In this talk from Hatch Conference, Jenny Wen, Design Lead at Anthropic and former Director of Design at Figma, explains why the traditional design process is outdated and no longer works for today’s tools and tech: ​“With AI accelerating prototyping, smaller teams doing more, and craft becoming a key differentiator, rigid processes are failing designers. Jenny shares real examples from Figma and Anthropic that show how great work actually gets made today. Starting from solutions, caring deeply about details, building intuition, skipping steps, and designing for delight.”

Jenny’s talk really resonated with me. Quickly trying and discarding solutions, iterating on details, and relying on intuition is how I prefer to work. Still, without formal collateral such as personas or problem statements, it can feel like taking a shortcut. I went through a phase of producing these artifacts, but often found them more useful for justifying decisions than making them. It finally clicked when I read Alan Cooper’s interaction design bible, ​“About Face,” a decade ago: a lot of these processes came from design consultancies. They have to learn a client’s business, do product discovery, solve a problem, and sell it to stakeholders in a short time before moving to the next client. The longer you work on a product, explore the problem space, and listen to users, the stronger your intuition gets, which lets you fast-forward and compress discovery and design process.

Tom Johnson: ​“It’s literally faster for me to build a concept inside of the actual codebase than it is to work in Figma. But the amount of versions and breadth of the final result is not up to the quality bar that I usually hold. I’m loving the speed, but the output is sloppy at times. So I’ve got this weird flow of Code → Code → Figma → Code → Figma. Repeat, reorder, etc. The issue is that the transition from Figma → code with their MCP is solid. […] But code → Figma… is a terrible flow.”

I often spend more time recreating a particular screen in Figma than actually designing the change. I’ve been beating on the Code Connect drum for a while as it has huge potential for connecting design and code components. Even though it was built to translate components from Figma to code, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work in reverse. Code Connect was announced almost two years ago (way before LLMs and MCPs got powerful), but because it’s locked behind Organization and Enterprise plans, it’s rarely discussed in the community or considered by plugin and tool makers.

Speaking of Tom, in this interview with Jay, he shows the DM he sent to Linear’s CEO to get an interview — and later the portfolio and case studies he used to land the job at Vercel.

Marcin Wichary, Design Architect at Figma, started a microblog about software craft and quality. His writing is always wonderful and insightful — instant subscribe.

A collection of essays by Raphael Salaja on interaction design and animations.

Joey Banks shares a simple way to get started with variables structure when he is not sure where to begin: ​“One very simple approach that’s worked well for me is separating variables into non-interactive and interactive buckets. […] Non-interactive variables describe the environment. Things like background surfaces, text, icons, and borders that don’t change based on input. Interactive variables describe behavior, such as actions, states, and feedback that do respond to input.”

Doruk: ​“Photoshop to Sketch was a productivity jump. Sketch to Figma was a collaboration jump. This next jump will be the same type of collaboration leap, but for coded prototypes. This is not ​“designers can code now”. It is about keeping design work shareable and close to production. The teams that win will not be the ones with the fanciest local setups. They will be the ones who keep making, testing, and reviewing work in the same shared space.”

Nikolas Klein, PM at Figma: ​“Today, we’re introducing the ability to embed Figma Make prototypes into Figma Design, FigJam, and Figma Slides, along with new editing tools that help you build and share your best ideas.”

“These updates give you more precision and control when bringing ideas to life in Figma Make: preview a to-do list for your more complex prompts so you can see, verify, and even edit the plan before it runs; manually edit text or delete specific elements to quickly fine-tune your prototypes; and a new navigation bar where you can route to a specific screen of your prototype.”

“Agentation (agent + annotation) is a dev tool that lets you annotate elements on your webpage and generate structured feedback for AI coding agents. Click elements, select text, add notes, and paste the output into Claude Code, Cursor, or any agent that has access to your codebase. It’s fully agent-agnostic, so the markdown output works with any AI tool. Zero dependencies beyond React.” Read the intro post by Benji Taylor for details.

A new feature in MagicPath: ​“The best way to turn your Figma designs into real, interactive prototypes. No MCP. No plugin hell. Just copy and paste your design into MagicPath and turn it into code with pixel-perfect accuracy — assets preserved.” Read Pietro Schirano’s thread.