Ioana at AI Goodies maps 2026 design workflows into five layers

Ioana at AI Goodies collected over 30 LinkedIn replies to a simple question, how do you actually work now, and distilled them into a five-layer architecture: reason in language first, build persistent context (markdown files, brand DNA docs), produce through Claude Code and agents, judge as a human, then refine in Figma for design systems and stakeholder sign-off. The pattern worth noting is Figma's demotion from center of the practice to a specialised tool for structural records and final polish, while the terminal becomes the studio. The sharper thread comes from the skeptics: Cem Kurtaraner argues teams now bring AI-generated prototypes instead of problems, warning "we've lowered the cost of proposing solutions, but not the cost of judging them," and Nikos Antonogiannis built an adversarial QA agent because, as he put it, nobody in the thread was checking the judging itself.