MDS

What's something in the world you know you're directly responsible for but if you were to claim credit you'd sound crazy?

ai is a joystick love it great read

As we've launched Figma Code Layers, MCP Server, Motion, and generative shaders and plugins, I have been thinking about the role of prompting in the creative process. In 1978, Card, English, and Burr at Xerox PARC showed that direct pointing with a mouse outperformed the alternatives they tested in both speed and accuracy because users could point directly to a target in one movement. This result became one of the foundations for modern graphical interfaces. Less discussed are the other devices tested. While the mouse pointed at a target, the joystick expressed a velocity: keep moving in this direction. Although effective for exploration, joysticks required iterative refinement to reach a precise destination. Prompting is AI’s velocity input. Like a joystick, it communicates how a system should move, rather than where it should end up. It launches a search through an enormous solution space with remarkable efficiency, making it an incredible interface for exploration, ideation, and rapidly converging on promising directions. But exploration eventually gives way to refinement, and every constraint comes into focus. Direct interaction with the artifact—be it code or design—provides a fidelity that is difficult to capture through natural language alone. Every dependency, every pixel, every interaction matters. Each interaction model excels at a different level of precision. In a nutshell, prompting tells the computer how to move, while direct manipulation tells it exactly where to stop. We’ve been talking a lot at Figma about how prompting and direct manipulation complement one another. Our research team recently dug into how design, code, and AI are converging, and even quantified how these disciplines are blending in practice. It’s well worth a read. 🔗⤵️

As we've launched Figma Code Layers, MCP Server, Motion, and generative shaders and plugins, I have been thinking about the role of prompting in the creative process. In 1978, Card, English, and Burr at Xerox PARC showed that direct pointing with a mouse outperformed the alternatives they tested in both speed and accuracy because users could point directly to a target in one movement. This result became one of the foundations for modern graphical interfaces. Less discussed are the other devices tested. While the mouse pointed at a target, the joystick expressed a velocity: keep moving in this direction. Although effective for exploration, joysticks required iterative refinement to reach a precise destination. Prompting is AI’s velocity input. Like a joystick, it communicates how a system should move, rather than where it should end up. It launches a search through an enormous solution space with remarkable efficiency, making it an incredible interface for exploration, ideation, and rapidly converging on promising directions. But exploration eventually gives way to refinement, and every constraint comes into focus. Direct interaction with the artifact—be it code or design—provides a fidelity that is difficult to capture through natural language alone. Every dependency, every pixel, every interaction matters. Each interaction model excels at a different level of precision. In a nutshell, prompting tells the computer how to move, while direct manipulation tells it exactly where to stop. We’ve been talking a lot at Figma about how prompting and direct manipulation complement one another. Our research team recently dug into how design, code, and AI are converging, and even quantified how these disciplines are blending in practice. It’s well worth a read. 🔗⤵️