Can design and code work on the same structure?
Should design+code tools be trying to turn visuals into code? Or somehow facilitating the design and code working on the same thing directly?
There’s a version of this where we end up in five years with translation tooling that actually works well. Code to canvas in milliseconds. Canvas back to code with full token fidelity. Collaboration happening fluidly across both environments.
And we’d still be running two parallel systems, kept in sync by increasingly sophisticated automation, with all the maintenance overhead and structural drift that creates.
The other version is one where the design system is the substrate both environments read from directly. Where a decision made in one place propagates to the other not through capture or export or handoff, but because they’re drawing from the same structure. Where AI agents generating UI are composing from a system that knows what it is, not generating approximations from visual reference.
I know which version I think we should be building toward. I’m not sure the tooling announcements of the past six months are pointing there.
The roundtrip is getting smoother. I’m more interested in why we need the trip at all.