Config 2026 lands June 24–25 at Moscone. The agenda confirms the obvious: this year is about AI workflows and design systems built for them. Build your schedule now — last year the best talks filled up fast.

The May edition is mostly a demo of Figma’s MCP server, with Amy Lima and Anthony DiSpezio walking through three workflows: code-to-canvas import of a vibe-coded prototype, round-tripping a dark mode so variables stay in sync between code and Figma, and using the pre-installed figma-use-scale skill to generate first-pass directions on a production dashboard. The closing update reel includes vector editing up to 10x faster, memory warnings down 92%, macOS eyedropper now samples anywhere on screen, FigJam MCP can read and write boards (ERDs, architecture diagrams), Make Kit packages your design system’s code for Figma Make, and Weave gets a timeline for video.

Luis Ouriach makes the case against single-number design system adoption metrics. His argument: one number collapses three things that should stay separate, across artifacts (a brand token and a complex data table component need different definitions of ​“used well”), surfaces (a logged-in dashboard component has no business on a sign-up screen), and people (a marketer, a senior product designer, and a front-end engineer all want different things from the same system). The throughline is that compliance with a benchmark is not the same as value, and most design system dashboards are quietly measuring the wrong one.

A useful baseline study on how people actually use AI well. The most uncomfortable finding for designers: in conversations that produce artifacts (code, UI, documents), users are less likely to question the model’s reasoning. Polished output suppresses critical evaluation, even though that’s exactly when it’s most needed.

Jakub Krehel launched Interfaces, a paid magazine for design engineers built around interactive demos and source code, not text. Initial issues cover gestures in motion, gradients, OKLCH, and shared layout animations.

Brian Lovin shows the Notion design team’s Prototype Playground, a single Next.js repo on Vercel where every designer gets a namespaced folder and a small set of shared Notion-flavored components. The interesting parts are not the scaffolding but the slash commands and skills layered on top: /figma runs a three-phase loop with the Figma MCP and Chrome DevTools MCP until the build matches the source (~80% on the first try), and a find-icon skill writes its own TypeScript search script after the team got tired of Claude hallucinating ​“search-icon.” See also the Stripe and Vercel pieces below for the same pattern at other companies, as well as another interview with Brian at Dive Club.

Owen Williams, design manager at Stripe, walks Claire Vo through Protodash, the internal prototyping platform he’s been building for 18 months. The V1 was a bundle of Cursor rules plus an MCP server wired to Sail, Stripe’s design system, so any designer can open the repo and build a page without ever touching React or routing. V2 wraps the whole thing in a browser UI running on internal dev boxes, with embedded LLM chat, click-to-annotate feedback, a design review mode, and fidelity toggles (monospace, grayscale) to signal work-in-progress. The same pattern as the Notion and Vercel pieces in this section: production design system plus a thin internal harness, calibrated to one team’s review culture in a way no off-the-shelf tool can be.

Dan Hollick (design engineer at Cursor, formerly Tailwind and Raycast) shares a video walkthrough of the custom tooling he built to produce the illustrations for his book Making Software. This is what ​“designing the tool that designs the work” looks like in practice.

Hannah Hearth runs a tooling Show and Tell with her team at Vercel and writes up the results: Codex + Claude pair programming, Conductor for parallel agent threads, UI Fork for in-browser variant exploration, and Cleanshot’s Pin tool still earning its place.

Designer advocate Amy Lima walks through a full code-to-canvas-to-code round trip on a sample app: install the MCP in Cursor with /add-plugin, authenticate via OAuth, generate a new screen iteration into Figma, refine it by hand, then prompt the agent to update the codebase and open a PR. Pairs well with the useFigma deep dive below.

“AI designs with you, not instead of you.” Figma’s positioning for useFigma, the new write-capable MCP tool that creates real components, variables, and auto layout on the canvas, not flat images or wireframes. The demo runs the full loop: terminal prompt to first draft, manual polish in Figma, annotations the agent later reads as design context, then back to the terminal to update the codebase. The annotations detail is the most interesting part — they double as machine-readable spec.

Figma Make now supports custom skills — markdown files that capture conventions and workflows you use repeatedly, callable from any prompt with a slash command. Pair /build-from-prd with a Notion connector and any PRD becomes a prototype that matches your standards.

Stephen Haney announces QuiverAI’s SVG generation inside Paper – vector output from text or references, aimed at logos, illustrations, and animations. QuiverAI​’s models have been on my radar since Dann Petty joined the team as a Founding Product Designer.

Paul Bakaus has packaged 23 design commands into a single agent skill that teaches Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Gemini CLI how to actually design. Type vocabulary, color systems, motion, spatial logic — the foundations most prompts miss. The Live mode that writes accepted variants back to source is where it gets genuinely interesting.

Variable Sync to Repo, from Luis Ouriach, pushes and pulls variable collections between Figma and Git in both directions. Worth pairing with his ​“Adoption is a Red Herring” essay above — both are arguments for treating the design system as infrastructure that has to meet people where they are, including the engineers consuming tokens through a package manager.

Figma’s first quarter as a public company: $333.4M in revenue, up 46% year-over-year, accelerating from 40% last quarter. Full-year guidance raised. Dylan Field’s framing in the release — ​“when code is a commodity, design is the competitive edge” — is the line the company will be repeating all year.