»Figma is dead.« I keep hearing this, and I only partially agree.

Tools like Figma help design teams with two things: hand-off and exploration. The hand-off part – getting designs into production – will dissolve into codebases sooner or later, depending on context, company size, regulations.

The exploration part is a different story. Figma, and before it Sketch, Fireworks, Flash, Photoshop – these have always been visual thinking tools to explore, compare, and decide. Figma nailed the collaborative side of that in the last few years. And I don't expect this collaborative exploration part to disappear.

People need to see and feel things. Stakeholders, users, product people – they need a visual surface to react to, in real time. Especially when you're working within an existing brand, or running workshops where opinions, feel, and control matter. AI can generate options faster, sure. But you can't – at least right now – duplicate, compare side by side, switch back and forth, and let a room of people weigh in on what feels right. A visual tool is essential for that, and it will stay essential.

But also this part is facing transformation: What's starting to change is how you arrive at that canvas. Historically, designers working in digital product design needed to use a huge amount of time for building – laying out screens, connecting flows, setting up transitions and prototypes (don't know if we're in the pareto 80%, but it was a lot). The remaining, smaller part, went into the part that actually matters the most: understanding context & users, exploring ideas, comparing options, making decisions. Now even there, AI agents are starting to flip that.

The workflow could go like this:

  1. Define the problem or idea clearly – this becomes the crucial starting point
  2. Let an AI agent build a first pass
  3. Move into a visual tool to compare, refine, and judge with taste
  4. Test and get feedback
  5. Ship (alone or with dev teams) & iterate in code

To conclude: The building part of design is being automated. The exploration and decision-making part isn't. Tools that own that space – whether that's Figma or something entirely new – have a clear future ahead.