You're Doing It Wrong

Every week there's a new design tool. It's got AI built in. It lives in your IDE. It generates variations. The demos are incredible. The infinite canvas beckons.

And it's still a canvas you click around in. Still a proprietary file format. Still a tool you conform to. Still an app.

They're making the old paradigm agentic instead of abandoning the paradigm entirely.

Here's what I actually do. I open a terminal. I talk to an AI agent. I say "make the click zones tighter" or "try Bitter for the headings" or "that opacity is too heavy, bring it down." The agent writes the code. I look at it in the browser. I say what's wrong. We go back and forth until it's right.

No canvas. No layers panel. No export step. No design-to-dev handoff. The design is the code. The code is the design. There's nothing in between.

The new tools want to put something in between. That's the trap. They look like progress because they're faster and smarter than the old tools. But they're still tools. They still sit between you and the thing you're making.

The shift isn't Figma to better Figma. It's Figma to no Figma.

I know this sounds extreme. It felt extreme when I started. I kept reaching for a canvas, a color picker, a layout grid. Muscle memory from fifteen years of design tools. But every time I caught myself wanting a tool, I'd just describe what I wanted instead. And the agent would build it. And then I'd react to it. And we'd iterate.

That loop -- describe, react, iterate -- is faster than any tool. Not because the AI is fast (it is), but because there's nothing in the way. No interface to learn. No menus to navigate. No paradigm to conform to. Just me and the work.

The people building AI-powered design tools are solving the wrong problem. They're building better hammers. The rest of us stopped using hammers.