🤿 wtf is a prototype

wtf is a prototype now??

we've made incremental progress for a decade+ and then everything changed overnight 😳

So this week is all about the future of prototyping because we get to hear from Holly and Nikolas from the Figma Make team.

Some highlights:

• Rethinking what “high fidelity” means for a prototype

• How code is the glue and what it means for collaboration

• What are the less obvious use cases for prototyping with AI

• Meta prototyping with interactive playgrounds and inspect panels

• + a lot more

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

🤝 WITH GRANOLA

Alright picture this…

You’re in CRIT and you’re getting a bunch of feedback from everyone on the call so you’re taking notes as fast as you can so you know where to iterate.

Sound familiar? Well thankfully those days are over…

All you have to do is run Granola in the background the next time you’re talking with people on your team (don’t worry there’s no creepy meeting bot).

You can kinda think of Granola like Apple notes but it transcribes CRIT for you 😮

You can even make a CRIT template to pull out specific action items or capture all of the questions you were asked. I never start a meeting without Granola and I strongly believe that designers everywhere should be using it.

They’re offering 3 months free for you and anyone on your team all you have to do is click the link to get it 👇

🎓 KEY TAKEAWAYS

Some thoughts on the future of prototyping

1 — Time to rethink fidelity

When you hear “low fidelity,” you probably think gray boxes and wireframes. It’s become shorthand for visual roughness.

But fidelity isn’t just about visuals… it lives on multiple axes.

Holly shared how she’ll sometimes intentionally ask Figma Make for a wireframe with gray boxes. That way, she can focus entirely on the interaction design.

This example really resonates with me because prototyping with AI has improved my interaction design more than just about anything else. You don’t need the skills or even the right language to make something happen.

Niko joked that you can tell the AI to “make it feel like a bouncy ball on a rainy day” and it’s true! You might not know what that looks like but something will happen and you can easily iterate from there.

Which brings me to my next point 👇

2 — Embrace “meta prototyping”

You ever see people like Jhey building these little sliders that allow you to tweak values and explore interactions live?

I used to think that was only something design engineers at Vercel could pull off but now you can add this to your prototype with a single prompt.

Just tell the AI what variables you want to mess with and it’ll generate the sliders for you automatically.

We started calling this “meta prototyping,” and it genuinely unlocks a new ceiling for what you can build.

One thing I like to do is ask the AI to create a custom Inspect tab for developers.

For example, when I was working on theming logic for Inflight, I had AI generate documentation and give my engineer a one-click way to copy my custom gradients.

So returning back to the “bouncy ball on a rainy day” interaction…

You could easily ask AI to:

1. Create sliders to tweak the animation

2. Outline the full code and logic for your developer to use

Pretty cool, right?

3 — Code is glue

The final state for software will always be code.

So the more people who can work directly in that medium, the better the collaboration gets.

Remember when Gunnar Gray talked about designing the shader animation for Perplexity’s voice mode?

If he had stayed in After Effects, it would’ve been much harder for the engineer to realize his vision.

This isn’t about designers doing everyone’s jobs. It’s about contributing to a shared set of artifacts.

When the output is standardized, you can insert yourself wherever you’re strongest or most curious.

For Gunnar, that meant shaders.

For me… theming logic.

What’s it going to be for you?

Meet the Dive partners 

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Framer​ → How I build my websites

Genway → How I do research

Granola → How I take notes during CRIT

Jitter​ → How I animate my designs

Lovable → How I build my ideas in code

Mobbin → How I find design inspiration

Paper → How I design like a creative

Raycast ​ → How I stay in flow while I work

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