Last week, Figma held their annual user conference Config in San Francisco. Since its inception in 2020, it has become a significant UX conference that covers more than just Figma’s products and community. While I’ve not yet had the privilege of attending in person, I do try to catch the livestreams or videos afterwards.

Nearly 17 months after Adobe and Figma announced the termination of their merger talks, Figma flexed their muscle—fueld by the $1 billion breakup fee, I’m sure—by announcing four new products. They are Figma Draw, Make, Sites, and Buzz.

• Draw: It’s a new mode within Figma Design that reveals additional vector drawing features. 
• Make: This is Figma’s answer to Lovable and the other prompt-to-code generators. 
• Sites: Finally, you can design and publish websites from Figma, hosted on their infrastructure.
• Buzz: Pass off assets to clients and marketing teams and they can perform lightweight and controlled edits in Buzz. 

With these four new products, Figma is really growing up and becoming more than a two-and-half-product company, and is building their own creative suite, if you will. Thus taking a big swing at Adobe.

There has been an explosion of AI-powered prompt-to-code tools within the last year. The space began with full-on integrated development environments (IDEs) like Cursor and Windsurf. These enabled developers to use leverage AI assistants right inside their coding apps. Then came a tools like v0, Lovable, and Replit, where users could prompt screens into existence at first, and before long, entire applications.

A couple weeks ago, I decided to test out as many of these tools as I could. My aim was to find the app that would combine AI assistance, design capabilities, and the ability to use an organization’s coded design system.

While my previous essay was about the future of product design, this article will dive deep into a head-to-head between all eight apps that I tried. I recorded the screen as I did my testing, so I’ve put together a video as well, in case you didn’t want to read this.

Karri Saarinen, writing for the Linear blog:

Unbounded AI, much like a river without banks, becomes powerful but directionless. Designers need to build the banks and bring shape to the direction of AI’s potential. But we face a fundamental tension in that AI sort of breaks our usual way of designing things, working back from function, and shaping the form.

I love the metaphor of AI being the a river and we designers are the banks. Feels very much in line with my notion that we need to become even better curators.

Saarinen continues, critiquing the generic chatbox being the primary form of interacting with AI:

One way I visualize this relationship between the form of traditional UI and the function of AI is through the metaphor of a ‘workbench’. Just as a carpenter's workbench is familiar and purpose-built, providing an organized environment for tools and materials, a well-designed interface can create productive context for AI interactions. Rather than being a singular tool, the workbench serves as an environment that enhances the utility of other tools – including the ‘magic’ AI tools.

Software like Linear serves as this workbench. It provides structure, context, and a specialized environment for specific workflows. AI doesn’t replace the workbench, it's a powerful new tool to place on top of it.

It’s interesting. I don’t know what Linear is telegraphing here, but if I had to guess, I wonder if it’s closer to being field-specific or workflow-specific, similar to Generative Fill in Photoshop. It’s a text field—not textarea—limited to a single workflow.