Guests

Vlad Solomakha, CEO & Co-founder, Banani
Vova Parkhomchuk, CTO & Co-founder, Banani
Vlad Ostapovats, Founding Growth, Banani

In this episode

Why Banani started as a Figma plugin and what they learned from early organic distribution
The canvas-first approach: why Banani is built around a design canvas rather than a chat interface
How their agent architecture splits prompts into surgical edits instead of regenerating full screens
The "gulf of specification" problem and what Banani is building to help agents and designers speak the same visual language
Managing context across canvases with hundreds of screens — per-screen history with shared project context
Why Banani doesn't compile running applications — just HTML/CSS mockups — and how that shapes everything
How they evaluate design quality without traditional evals: spinning up 10 screens from one prompt to compare models
Their approach to building at the edge of what's possible: identifying which model limitations to work around vs. wait out
The role of context engineering and specialized agent tools in producing tasteful, high-quality design

Resources & Links

Chapters

00:00 Meet the Founders 01:12 What Bonani Builds 02:18 Why an AI Designer 03:40 Raising the Design Floor 06:23 Why AI Was Finally Ready 10:48 First Prototype Figma Plugin 14:10 Early Growth and Distribution 15:25 Standing Out in a Crowded Market 20:13 Product Tour Canvas First AI 23:40 Autopilot vs Manual Control 27:07 Tech Behind High Quality Design 32:08 Craft Beyond 80 Percent 33:40 Gulf of Specification 36:44 Proactive Agent Interviews 38:40 Canvas First UX Choices 42:54 Agent Architecture Under Hood 48:48 State History Context Tricks 52:32 Tooling Context Engineering 56:04 Navigating Busy Canvases 01:00:13 Betting on Model Progress 01:03:47 Shipping Around Imperfections 01:07:20 Try Banani and Next Steps 01:07:52 Building the Banani MCP 01:09:19 Final Thanks and Wrap

462 Nuts!