For years, design handoff meant exporting frames and hoping the spec captured the intent. Then I started building my own designs with AI-assisted development, and the gap became obvious: I had never actually written down half of what I knew about my own designs.
Talking to a coding assistant forces precision. “Make it feel calmer” is not a spec — but “increase spacing between sections to 96px, drop illustration density, and slow the reveal animation to 600ms” is. Vibe coding turned me into the engineer of my own intent.
The surprise is what it did to my Figma files. Because I now expect my designs to be read by a machine, I name layers like variables, group by behavior instead of aesthetics, and write rationale in the file itself. Handoff quality improved even when the handoff is to a human.
I don't think designers must code. But I've stopped believing the file is the deliverable. The deliverable is a shared, explicit model of the design — and AI tools are simply brutal mirrors that show you whether you have one.