AI has completely reignited my love for design and product. Not in a quiet, subtle way, but in a way that makes me want to build things again for fun, late at night, just to see what happens.

I’ve always been drawn to creating products. For a long time, Figma was the lowest-friction way to turn ideas into something tangible. It was fast, flexible, and accessible. You could open it, sketch a few frames, connect them together, and suddenly you had a “product.” It was good enough to align teams, communicate intent, and move forward.

But it was always a compromise.

How we as a Team were using Figma: #

What we made in Figma were representations of products, not the products themselves. Static interfaces stitched together with hotspots and clever transitions. They looked convincing from a distance, but the closer you got, the more fragile they felt. Every time I tried to push for more realism, the cracks became obvious. Hover states were faked. Dropdowns were simulated. Inputs were frozen in time. Animations took effort disproportionate to the value they delivered.

So much of the work was menial. Tedious. Disposable. We would spend hours perfecting interactions that existed only to be thrown away once engineering started. Somewhere along the way, we stopped exploring ideas and started role-playing them. Design became performance.

AI changed that relationship entirely.

AI powered context based IDE Cursor changed everything: #

Working with tools like Cursor feels less like using software and more like collaborating with a thinking partner. When my ideas are unclear or half-formed, I no longer have to force them into neat boxes upfront. I can explore in real time. I can ask questions. I can try a direction, throw it away, and try another one minutes later. The friction that used to slow me down is mostly gone.

What makes this shift profound is that the output is real.

I am no longer sharing pretend experiences. I am opening a browser and interacting with something that actually runs. Real layouts. Real tokens. Real text. I can resize the window and watch it respond. I can break things and see what fails. I can hand it to someone else and let them get lost inside it without caveats or explanations. No more “imagine this animates” or “that button is not hooked up yet.” People just use it, and their reactions are honest in a way that prototypes rarely allow.

Once you cross that line, it is very hard to go back.

At that point, Figma starts to feel like pen and paper. Still valuable. Still useful. But limited. Prototyping in code feels like working directly in the digital medium instead of drawing a picture of it. The product pushes back. It reveals problems early. It forces clarity.

Vim Motions Changed Me: #

Around the same time, something similar happened with how I write and edit code.

Learning Vim fundamentally changed my relationship with text. At first, it felt strange and even hostile. No mouse. No arrow keys. Everything driven by motion and intent. But once it clicked, editing stopped being about tools and started being about flow.

Vim motions feel like thinking in verbs. Delete this. Change that. Move inside. Move around. It is fast, expressive, and surprisingly creative. Writing code or prose in Vim feels closer to sculpting than typing. The editor disappears, and all that remains is intent.

That shift mirrored what I was experiencing with AI-driven development and design. Less friction. Less ceremony. More direct translation from thought to action. When you combine AI as a thought partner with an editor that stays out of your way, something unlocks. You stop fighting interfaces and start shaping ideas.

Design, writing, and coding start to blur together. Prototypes become living artifacts. Words become malleable. Ideas move faster than doubt.

At this point, it is difficult to imagine going back to the old way. Static prototypes. Heavy tools. Slow feedback loops. They had their place, and they still do. But for me, the center of gravity has shifted.

I want tools that work with me, not ones I have to wrestle into submission. I want to explore, break things, and learn by doing. AI and Vim have both reminded me why I fell in love with creating in the first place.

And once you feel that freedom, it is almost impossible to give it up.