The designer/developer handoff has been with us for years. And even though today's AI tools are dramatically increasing everyone's output, the walls between disciplines haven't changed. So now we're throwing more stuff over the wall, faster. We've been iterating on a different workflow, which Amelia Wattenberger and I demoed at Design Futures Assembly.
Most companies have years of cemented process. Changing how designers and developers work together means unwinding habits, tools, and politics that have been building for a long time. We're in a different situation because we're spinning up new companies regularly. Which means we can recreate the design/dev process each time. And as the technology evolves and we learn what works, we adapt and carry those lessons into the next one. Today we'll share our current approach.
Where a lot of the discourse on AI is these days, and where a lot of AI tools are at, is individual empowerment. Designers saying: "I can finally ship code, I don't even need developers anymore." Developers saying the reverse.
But very few people are actually asking the question: how do we use AI to work better together?
Because pretty much everybody, in this room and beyond, is working with other people. And that's where the magic lies. Being able to pull multiple folks, their skills, and their experience together to create something better than you could do yourself.
Why doesn't this kind of collaboration happen already? As user experience, front-end development, and product management have matured as disciplines, we've fallen into a throw-it-over-the-wall modality. Partially because as these roles have matured, specific tools have been made for designers, like Figma. Likewise specific tools for developers, tools for PMs, et.c
And now we're adding a lot more tools, thanks to AI. So we're all able to produce more at a higher rate. Which means we're more throwing stuff over the wall faster. That's why you hear stories of developers just being overwhelmed with PRs as everyone starts "shipping" their ideas.
That applies to big complex projects but also nearly everything we do. Like publishing a blog post on your Web site. Maybe these days, the PM writes the content in ChatGPT, the designer makes the assets in Nano Banana, the developer writes the code in Codex. Everyone's productive, but are they aligned?
To help solve this, we've been building an app called Intent. The goal: make it easier to build software together. For any task, you spin up a workspace, which is a bundle of everything you need. Files (an isolated copy of the codebase, so you can change without messing up what others are doing), context (specs, scratchpad, data from external systems via MCP, etc), and agents (with tools and the ability to delegate and orchestrate work). Because these are all in one bundle, it becomes easier to put things down, pick them up, and hand them off.
Here's why that matters in practice. A designer keeps working where they already work (like Figma or paper) and brings their expertise into the workspace: grid, typography. That all gets encoded. A developer gets to work in their tools: CSS frameworks, deployment, structure. Same surface, different expertise.
The same surface that makes it easy to collaborate with people on your team is the same one that makes it easy to collaborate with agents. And true collaboration means respecting everyone's taste. So any workspace that gets spun up will align with how the designer encoded the styles to work and how the developer encoded the code to work.
To illustrate as a designer, I've got a Figma file with a grid and layouts. I go into a workspace in Intent and say: "Agent, look at the Figma file. Create the grid. Here's what the breakpoints are." Now that's encoded in the workspace and anybody that creates a new page or drops in a new asset, it works within that system.
I can also set up how animations should work to give everything made in the workspace silky smooth transitions.
Same idea on the developer side. The dev can say: here's the agent's MD file, here's how we're testing the code, here's the tailwind config. The agent encodes all of that.
Taste gets baked into code files and markdown files in the repo. And because things are built on top of the same version control that developers use, it gets automatically included into every new workspace.
The great thing is that this same pattern works for anybody on the team. An illustrator can use their own tools to make assets. A content writer can write their copy in Word.
Then anybody on the team can spin up a workspace and say: we're making a blog post, here are the assets, here's the Word doc. Because that workspace already includes the designer and developer's tastes, what pops out the other end is a blog post that's fully aligned with the rest of the site.
You can also run these workspaces in parallel so many people can be working on different parts of the experience simultaneously. And because every workspace is encoded in the same way, everything that gets added ends up unified by default.
This gives us massive parallelism and the ability to accommodate all kinds of last-minute requests. Which, even in an age of AI, still happen. Here's me busting out 10 last-minute 8pm asks in minutes using multiple workspaces without messing up the design or code integrity of the site.
AI tools are making individuals faster, but speed isn't the problem. Cohesion is. When taste is encoded into a shared workspace in Intent, designers keep designing, developers keep developing, and everything that comes out the other end holds together. No handoffs necessary.