One Tool to Rule Them All

<"We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us".>

Design and engineering collaboration is about to undergo another tectonic shift — and this time, it's going to be a bigger shift than what led to Figma.

The Last Big Shift: 1 Designer → N Designers

The previous tech shift happened around 2016-17 when WebAssembly and CRDTs made Figma possible. It brought the design canvas — previously locked inside desktop-only apps like Sketch — directly to the browser, unlocking real-time collaboration. Suddenly you could go from one designer working in isolation to N designers working together simultaneously.

That was a massive unlock. But this year we're about to go one step further.

The Next Shift: N Designers → Everyone

In 2026, Figma (for design-first builders) and the IDE (for code-first builders) are going to collapse into one tool. The walls between "design tool" and "code tool" will dissolve entirely.

This means you go from N designers collaborating to everyone — designers, engineers, PMs — working in the same tool. Engineers can lean into the design side. Designers can get closer to production code.

The handoff disappears because there's nothing to hand off.

One Source of Truth

Today, no matter how hard teams try, the design system lives in two places: a Figma master file and the actual code libraries. These inevitably drift apart, creating friction, bugs, and wasted cycles spent reconciling differences.

A unified tool kills this problem. One source of truth for the design system. One place where a component is the component — not a picture of it in one tool and an implementation of it in another.

What This Means for Teams

For teams scaling fast, especially those where design is lean, this convergence is a force multiplier. When your engineers can meaningfully contribute to design iteration without context-switching between tools, and your designers can see real implementation constraints in real-time, you build a stronger bridge between the two disciplines.

Your designer and engineer jamming together is great, but you know what's better? Your right brain and left brain working together in one tool.

It remains to be seen exactly how this plays out. Maybe Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google acquires Figma (most likely). Maybe Figma evolves from within (least likely). Maybe a new entrant nails the unified experience first — I'd bet on Anthropic, they seem to be completing the loop.

But the direction is clear: the era of separate tools for separate roles is ending. The teams that lean into this convergence early will ship faster and with higher fidelity than those still passing mockups over the fence.

The roles are merging, and the tools have to merge.

</"We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us".>