TL;DR: Three days to ship a dashboard. The designer was unavailable, the Figma file had maybe 40% of the screens done, and the PM wanted something demo-ready for a client call. 📖 Reading time: ~29 min What's in this article The Situation That Made Me Actually Compare These What I Mean by 'AI-Generated UI' (and What I Don't) Setting Up the AI UI Side: v0.dev in Practice The Traditional Design Path: Figma to Code The Exact Moment v0 Won (and the Exact Moment It Lost) Honest Pros and Cons Breakdown Head-to-Head Comparison Table When to Pick What — Actual Decision Rules I Use The Situation That Made Me Actually Compare These Three days to ship a dashboard. The designer was unavailable, the Figma file had maybe 40% of the screens done, and the PM wanted something demo-ready for a client call. That's not a hypothetical setup — that's the actual pressure that made me stop treating AI-generated UI as a curiosity and start treating it as a real option worth measuring against my normal workflow.…