When my team moved from Figma to Cursor, we gave things up on purpose. In this episode, I walk through the ledger: lost visual history, the comment threads that held our why, a rejected pull request, and what we gained by designing with production code instead of a picture. |
When your design team trades the canvas for code, what actually disappears, and is what you get back worth more than what you lost?
When I tell people my design team moved from Figma to Cursor, they picture us canceling our licenses on a Friday and vibe coding on Monday.
That's not what happened.
But we did give things up. So I made a list. 👇
But first, check out this week's sponsor:
This list has a debit and a credit side.
➡️ What did we lose? Visual history. Comment threads pinned to designs. A command-line skill set I can feel getting weaker every day.
➡️ What did we gain? Working pages instead of pictures of pages. Real states, real interactions, ready for production. Work that used to take months, done in days.
➡️ What am I still not over? Getting compliments on my code at standup and thinking, "I couldn't debug this line by line if my life depended on it."
So, was it worth it?
I want to say yes. We ship faster, we ship more, and the work is real in a way a mockup never was.
But I'd be lying if I said the scales were even. Some of what we gave up, like the history and the comment threads, mattered more than I realized while I had it. And some of what I thought I was mourning, like the blank canvas, might have been gone long before AI showed up.
Episode 03 of Beyond UX Design is the honest accounting: the debits, the credits, and the line items I still can't decide where to file.
If your team hasn't switched yet, do yourself a favor and figure out where your decisions are going to live before you leave the canvas behind!
And if you've already made the move, what's on your ledger? I'm curious what other teams gave up, and whether anyone would take it back.
New episode out now, wherever you get your podcasts.
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You iterated, pivoted, circle-backed, and made it out of Q4 (barely).
You’ve earned a Merit-ish Badge!
Choose from four sets:
• Soft Skills, Sharp Tongue
• Cult of Figma Initiation
• Pixel Pusher Survivor Kit
• Field Notes & Frayed Nerves
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They don't teach this stuff in school
Learn the things they left off the syllabus.
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