There’s a thread on r/UXDesign this week that I keep coming back to. A designer writes: “I’m currently working with a PM who is obsessed with vibe coding prototypes... the PM will show me a prototype they made and suggest working from it.”
Many designers have been in that room. The tool just keeps changing.
Over a decade ago, my version of this room had a PM who’d learned Balsamiq over a weekend. They walked in with wireframes - overly confident ones - for exactly how the product should work. I’m pretty sure you could name any major design or prototyping tool and I’ve been in that room. The specific tool doesn’t matter. What matters is the dynamic: they have something you can click, and you’re standing there with nothing to show yet.
The instinct is to reach for the drawing compass - redraw it, clean it up, make it more correct. But what the moment calls for is the navigational one. Treat the prototype like a hypothesis, not a directive. What problem is this solving? Whose behavior does this assume? What does it get right? Use it to surface the questions it can’t answer and shift the conversation toward strategy, research, the decisions that don’t show up in the code.
The designers who stay relevant aren’t the ones who fight the prototype. They’re the ones who pick up the right compass - not to redraw what’s there, but to ask if we’re heading in the right direction at all. In a world where a PM can vibe-code a concept in twenty minutes, that’s not a threat to your role. It’s the clearest argument for it.
Some Recent Links (Human Curated) ❤️
Soleio’s design hiring playbook as a Claude Code skill — Soleio (an early Instagram, Facebook design lead) turned his hiring framework into a Claude Skill. Worth opening if you’re building a design team or preparing for your next role.
Kite Video — I’ve been experimenting with this tool to jazz up my screen recording demos. If you've ever recorded a Loom and wished it looked more like an Apple product launch video, this is worth a look.
Agentation — Annotate your UI with intent and priority, paste it into your agent, and Agentation outputs the CSS selectors, component tree, and source file paths so it fixes the right element without guessing.
Agentic Taste— Refero MCP gives your AI agent access to 126k real product screens and 8k+ user flows — so when it builds an onboarding modal, it’s working from how actual products solved it, not inventing from scratch.
Paper Desktop — Paper is now an MCP-connected canvas. The first tool I’ve seen that makes the design-to-code handoff feel like a loop rather than a wall.
Cursor Continual Learning — Cursor’s plugin watches your chats, pulls out your corrections and preferences, and writes them into your AGENTS.md automatically. Your agent learns your component names, your review style, what you keep reverting - instead of starting from scratch every session.
Mockdown — ASCII wireframe editor built for AI workflows. Describe your layout in plain text and your agent works from it directly — no Figma export, no screenshot. Made by the same person behind Refero MCP, so it fits the same workflow naturally.
Thanks for reading Not Another Tab!