When my team moved from Figma to Cursor, we gave things up on purpose. In this episode, I walk through the real ledger: lost visual history, the comment threads that held our why, a rejected pull request, and what we gained by designing with the real product instead of a picture of it.
When your design team trades the canvas for code, what actually disappears, and is what you get back worth more than what you lost?
A few months ago, I designed a full-page drag and drop interaction, cut it for a technical constraint, and then went looking for it a month later when that constraint disappeared. It took me 15 minutes and an AI assistant to dig it out of an old pull request. In Figma, it would've taken under a minute. And if a year had gone by, or I'd left for Costa Rica to take up surfing, nobody would've known it existed. That little treasure hunt is where this episode starts.This is episode three of "What Survives: When AI Comes for Your Design Work," and it's all about the trade-offs. I get into what my team lost when we left a canvas design tool behind: the visual iteration history that came for free, the comment threads that quietly held the why behind our decisions, the blank canvas (which, as it turns out, may have been gone long before AI showed up), and a command line skill set I can feel getting weaker every day. I also take on a fair pushback from a listener named Elena, who argues teams rarely look back at old versions anyway.But it's not a horror story. I talk through the other side of the ledger too: turning six months of Figma work into working, production-ready pages in days, the rejected PR that made me wonder if we were just cosplaying as engineers, and how we found our lane with engineering afterward. If your team has made the switch, or is about to, give this one a listen and then tell me what you traded away.
Topics:
- 03:10 - The foundation nobody sees
- 04:10 - Not a picture of the design, the design itself
- 04:50 - Losing the visual history
- 06:15 - Recovering a decision, not browsing
- 07:40 - Where the why actually lived
- 09:05 - How we kept collaboration alive
- 09:45 - When tooling costs more than a human
- 10:20 - Was the blank canvas ever blank?
- 11:15 - Auto layout was already doing the work
- 12:15 - The skills I'm renting
- 14:10 - The other side of the ledger
- 14:45 - Months of Figma work rebuilt in days
- 15:35 - The PR that got rejected
- 16:30 - Finding our lane with engineering
- 17:25 - Saved time is contested territory
- 18:15 - Engineers weren't territorial
- 19:25 - Designer or UI engineer?
- 20:05 - Back to pen and paper
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