Dive Club 🤿 Drew Wilson - How designers become builders and the future of tooling
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Oct 24, 2025 Drew Wilson, a seasoned design-engineer and founder of Opacity, envisions a future where designers effortlessly transition to coding without handoffs. He discusses the evolution of design teams, emphasizing the need for a single source of truth that connects designs directly to code. Drew introduces Loop, an innovative IDE for AI-assisted development, and explains how AI is reshaping the roles of designers and engineers. He also offers insights on future skill sets, the importance of design systems, and strategic hiring in a tech-driven landscape.
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One Source Of Truth For Design And Code
- A single source of truth can eliminate the separation between design and engineering by making design artifacts actual code.
- Opacity aims to create that unified system so designers and engineers work on the same canonical artifacts.
WebGL Canvas vs Production DOM
- Figma's canvas is rendered in WebGL not the DOM, which makes its designs a "pretty picture" rather than production code.
- A DOM-based canvas would let designers create artifacts that are directly usable in production.
Publish Components As Versioned Packages
- Publish visual components as versioned packages so engineers can import them directly into codebases.
- Expose design variables as props so engineers or AI can customize components without rewriting them.