I’ve argued that design tools should be canvas-first, not chatbox-first. Jeff, writing in Abduzeedo makes the case for the opposite:

Designers have always borrowed from developers. Version control, component systems, token-based design — these ideas crossed the aisle from engineering and reshaped how visual work gets done. Vibe designing follows the same logic. Instead of opening Figma and reaching for a drag-and-drop panel, designers drop into the terminal. They prompt an AI model directly from the CLI, pipe the output into a file, and iterate without ever touching a mouse.

He isn’t theorizing. He published this article using browser automation and AI, with minimal manual clicking.

I don’t think the answer is CLI or canvas. It’s both. Designers are visual thinkers—that’s the cognitive foundation of the discipline, not a limitation to engineer away. Going fully terminal assumes we can be retrained to work without seeing what we’re making, or that the profession will attract people with entirely different skills.

What does look right is the plumbing underneath. Jeff on Paper.design’s MCP integration:

Its canvas is built natively on web standards — HTML and CSS — which means AI agents working through Paper’s MCP server can read and write design files directly. Tools like get_screenshot, get_jsx, write_html, and update_styles give Claude Code or Cursor direct read-write access to the design canvas.

HyperCard figured this out in 1987: direct manipulation on top of a scripting layer. The tools are finally catching up, with AI as the scripting engine.