Dylan Field’s own Config 2026 recap, covering all six announcements at once: Code Layers, Figma Motion, Shader fills and effects, Generative Plugins, Weave Tools, and the Figma Agent. His framing: ​“AI has lowered the floor, but it has not raised the ceiling. Designers, creatives, builders: You will raise the ceiling.” A deliberate pushback against the narrative that AI replaces creative work.

Dylan Field opens Config 2026 by settling the design-vs-code debate once and for all: ​“Code is not the opposite of design. Code is material for design.” The keynote’s headline feature, Code Layers, puts live interactive code directly on the canvas alongside design layers, with a shared agent chat so teams can explore and riff together rather than each going a hundred prompts deep alone. From the same team: Figma Motion in beta, a full timeline-based motion tool with shader effects, 3D transforms, and export to MP4, GIF, and animated SVG. Worth watching in full: the Weave AI tools and custom shader section is genuinely impressive, and the generative plugin demos near the end show where the platform is heading.

A fresh edition of my annual Config Study Guide, with all recordings grouped by day, organized by stage (from larger to smaller), and color-coded by theme. The stage size is a good cue for how important organizers considered a specific talk — I recommend starting from the top of deep dives and themes you’re interested in. Some talks haven’t been published yet, so the study guide will be updated.

I make this resource because even while attending in person, I can only make it to a small fraction of talks I’m interested in. Use the Stamp tool to mark the talks you want to watch or have already watched, add your thoughts with stickies, and share your version of this file with friends.

“AI tends to pull us in deep before we’ve gone wide, and I think that’s a mistake.” Joey Banks’s recap of Config 2026 is a good summary of the features, but the reason to read it is this thread running underneath: the entire Figma canvas strategy this year is really an argument for staying in the messy middle rather than reaching for the polished AI output too fast.

Ridd digs into everything that launched at Config 2026 with Loredana Crisan, Figma’s Chief Design Officer. The key product philosophy she outlines: AI gets you to 70% — on shader effects, on motion — then you mold the rest. Weave, the node-based tool Figma acquired last year, is the clearest expression of this systems-over-screens direction: you build a workflow that produces a visual system, and the workflow is ​“the special sauce.” The big bet isn’t AI replacing the designer’s hand; it’s making AI a precision tool, which Loredana argues is still ahead of where the technology actually is.

Meng To, founder of Design+Code, shares his first hands-on session with Figma Motion. The tutorial runs through basic animation, auto keyframes, and agent-prompted stagger animation, then pivots to shaders — which is where it gets interesting: he animates dither and lens distortion settings over the timeline, and builds a custom Matrix-style shader from scratch using the agent with a screenshot as input. A good complement to the official Figma tutorial below, which focuses on design systems and 3D transforms — this one is messier and more exploratory, which makes it easier to follow along.

Figma’s official getting-started tutorial for Motion. The three-part structure covers agent-assisted animation (prompt it, then refine in the timeline), preset animation styles, and manual keyframing. One thing that stands out: animation built on a component automatically propagates to every instance, so you animate the play button once and every media player in the file picks it up. Motion tokens are new variable types for timing and easing, and Dev Mode now shows a Motion panel with ready-to-ship code (JSON, React, CSS) alongside the design.

Figma’s microsite for exploring the new Shader Fills feature announced at Config 2026. You can prompt, stack, and customize shader effects directly in the browser, then take what you’ve built back into the canvas. It’s a smart way to onboard people to a feature that could otherwise feel intimidating, and it doubles as a demo that shows off what the feature is actually capable of.

Nikolas Klein, PM on Figma Make, walks through how Code Layers work in practice. The mental model is deliberately familiar: duplicate a code layer to explore alternatives the same way you’d duplicate a frame. What’s new is that those alternatives are working experiences your team can interact with, comment on, and prompt against — all in the same file. The extract-to-design flow is the detail worth pausing on: you can pull any state or screen from the code layer back into editable Figma layers, make visual edits, then push the changes back to the code layer and to your repo. Code Layers are in closed beta with a signup for early access.

“Figma Make changes who gets to ship things.” That’s Charlota Blunárová, whose collaborative embroidery app ​“Common Thread” took Best Overall after she built it in one afternoon with no engineering background. It’s the most direct statement of what Figma Make is actually doing at the edges of the design community. The other five winners — including Aleyna Çatak’s head-and-lip-controlled navigation system ​“Pucker” and Lee Black’s gesture-powered ambient music instrument ​“Airwwave” — make the same point from five different angles.

Ryo Lu, Head of Design at Cursor, gave the standout talk at Cursor’s first conference, Compile. The title is ​“Closer to the Material,” and the core argument lands hard: as AI makes execution cheaper, the real risk is that humans become approvers rather than authors — people who accept or reject outputs without ever being inside the decision. He distinguishes between output (which ends the loop) and material (which invites you back in), and argues that the future he wants is tools that keep people close enough to the work to still have judgment. A sharp and honest take on the AI-design moment, and easy to connect to what Figma is navigating with its own agent features right now.

Carol, a designer at Mercury, walks through how she designed Mercury Command, the AI-powered interface being built into Mercury’s banking dashboard. The interesting part is her argument that agentic design fundamentally breaks the Figma-first workflow. Because the output is non-deterministic, she had to prototype in Cursor with a live system prompt to understand what the experience would actually feel like. ​“The system prompt in a way is the product,” she says.

Murphy Trueman on the specific thing Figma did that mattered: making abstract structural decisions visible and traceable, in a way that let her understand design systems by actually touching them. She worries that AI assistance is replacing the effortful parts of design work, and there’s a difference between automating the tedious and automating the problem-solving.

Apple updated their official Figma kit for iOS and iPadOS 27, with a full overhaul for Liquid Glass, expanded component states, and naming changes that now align with code. Because it comes directly from Apple, it reflects current system behavior rather than a third-party approximation — which matters when you’re designing anything that needs to read as genuinely native.

Apple acqui-hired the team behind Play, the SwiftUI prototyping tool that won a 2025 Apple Design Award, with the app already gone from the App Store since April. The speculation — and the implication of @avstorm’s post — is that Play’s real-time Mac-to-iPhone prototyping workflow is heading into Xcode as a native Design Mode. If that happens, it would be a direct answer to what Play was doing that Figma can’t: designing iOS interfaces in the actual framework they’ll ship in.

Kyle Shepherd turned the entire Dive Club archive into a searchable AI Q&A. Ask a question, get an answer pulled from auto-transcribed podcast and video content, with the source clip linked for verification. Handy if you remember a concept from an episode but can’t remember which one.

Joey Banks, founder of Baseline Design, joins Code & Pixels to talk about what it actually feels like to navigate AI tooling right now. His ​“You’re Not Behind” post came out of his own anxiety the weekend Claude Design launched, and this conversation unpacks it honestly. The most interesting moment: Joey spent 102 prompts vibe-coding a to-do app in Cursor and found himself checking Slack while the model ran, feeling further from the output than he ever does in Figma.