If someone asked me to explain Figma Make to them I would tell them its like a sketchbook you interact with using English, that moves at the speed of AI generation.

Wireframes used to be the base level, an entry point into our visual understanding of a piece of software's form and structure. The value of the pencil sketches and the grey boxes in figma has always been speed. "It's faster than high-fidelity" "it can help teams align on ideas early" all things we learnt in design school, before an era where wireframes would soon feel like more of a tool in a toolbox, and less like the definitive answer to the problem of creating a starting point to align on visual direction early in the design process.

There were so many ideas around how we validate ideas and which tools we reached out for, it all begins to collapse under the rise of generative and agentic design workflows. Suddenly prototyping isn't hidden behind the guarded walls of syntax and advanced Figma or Origami workflows, suddenly English is the prototyping tool of choice, a chat based interaction pattern arguably even more democratic than the GUI as a design interface.

Natural language becomes a tool that blurs, subverts and disrupts various paradigms and assumptions in our conception of how we design interfaces. And so artefacts like wireframes take on a new purpose in the product design process, visual context for an agent in an era where the ceiling for fidelity has been raised, and is being turned upside down and complicated. What's higher fidelity a one-shotted AI prototype with no polish or alignment to our design system or a wireframe with much more accurate design intent. The workflow is now cyborgian, an idea which is inherently postmodern and so lines blur and ideas collapse.

In some workflows, the sketchbook metaphor completely falls apart, take for example how I built Pixel Vault, a tool to help teams store and share code, prompts and prototypes to a shared resource base, think of it as a teams shared second brain for modern UI engineering worklows. I built in 3 days for the Figma Make hackathon, and it's not just a prototype, it… works. It's actual code that works an artefact of a more abstracted workflow, but real nonetheless.

So if you asked me what I thought about Figma Make I would tell you it's the natural conclusion to a shifting cultural context that presents itself as almost like a karmic gift to the designers who grew up on the "developer ruined the designs" ux memes and are now lucky enough to have the most high tech genies from frontier tech labs grant them their one and only true wish as product people. To ship with taste, intent and consideration.