The question of whether Figma or code should be the source of truth was always a debate. One side would “win” the debate, then waterfall everything to the other skillset. Over time, features and components would get out of date, because design and engineering weren’t talking as much as they should have been, people got busy, work wasn’t properly tracked, etc. Or maybe designs of a new component would be inaccessible during the handoff stage, or have other technical challenges that weren’t brought up until engineering got a look, and now you’ve wasted precious delivery time. I’ve been guilty of this myself — in previous work, I was syncing variables from Figma into code.
But now, with AI tooling, code being the source of truth makes it easier than ever for design and engineering to be a REAL, single team. More folks are starting to become “design engineers” (“design technologists”, or simply “builders”) — people leveraging AI tooling to bridge their skillset to ship. And some folks may be thinking: “aren’t you shipping slop then?” No. Let me explain.
Start small by bridging design and engineering. Enable a designer to be more like an engineer by using tools to prototype with real, coded components, and then hand them off to their engineering subject-matter expert to make them production-ready. In the other direction, let an engineer push things into Figma directly, where they may not have a lot of experience, and then have the design subject-matter expert tweak things to their high standards.
The key is that you always have a subject-matter expert in the loop at every step of the way, verifying the output and reasoning about whether it’s “good”. Just like reviewing peers’ work. Part of that is saying “no” or deciding not to ship anything at all when an idea doesn’t make sense. You don’t ship slop — you ship code and designs you’d stand behind, no matter who the author was.
The old way of working doesn’t make sense anymore.
It’s ridiculously inefficient. Instead, get everyone in the room talking and pairing, like we used to do in the old days. Engineers, teach your designers coding patterns and practices. Designers, teach your engineers design and Figma practices. Move more efficiently with the help of AI to build the best Design System or product you can.
Working this way accelerates product delivery. It allows like-minded folks to bridge their skills — not replace each other. Lift each other up. Complement each other’s skillsets and allow for growth opportunities.
And this is just a step in that direction. Over time, as engineers and designers work more closely together, the “title lines” begin to blur. Then the team becomes people who ship things. And that seems pretty awesome.