Firstly, congratulations on Figma Make. It seems like you're one of those companies that fundamentally adopted AI in a way that was very expedient and very natural and it didn't seem like it was an artificially jammed in thing. So, how'd you go about doing that? Talk to us about it.
Yeah, I mean, even before Figma Make, our point of view has just been we have to be able to add AI in ways that solves real problems. And I think it's so tempting to sprinkle some AI fairy dust on stuff and say AI a lot, and that's just not going to actually solve any user problems. So early on that meant things like renaming layers, and users loved little features like that.
Because it takes hours to rename all your layers if you're a designer.
Right?
And if you're able to just do it with one command, then you save so much time. But then if you go bigger, Figma Make obviously is something that we're really excited about. The ability to go right from design to prototype to back to design. They really should be two sides of the same coin.
And as we look forward, bringing all the efficiency of experiences you can get in code to the design canvas. We've talked about this publicly already and it's something that we're really excited about what we can do there. And do you think the role of a designer and the PM starts to fuse a little bit also because of what you folks are doing? Like does prototyping get to be a core part of product design or product management?
Yeah, it's so interesting because I think for maybe 10 years or so, 2015 to 2025, I was very vocally saying I think that all these roles are going to blur — engineer, design, PM, research — they're all going to blur. I was extrapolating out from some of the early signs I was seeing, totally disconnected to anything AI. And then I think as models started to really get powerful and the scaling laws kicked in fully, I sort of revised my opinion just as everyone started to say the roles blur. And now what I think is that the roles actually aren't blurring; the roles are sort of staying what they are, but the responsibilities are blurring. And I think AI is this pull to be more generalist in the first place. It's not an excuse if I'm blocked as a designer by my PM or vice versa anymore. And it definitely won't be, you know, six months, twelve months from now. You shouldn't be blocked. You should just actually go solve the problem. And that said, there are people in your org who have expertise and are spiky in certain areas, and that's why we have roles. But yeah, I think more people are going to prototype, more people are going to go design, and I also think more people will be hopefully talking with customers and sort of doing all of it.
But roles, you know, responsibilities blurring.
They're blurred. So, now I'm a designer.
Yep. My design team is going to be really upset, but otherwise it's great.
Excited. So I'm going to talk to you about a range of issues, but let's start with the future of UI. If agents become the prominent worker bee and if agents are going to interact with other agents and if we evolve these systems to be speaking human language rather than us learning machine language, does the fundamental first principle construct of design change where you're not going to build a bunch of UIs with browsing ability where you're going to go out and try to surface different things, but it's just going to be you're going to ask it something maybe with voice, maybe with text, it's just going to give you an answer? And does that fundamentally change design in the future?
Yeah, I think there's two ways to approach that question. I guess first I would just say that the current paradigm of how people are thinking about agents is limited. Right now it's very much I go kick off something, the agent goes and does a thing and it comes back and it's done. And I think that we will see that. We will see prompting through text, and by the way that will change because the duration for autonomous execution will just get longer and longer. Absolutely there will be long running, maybe you'll have an agent running for a year. But also I think what will happen is the prompt box, while it will persist for a while, I think we're going to see an evolution there. I've been saying for a bit now I believe that we're sort of in this MS-DOS era of AI. Brian Ryan Chesky apparently agrees. He said it recently too. And it's exciting that this is catching on and people are really starting to imagine what can we do if we think beyond the prompt box because this is just one way to navigate latent space and ultimately you're just trying to figure out a way to get to this hyperdimensional space and create the right activations. And so I think prompting can evolve and I would just say for long-range agents or short-range agents, auditability matters. You don't — I mean if you're somebody that is just blindly trusting an agent right now then you're a very brave person. And I think as AI gets better perhaps you build more trust, but I still think that you need, just like you need for humans, the ability to audit. And then how do you audit? Well you need to be able to actually look at something that you can understand. Finally, I really believe that where we're headed is not towards a world where you just have agents working independently in a sandbox, but rather alongside you. I mean, I'm coming from Figma, so we have an infinite canvas where humans can come together and work together in that canvas. We're very inspired by Google Docs where you can edit multiplayer at the same time. And I think that where we're probably headed for software in general is more towards that multiplayer philosophy where agents and humans work together alongside each other, as well as a human or an agent going off on a long-term task.
And so now let's fast forward. You're already there today, but let's say that up until now, really good creative thinking and design took time, you know, and it was like when I was at Box, Aaron and I would literally iterate on designs for a very long time to make sure that the screen was perfect. Now you have this notion of infinite design options where you could just ask a prompt and you'd get 50 different design options. How do you train for judgment at scale and does that become the scarce commodity? Because it doesn't seem like getting brand renditions of different design options is the scarce commodity anymore. Like you will have unlocked that pretty substantially over the course of the next even year I would say.
Yeah. I think getting an output to a prompt is only a first step. You know you might go and get a bunch of variations.
Yes. But even the way you prompt that, the way you set that up with the first prompt is actually quite challenging to do right. And then actually thinking about the system that exists in, we're headed towards a world, we're in a world where you're existing across so many surfaces, so many modalities, and you have to think about how all that connects, stays consistent, solves a real problem, and most importantly, I think has a point of view.
And if you don't have that point of view, I think that in the increasingly competitive landscape of software, you might be in a place where actually you're just not going to make it. So I really think the design craft point of view is the differentiator. And what's exciting right now is that you can plant flags in the option space more easily. What I found personally was, you know, I've been trying to make sure that every part of Figma's aligned to models getting better. You know it's obviously as the models get better we got to all get better. And as models get better, Figma gets better.
And do you see yourself writing models as well or just using foundation models that might exist? Well, we experiment with all sorts of stuff. But the foundation models are increasing their capabilities at such speed
that it's foolish to believe that you can outpace them, right?
