At Perplexity, the design system lives in the codebase, not Figma. Designers contribute directly to the frontend, creating a single source of truth that eliminates drift between design files and production code, forcing a highly practical and collaborative process.

To enable AI-powered prototyping without production risks, large tech companies are creating separate, forked repositories for designers. This "designer playground" approach avoids the friction of production environments (e.g., linting, deploys) while providing a real-world starting point for stateful design exploration.

The biggest barrier for designers entering the codebase isn't writing code, but the complex, brittle setup of a local development environment. Tools that abstract this away into one-click, sandboxed environments are critical for unlocking designer participation.

While forked codebases empower designers with AI tools, they create a new operational cost. Teams must now maintain two copies of the app—the real one and the designer one—which risks falling out of date. This mirrors the long-standing problem of syncing Figma design systems with production code.

The traditional, linear handoff from product spec to design to code is collapsing. Roles and stages are blurring, with interactive prototypes replacing static documents and the design file itself becoming the central place for the entire team to align and collaborate.

Instead of creating static mockups in Figma, Cursor's design team prototypes directly in their AI code editor. This allows them to interact with the "life states of the app" and get a more realistic feel for the product, bridging the gap between design and engineering.

Stripe built "Protodash," an internal tool that allows designers, PMs, and engineers to quickly create high-fidelity AI prototypes that mirror the real product. This removes the bottleneck of needing engineering for early exploration and empowers proactive, cross-functional ideation.

The current model of separate design files and codebases is inefficient. Future tools will enable designers to directly manipulate production code through a visual canvas, eliminating the handoff process and creating a single, shared source of truth for the entire team.

At OpenAI, the development cycle is accelerated by a practice called "vibe coding." Designers and PMs build functional prototypes directly with AI tools like Codex. This visual, interactive method is often faster and more effective for communicating ideas than writing traditional product specifications.