If you haven’t yet vibed your multi million dollar startup you better hurry! That window is closing.
For a while vibe coding was promoted as the future of products. That future supposedly belonged to the idea people. Not the “boring” coders. The visionaries.
Now everyone who skipped coding classes donned a black turtleneck and held their chin Steve Jobs style. So of course I had to jokingly do that too.
I still know a bit of coding, so I was able to tweak lots of things in my apps by hand. Make them unique and without that ai-vibe.
And I’ve built apps that got 5–6K users. Longevity Deck still has around a thousand daily active people in it.
Access to everything. Now up to 60% off.
Unlock every single story.
Read member-only stories
Support writers you read most
Listen to audio narrations
Read offline with the Medium app
Access our Mastodon community
Connect your custom domain
Create your own publications
Key visuals are secretly killing your product. And it has little to do with AI. It’s a conscious design choice that simply undermines your business.
Companies spend months (or weeks) building a product and then they put a blob with a light-leak on their homepage. A pretty picture that means absolutely nothing.
The problem is that since most landing pages now do this, companies are inclined to at least try that. It’s herd mentality and a bit of fomo. It’s like they all follow some kind of “landing page blueprint” without thinking.
That creates a huge problem with landing page creative direction that reinforces itself. At least until a breaking point, because this abstraction obsession is really bad for business.
Sales drop because your main convincing spot (the hero) totally sucks at delivery.
Press enter or click to view image in full size
There is a sound a certain generation can still replay without effort. The dial-up modem shrieking, that wavering hum like two machines introducing themselves awkwardly, then a click, then silence. After the click, the internet left. Not minimized. Not pushed to the background. Gone, somewhere else, and you were returned to the physical room you were sitting in, with the slowing fan of the computer and the wall clock suddenly audible again.
Logging off was an action. It had a verb. You closed something, and the day resumed its other texture.
This morning I woke, and the world was already mid-sentence. Nothing needed connecting. Threads had moved overnight, notifications were queued before my eyes focused, and a few conversations I had left when I went to sleep already had a new act without me. I did not arrive anywhere this morning, because last night I never left. There was no door I crossed in either direction.
A place that turned into a layer
"At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint occaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga. Et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio. Nam libero tempore, cum soluta nobis est eligendi optio cumque nihil impedit quo minus id quod maxime placeat facere possimus, omnis voluptas assumenda est, omnis dolor repellendus. Temporibus autem quibusdam et aut officiis debitis aut rerum necessitatibus saepe eveniet ut et voluptates repudiandae sint et molestiae non recusandae. Itaque earum rerum hic tenetur a sapiente delectus, ut aut reiciendis voluptatibus maiores alias consequatur aut perferendis doloribus asperiores repellat."
1914 translation by H. Rackham
"On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains."
For more than a decade, Figma defined modern product design. It made collaboration effortless, turned design into a shared language, and became the default workspace for teams building software. But as AI reshapes how products are planned, prototyped, and shipped, the central question is the extent of Figma’s usefulness. Or rather, will the canvas remain at the centre of gravity, if at all?
Unlike the previous conference, Config 2026 makes that question more urgent. Figma no longer just defends a collaborative design canvas; it is actively expanding that canvas into code, motion, shaders, and agent-driven workflows. That shift reveals how much pressure the old model is under.
The Config Moment
Config 2026 arrives at a meaningful turning point. Figma is still the place where many product teams begin, refine, and communicate ideas, yet the broader workflow around it is changing fast. This is because AI is pulling more creative and production work into code editors, agentic environments, and structured workflows that remove the need for a designer to drag pixels around a canvas.
What changed at Config 2026 is that Figma is now responding to that pressure directly. Code layers bring code onto the canvas, Figma Motion brings animation and timing into the file itself, shader tools add more expressive visual effects, and the agent becomes more useful across connected workflows. This brings us back to the canvas being more than a surface. It was Figma’s business model for its collaboration engine and its defensive moat against command-line interfaces through seats.
The Seat Model Gets Pressured
Figma’s enterprise strength has always depended on breadth. Designers used it first, then product managers, engineers, marketers, writers, and executives followed. The more people needed to review, comment, inspect, or reference design work, the more seats Figma could sell. The same applies for the product bench, with the rapid expansion of Slides, Buzz, Sites, and now Motion and Weave.
AI complicates that logic. If an engineer can generate or inspect UI directly inside a coding environment, or if a product team can translate structured design intent into working software without opening a shared canvas or applications, the need for passive, underutilised seats weakens. Config 2026 actually confirms this tension by bringing code layers and agent workflows closer to the main product, Figma Design. In other words, Figma is acknowledging that an increasing number of people want to participate in product and code creation without relying on traditional file-based design behaviour.
That does not kill Figma’s seat model overnight, but it does chip away at the assumption that every stakeholder must enter Figma to participate or experience design. Thus, the deeper issue goes beyond whether the team has seats at the table (canvas). The table of collaboration resides in a code-native environment and workflow, where the moment of truth shifts closer to implementation, and that reduces the number of times a team needs to return to a design file as the source of record.
Figma’s Fightback
Figma is not standing still. Even before Config 2026, the company pushed beyond static collaboration and into AI-connected workflows. Features like MCP, Code Connect, and Figma Make on local code point toward a future where design data can move more fluidly into development environments and AI tools.
No comments yet. Be the first!