Feels as though, in product, prototype is the design story of record now.
A few weeks ago, a designer on our team needed to communicate a direction - a flexible widget system for component titles with a big, opinionated brand.
The traditional version of that story would have been a Figma file: a run of polished static screens, presented in sequence, each one a promise about how the real thing might behave.
He didn’t make a Figma Prototype. He built (claude-dependent) an interactive, responsive prototype.
The result wasn’t just faster than the design-in-Figma-then-hand-to-code path. It was better - responsiveness, real hover and loading states, data that drew on the product’s data.
An immediate connection
In January 2012, Bret Victor gave a talk called “Inventing on Principle.” His argument fit in a sentence: creators need an immediate connection to what they create.
Change something, see the effect. Instantly.
He was talking about code editors and game tools, but the principle indicts most of how product design can work today.
Plato got here about twenty-four centuries before Victor did. In the allegory of the cave, prisoners sit facing a wall, watching shadows cast by objects carried behind them - having watched nothing else their whole lives, they take the shadows for the things themselves.
It is an uncomfortably precise description of a design review.
A room full of smart people studying projections of a product: static, flattened, arranged in a sequence someone chose, stripped of motion and data and response. The review can only ever approve the shadow. Whether the object casting it holds up is discovered later, by other people, in another tool.
An illustration of the allegory of the cave, from Plato’s Republic. (Wikimedia Commons)
A Figma file is an abstraction of a product. A good one, a fast one, a beautiful one - sometimes a necessary one - but an abstraction.
The user manipulates pictures of the interface to later build (or have someone else build) the interface itself.
Between the two sits the translation layer of handoff, and we all know exactly what happens to any system that keeps two representations of the truth joined by a translation layer: they drift.
And drift compounds.
The design drift — every handoff event widens the gap between the designs and what ships. From our Web Summit talk, May 2026.
We’ve been rallying designers and engineers around Storybook consistently to work better together, and the reason is almost embarrassingly simple: the button in Storybook isn’t a picture of the button. It’s the button. One representation of the truth. Nothing to drift.
Storybook is also Victor’s principle at work: change the component, see the component.
That seeing half matters more than it sounds right now. AI has made it possible for non-technical people to make technical changes. It has not made code a good place to see them.
A diff tells you what changed; it doesn’t show you. For many of us, we do not form a preference by reading a pull request. For those of you who can, I truly admire this ability.
Storybook gives the change a surface, somewhere your edit becomes a thing you can look at, put in front of a teammate, compare against the alternative, and decide about. The making of changes has been democratized.
The only reason the mockup was ever the deliverable is that building the real thing used to take longer than drawing it. That was true for decades. It stopped being true recently.
What Figma still does best
This is not a Figma-is-dead post, and you should distrust anyone writing one.
Figma is the industry leading canvas, and still an excellent place to diverge - explore ten directions before you know which one deserves to exist. It’s still the best surface for the spatial thinking of laying a whole system out on one canvas and seeing it at a glance. It’s still unmatched as a multiplayer room where a team thinks together in real time. None of that is threatened by working prototypes, because none of that was ever the deliverable.
Getting to the source
If you want a sign of where this settles, watch the companies whose entire business was the abstraction layer.
My colleague Myles, shared a recent article with me that kicked much of this off.
Webflow - whose product is, definitionally, a visual representation compiled into code you never touch - recently published a piece announcing they’re rebuilding around code as the source of truth .
They open with the same Victor talk, and they name the reason in one line: “any system with two representations of the truth, joined by a translation layer, will drift.”
When the abstraction companies start dismantling their own abstractions, consensus is forming. Everything else is an export.