arrive at about 7pm. This is where my day took a turn for the worst.
Bolivian Riots
I started to hear blast in the distance that sounded like gun shots followed by people screaming. I was very confused and did not understand what was going on so I kept sitting, looking around to see if the locals were concerned. After about 30 minutes of these blasts and screams I heard them getting closer and could sense an uneasy feeling on the locals faces as they kept looking at me, probably looking terrified. With the little service I had, I started looking up what it could be and I quickly learned that those blast were rubber bullets striking into the rioting Bolivians against the police. There was massive riots due to the rising political battle taking place on my first day in the country! I also learned that my bus route from La Paz to Uyuni usually took place every night, however; the bus hadn’t left in a week because the last trip was a nightmare for everyone on board. Half way through the bus ride, in the middle of the desert the bus was stopped by 50 Bolivian holding handmade slingshots and shooting rocks at the bus. The bus ended up stopping for 50 hours in the middle of the scoring hot tester while Bolivians shot rocks at them. There were Americans on the bus that later reported to the local news that they didn’t know if they would live or die as they were running out of water and it was scoring hot. Eventually the Bolivian military learned of this and stepped in to rescue the bus and everybody was okay.
I learned of this event 1 hour before I was supposed to get on the first bus ride to make the journey after the event took place. So I did what any reasonable person would do and I bought 2 2 gallon bottles of water, some extra chips and snacks and hopped on the bus.
I was terrified at the start of the journey but quickly settled in and fell asleep. The bus ride went over extremely well, we were not stopped and held at slingshot point and we made it to Uyuni around 5:30 am the next morning.
Uyuni
Most of my day-to-day is juggling client sites, so the thing I really wanted to stress-test was workflow. Around the half-hour mark 33:43 I walked through how I’m using the Claude desktop app now — multiple project “terminals” in one workspace, one per site. Switching between a grooming landing page and an unrelated client build doesn’t require swapping IDEs, tabs, or context.
Pair that with native macOS tools — Preview for image compression, the built-in background removal 26:15 — and suddenly a chunk of my Photoshop / Figma / third-party plugin stack is just… gone. I haven’t opened Photoshop in weeks and I haven’t missed it once.
Bus From Uyuni to San Pedro de Atacama
Around 31 minutes in 31:30 Enmanuel and I got into the honest question: does this replace Figma, Elementor, WordPress? After pushing the tool hard for an hour, here’s my read:
- High-end agency work: No. Complex overlapping compositions, pixel-perfect art direction, brand systems — Claude Design struggled to execute these cleanly 47:43. The human touch still wins at the top of the market.
- Low-to-mid market: Over. If you’re a small business that would have hired a freelancer off Fiverr or signed up for Squarespace, you are going to ship faster and cheaper with a tool like this. Full stop.
That’s the same delta I’ve been watching play out in code for two years 57:00. It’s here for design now.
Where it’s still rough
I don’t want to oversell this. We hit token limits twice on stream 46:50 53:57. The usage caps are real, and if you’re mid-flow on a client demo, watching the tool ask you to wait is not fun. Subscriptions solve money; they don’t solve throughput when the servers are busy.
And as I said above, anything asking for specific artistic positioning — overlapping hero images, precise offsets, unusual grids — still required hands on the CSS. Claude Design gets you to 80%. The last 20% is still you.
What I’d tell someone starting today
- If you’re non-technical and have been putting off learning design tools, don’t. Start with Claude Design and learn the vocabulary by doing.
- If you’re a freelancer charging $500–$2,000 for small-business sites: your customer is going to try this in the next six months. Your offer needs to be the thing the tool can’t do yet — strategy, copy, photography, ongoing maintenance.
- If you’re an agency doing complex brand work: you’re fine. For now.
Figma isn’t literally dead. But the job most people were using Figma to do? That job is getting done in Claude now. And it’s only going to get better from here.