I don't start my designs in Figma anymore

Figma is open on my other monitor right now. I'm in it most days. I just don't start my designs there anymore. Nowadays, I start in the terminal, with a prompt and a cursor blinking back at me like it has notes.

A few years ago, building something you could actually click took a few days. That's too expensive for something you might have to throw out. Now all it takes is a few hours of work. Instead of one polished prototype, I'll make a few rough ones that I can quickly click through before I commit to a direction.

Has it made the work better? In some ways, yes. In others I've just swapped one set of problems for another. I'm still working out which.

Motion beats stillness

The clearest case was a globe I built for Forma. It takes every kilometer you've run and wraps it around the Earth, so your training shows up as one long trip, city by city. The whole component is based on motion. You can grab it, you can spin it, you can watch the line crawl across the surface as the globe spins.

I knew exactly how it should look. What I didn't know was how people would use it. Which way would they turn it? Where would they grab it? How fast should it spin? You can't answer questions like that from a still alone.

Once it was running, the surprises started. I kept reaching for the globe itself to turn it, not the controls, so the whole thing became the handle, and it opens on your own city now. That held up when I handed it to a few other people. The trail surprised me the same way. It draws itself onto the sphere as the distance adds up, something I could never have built by hand in Figma, down to how it wraps around the back. So I fed it sandbox distances and let the awkward cases sort themselves out.

On real screens

The globe was one isolated component. The real test was a fuller screen, built from a dozen smaller parts. Forma runs on an engine that turns every workout into three numbers: fitness, fatigue, and form. The whole app is built around that model.

The fitness chart is how you read it: three lines, one for each, with a row of daily-load bars underneath. It tells you whether you're fresh or running on empty. It's the screen I open the most to check on my progress over time.

I built the first real version in a weekend. A few years ago that would have eaten most of a sprint. But the bigger shift came after it shipped. I reshaped it three or four times over the next few weeks, each pass a quick prompt and a fresh build, in the time a single Figma comp would have taken. The screen got better because changing it stayed cheap.

The loop I settled into

It's a loop now. I describe the thing, run it, and click around until it shows me something I didn't expect. Then I throw it away and write a sharper version. What I keep is what they taught me: which edge case actually mattered, which interaction felt right, which idea looked good on paper and fell apart in my hands.

What comes back is usually wrong in a useful way. The first version reaches for the obvious layout, the one I'd have drawn myself, and quietly skips half the states I asked for. So I run it, see where it breaks, and write down what's missing. Then I throw it out and ask again. Each pass gets sharper.

Where Figma sits now

None of this retired Figma. It moved later, to the work it does best. It's still faster for breadth: I can lay a few directions side by side and take them in at a glance, where a prototype makes me click through them one at a time. And once an interaction is settled, Figma is where I turn it into a system, the components and tokens that carry one decision across forty screens.

Lately the two have started feeding each other. I can pull a prototype's screens into Figma through its MCP, work on them there, then hand them back to the model to build from again. Prototype, Figma, model, and round again. It stopped being a one-way handoff a while ago.

Escaping rabbit holes

The biggest risk with prototyping is the rabbit hole. A prototype can swallow a whole afternoon in debugging side quests. So I try to stop building the moment it has shown me what I needed.

I know I've gone too far when I'm fixing something nobody will ever see. A glitch in a state that can't happen. A console warning. That's the prototype pulling me into engineering long after the design question was answered. Sinking into the build feels like progress. But that's not necessarily always the case. Catching yourself before going too deep, early enough, is the hard part.