Figma, Saarinen and the 32%
Figma's own 2025 AI Report says 78% of their users find AI more efficient and only 32% can rely on the output.
Read that twice.
Figma is selling AI design tools and measuring, in writing, that two-thirds of their own users don't trust what those tools produce.
Karri Saarinen, who runs a design-led company called Linear, has spent the last five months publishing very patient, very Finnish essays about what this number actually means.
The essays are called "Design is more than code" and "Output isn't design."
You can tell from the titles that the man tried tact and the industry stopped listening.
So let me put it less politely.
Saarinen's argument, borrowed from an architect named Christopher Alexander in 1964, is that design is the fit between a form and its context. The form is what you ship — the button, the layout, the working thing.
The context is everything that makes demands on the form: the user, the edge case, the problem the thing is supposed to solve. The work of design is the search for fit. The tools generating the forms cannot see the context. They are selling the shadow and calling it the shape.
This is why Figma Sites launched at Config 2025 with 210 accessibility violations on its own demo page, including 28 images with no alt text on a product whose entire pitch is helping people design for the web.
This is why Figma Make, the year before, reliably generated Apple's Weather app from the prompt "weather app" three separate times — like a slot machine that only pays out in copyright infringement.
And this is why Builder.ai, a company that raised $445 million from Microsoft, the Qatar Investment Authority, and SoftBank on the premise that describing an app would produce an app, went bankrupt last May after it came out that the "AI," named Natasha, was 700 engineers in India typing very fast.
Someone walked past the shuttered Shoreditch office and spray-painted four words on the door.
AI LIED. WE DIED.
Builder.ai is what happens when you take the premise that output is design all the way to its logical conclusion. You can't actually skip the hard part.
Saarinen has been trying to tell the industry this since December.
Alexander has been trying to tell the industry this since 1964.
A $36 billion cohort of vibe-coding companies has spent the last twelve months arguing with both of them.
They will lose this argument.
Not because their tools are bad — most are genuinely good, some are great. They will lose because they are selling the part of design that is easy and calling it the whole thing. And the part they skipped — the understanding, the context, the fit — keeps showing up anyway.
Sometimes as 210 WCAG violations. Sometimes as Apple's Weather app. Sometimes as four words sprayed on a door in Shoreditch.
The core of design is still about understanding, not output.
Saarinen said it first.
I'm just the guy shouting it.