Ridd interviews Kris Puckett, design manager at Stripe and formerly design lead at Mercury and Dropbox, on becoming an AI-native designer by using tools like Claude Code, OpenClaw, and personal AI to ship his own apps, supercharge his design practice, and build highly personal systems for life and work. I’m deeply curious about the last part and can’t wait to dig into his course Neuma on building a personal AI system.

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.

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.

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.

Jenny Wen leads design for Claude at Anthropic, and in the past, she was Director of Design at Figma, where she led the teams behind FigJam and Slides. At Lenny’s podcast, she lays out how AI is collapsing the classic ​“research → mock → iterate” workflow into two main jobs for designers: supporting rapid implementation alongside engineers, and setting shorter 3–6 month product visions that keep a swarm of agents and builders pointed in a coherent direction. Jenny describes the day-to-day at Anthropic as equal parts surfing internal prototypes, pairing with engineers, and doing last-mile implementation herself. She still sees Figma as critical for exploring many directions and fine visual decisions, but treats Claude as her primary stack for long-running tasks and front-end polish.

A live walkthrough of all February launches across Figma products, plus a Q&A with CPO Yuhki Yamashita on where design and software are headed this year. Don’t miss an early preview of Slots, launching in open beta this Thursday.

The Figma Makeathon is officially live! $100,000 in prizes are up for grabs. Check out the guidelines to get started.