Runway's Solaris generates interfaces frame by frame, skipping code entirely

Runway's Solaris is a new model that renders interfaces frame by frame rather than compiling them from code, treating clicks and drags as conditioning signals for the next frame the way it would treat a text prompt. Runway argues that converting a design into an intermediate representation, the usual code step, throws away visual fidelity and locks behavior to whatever developers anticipated in advance. To test that, Runway ran a 250-participant study comparing Solaris against Claude Opus 5 on identical interaction requests, collecting nearly 7,500 pairwise judgments: participants preferred Solaris 71% of the time for natural behavior and 61% for following instructions. Text rendering and long-session coherence remain unsolved.