AI Goodies gathers 30 designers' 2026 workflows, and the friction behind them

Ioana at AI Goodies collects responses from a LinkedIn thread of 30-plus designers describing their actual 2026 workflows, and the pattern she pulls out is a five-layer split: reasoning happens in language before any canvas, persistent context (markdown files, brand documents) survives between disposable chat sessions, production runs through Claude Code and similar agents, and Figma is demoted to a narrow job of stakeholder alignment and system upkeep. What gives the piece weight is that she includes the dissent alongside the enthusiasm: Cem Kurtaraner's line that teams now arrive with AI-generated prototypes instead of problems, so "we've lowered the cost of proposing solutions, but not the cost of judging them," and Nikos Antonogiannis building an adversarial QA agent because nobody checks the judging itself. That second thread matters more than the tooling inventory.