Why Design Is the New Code | Dylan Field

Dylan Field (0:00)

A year from now, the same thing I think is very obvious now, which is that design is the new code. If you believe that coding models will continue to get better, then you also believe that it's more outer loop architecture, the decisions you make about how to go build a system, that matter, not the code itself, the code as a material, and the value rises to the top. And that becomes brand, it becomes product design, your marketing, your point of view and the world.

And overall, the way you'll shape products is through design.

SPEAKER_2 (0:39)

Hello everyone and welcome back to MTS. Today I am joined with the Dylan Field. He is the co-founder and CEO of Figma. And today's an exciting day. They just announced that their Figma design agent is moving from beta to general availability. It's now generally available for everyone. So you can now use this agent to design rules and context, work alongside other people that I'm excited about, and also use all of these agents on the same canvas. So Dylan, welcome to MTS.

Dylan Field (1:06)

Thank you for having me. Good to see you.

SPEAKER_2 (1:08)

Great to see you. Great to actually chat about this agent that I know went in beta in May, but then since then you've got a lot of testing. Now you're actually going live. Tell me about these last few months. What did you learn about this agent in beta and what's actually getting launched today?

Dylan Field (1:24)

Well, most importantly, and first of all, so we learned that this is already something we kind of knew and then we viscerally learned it. We viscerally learned how I think designers, product managers are willing to deal with the terminal, the IDE, it is not the preferred way of working. It doesn't feel like home. And they want home. They want a better way. And so I think that agent is a part of that, code layers, which we announced at Config as well, will also be a part of that. And can't wait to be able to share more on that. But the, we also, I think, learned how you really need to just go back to the basics when building non-deterministic software. And this is also obvious.

But building with non-determinism, building with models, none of it's rocket science.

It's just a little bit different than working with determinism. And in order to do it right, you have to know the obvious things like, okay, you made a change. Did you get better? Did it get worse? Where did it get better? Where did it get worse? And so things like that, we had to really dial in. We already thought we had dialed in, but not enough. And based on all of our changes and improvements and the team's hard work, I'm really excited about this GA launch and be able to bring it to GA. It's faster, higher quality, works better with context. It just, in general, can understand better what you're trying to go for. And I think understands how to work with Figma better, which people obviously really want. And I think that we've also seen improvement on design system adherence, but more to go there and in all the places. This is still very much the start, and also it's something that we're really proud of.

SPEAKER_2 (3:10)

That's awesome. I know you guys mentioned that there's still a lot to improve. You just alluded to it as well here that there's certain areas that are good, but you want to make them even greater. What do you expect to come in the next maybe few months around what are the specific areas that you're trying to improve?

Dylan Field (3:24)

Well, I think number one is design systems in general. I think that there's so much more to do there, and using the context of how you're designing locally in your canvas, as well as what you've done in the past, we do some of that now and we'll do a lot more in the future.

And I think that these tasks are hard, you don't want to hallucinate, and you also need to be able to use the right things in the right times and the right ways.

And this is one of those things where the bar for the machine is even higher than the bar for the human. Humans don't get this right all the time either, but we expect more from machines and we should expect more. So we are really working towards that superhuman design system usage. But I also, overall, just want to point out the entire goal is empowering designers to the max. This is not a designer replacement. And I think there's some things where you can do tasks that are tedious and will take hours for designer. You can do them just instantly now. And there's other things where designers with lateral thinking and context and past experience, they just have these skills that models do not have and are able to make associations with real world inputs that are moments in culture or the feeling that you're trying to evoke. And these are just things that I think we will continue to see that brand and product design and point of view are differentiators and craft is a differentiator. I think that the well-crafted experiences will stand out and so agent is about empowering, helping you, it's not our placement, and working together with the agent, with multiple agents, multiple people, I think is the future.