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🤿 AI prototyping tip

🤿 AI prototyping tip

+ free Figma MCP lesson from Joey Banks

Ridd
July 30, 2025

As more people experiment with AI prototyping, a specific question keeps coming up…

“When I use tools like Lovable or Figma Make, I end up spending hours debugging buttons and nav bars. How is this faster?”

you, maybe

It’s a fair point 😅 But it’s also why it’s so important to ask yourself what the goal of your prototype is…

If your goal is to fully replicate your app UI, then yeah… it’s probably not worth it. The ROI drops fast.

The key is to zero in on the one thing you need to test or communicate.

Yesterday I was working on a new profile screen and wanted to reuse a layout from another part of the product. This required a scroll interaction that I couldn’t really build in Figma, so I pulled just that one page into Make. Five minutes later the interaction was working 😮

Was the rest of the UI solid? Not even close lol. The typography was bad, and the components were all over the place.

But that was enough to validate the feel and it also gave me a visual artifact to hand off to a developer.

Let’s talk through another example…

I was exploring a chat interaction (probably the best use case for AI prototyping since it’s brutal to fake in Figma).

I left most of the UI unpolished 🤷‍♂️

Instead I focused on making the chat interaction real enough to drop into Inflight and get feedback.

Then I used AI to generate an inspect doc with logic and actual code suggestions. The dev I shared it with was pretty impressed 😏

TL;DR: If you’re trying to get everything pixel-perfect, AI prototyping will frustrate you. But if you’re laser-focused on one interaction or concept, it can be pretty magical.

🤝 WITH MOBBIN

I’ve been designing for a long time… but somehow I only signed up for Mobbin this year and I cannot believe it took me this long.

Like it’s literally a cheat code being able to find inspiration for basically any pattern, any product, any flow…

It’s fast. It’s beautiful. And I already cannot imagine designing without Mobbin.

It’s the first place I look at for inspiration 💡

I can’t recommend it enough—Click the link to get started 👇

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

How to use Figma’s MCP Server

There’s a lot of hype around Figma’s MCP right now...

So I asked the Figma 🐐 himself, Joey Banks, to share a free lesson from his course and he agreed!

The fact that you don’t even have to paste a link in Cursor and it just knows what frame is selected is still wild to me.

This feels like a significant shift in how designers work so you’ll want to bookmark this one 👇

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

How Dan Mall uses auto layout

So Dann Petty recently tweeted this…

In response Dan Mall did the Lord’s work and put together a high quality walkthrough of exactly how he uses auto layout.

It’s a good example of how it’s not just about knowing how to use the features but also knowing what Figma functionality to ignore (which has quickly become a big part of my own course 😅)

🧃 INSPIRATION JUICE

3 things I saved this week

1️⃣ Sweating the dark mode details

Alvish is one of my favorite Twitter follows (ever since Derek Briggs talked about hiring him).

I encourage you to take a minute and really zoom in on some of these details. The way he’s playing with gradients and subtle inner shadows is world class.

I’ve been working on dark mode for Inflight and am in love with indented darker containers like this 🤌

See it live →

2️⃣ Updated Runway website

The old Runway website was one of my all-time favorites (I even brought it to web design show and tell with Erik Kennedy).

But I gotta admit… they kind of crushed it on the “grown up version” too.

The color palette is quite unique and I’m a big fan of the textured horizontal panel motif.

Side note: we are definitely in the era of simplified websites. Amie and Runway were too of the most celebrated scroll-based narratives and both companies reverted back to something simpler.

See it live →