Slots! Prototypes. Config speakers.
Our Config 2026 Speakers on the Biggest Opportunities With AI
A first look at Config 2026 speakers — AI artist Holly Herndon, creator of the world’s first 3D-printed fashion collection Danit Pele, designer and author Vicki Tan, designer and founder Matthew Ström-Aw, and mathematician and educator Grant Sanderson from 3Blue1Brown. Config returns to San Francisco on June 23–25. Virtual registration is free.
Workflow lab: AI image tooling and interactive prototyping in Figma
The new Workflow Lab format, showing an end-to-end process, is a smart way to frame the new AI image tools in context. The three new tools (erase object, isolate object, expand image) are genuinely useful for anyone who’s had to leave Figma to do basic cleanup in Photoshop, and Vectorize finally removes a step that’s been a quiet annoyance for years.
Prototype Code Is Not Production Code (And That's Okay)
Patrick Morgan makes a clean distinction that vibe-coding discourse keeps blurring: prototype code is for exploration, production code is for endurance. He is building a protected prototyping environment using Claude Code, a place where his team can move fast and then deliberately port the right assets across the boundary into production.
There is a clear parallel with how the design team at Notion works. In the recent episode of How I AI, Brian Lovin showed their collaborative “prototype playground,” where the entire team can create, share, and iterate on functional prototypes.
That also reminded me of how my team worked a decade ago, back when front-end development was a tad simpler. We had a separate “mockups” directory inside the Rails monorepo, where designers prepared static HTML mockups with production-ready CSS and JS. By the time designs were handed off to engineers in a feature branch, all polish and design details were already baked in. The design team must be fairly technical, but there is no going back to handing off Figma files after working this way.