Intercom's 3-point framework for AI-driven design

Shipping code, vibe coding the roadmap, and owning the entire frontend

We all know that AI is changing how design gets done. At Intercom we led the charge earlier this year by having all of our designers ship code changes to production; in a short few months we’ve seen many other design teams follow suit, and it’s fast becoming standard practice.

More broadly, design teams are using AI in many different ways to quickly redefine their role and impact.

We developed this three-step framework to expand design’s role at Intercom:

1. Designers shipping code: Every designer is shipping directly to production, fixing UX debt and bugs, updating content and continuously improving the experience.

2. Vibe coding the roadmap: We can now create highly-convincing interactive prototypes that we use to directly influence our product roadmap.

3. Owning the entire frontend: Designers at Intercom are now building entire features and screens.

Let’s look at these one by one.

1. Designers shipping code

For months now, designers at Intercom have been shipping PRs.

This started small, with modest copy tweaks or CSS changes. But over time, we’ve taken on more and more complex changes. The most impactful changes in this category have been UI quality fixes.

In the past, fixing quality issues has been a drag. It required designers to spot the issue, log it in GitHub, and add redlines and an explanation of the fix. That bug would inevitably get triaged as a P3, adding to the ever-growing pile of other P3 quality issues. Designers would beg, bribe, and cajole engineers in an attempt to get them fixed.

Sometimes engineers would get to them. Even when they did, the issue wouldn’t always be perfectly fixed, requiring further back and forth to refine the details. Highly frustrating for both the designers and for the engineers involved.

Today, designers at Intercom use tools like Cursor to hunt down these problems in the codebase and fix them directly. Designers have their own local dev environment, and their fix gets shipped straight to production after an Engineer has approved a quick code review.

We’ve always been judged by the quality of our UI, but we’ve been subject to an external process that limits our control of that quality. With the barrier to using the technology lowered, we have been able to take matters into our own hands.

This is a massive shift in self-determination for designers everywhere: you could throw another P3 on the ash pile of UI quality bugs, or you could just go fix the damn thing yourself. Do this enough times, and the overall quality of your product creeps inexorably up.

And this doesn’t just benefit our designers. As our co-founder Des recently shared on a podcast with Stripe’s John Collison, it’s also given our engineers more time to focus on the right things. It kills distraction.

Designers shipping code is good for designers, good for engineers, and good for our users. It’s a whole new vector of impact that’s now available to designers everywhere.

Left: janky, overlapping drag interaction. Right: smooth fixed version, shipped by a Designer.

2. Vibe coding the Roadmap

It’s not all about being a cleanup crew, shipping code to production. Vibe coding has been a second huge unlock for our design team’s ability to influence what we build next.

We’ve always attempted to do this in a sense, using wireframes and static mockups strung together into clickable prototypes that attempted to approximate an interactive UI. But this approach was full of limitations:

• Static prototypes leave a lot to the imagination. You just don’t get a qualitative feel what it’s like to use a product. You have to imagine loading states and transitions. You can’t click around, type, highlight, scroll. You can’t play with the product. Static prototypes felt more like browsing a Powerpoint presentation than using a real product.

• They were slow to iterate. Imagine a 20 screen prototype with a tiny detail changing: you’d have to go through all the screens and change it 20 times. Friction like this matters, and holds you back.

• You can’t easily incorporate real data. Imagine trying to prototype a filtering system: you’d have people clicking through static images of different states with pre-filled content. It didn’t feel anywhere close to the actual task.

But now, using tools like Figma Make, Lovable, Cursor, and Claude Code, designers easily can build highly convincing, interactive prototypes that look and feel exactly like the real thing.

That’s so much more convincing than a series of static clickable PNGs that are wired together into a storyboard of what the experience could be like. Vibe coded prototypes can be made to look exactly like your product, with a high degree of verisimilitude. We’re finding that with a bit of work and tooling, the level of fidelity we can get to is surprisingly excellent.

The upshot is that it’s way easier and faster for a designer to pitch an idea for what we should build next. At Intercom, designers are now influencing the roadmap much more often just by vibe coding what they think we should build.

And the response is often, “Holy shit, yeah we should just build that.”

It’s just way more convincing. You get to play with the thing, type the thing, get responses back, and feel the real product come to life. It feels real because it is real. People can actually use the prototype, not just click through it.

There’s another benefit too: rapidly validating these design ideas.

Before now, a robust user testing session would require a long process of designing mockups, getting an engineer to build a demo version, getting a researcher to run many user studies and write a report, etc.

Now designers can make a compelling prototype, put it in front of customers and rapidly test and then iterate on them, almost in real time. We’ve had designers test a proto with a user on a call, hang up, and in the 30 minutes before the next customer session quickly update the prototype based on what they just learned.

This new process of real-time user testing and iterating is an insanely fast feedback loop, and drives rapid product improvement. Another huge step forward in empowering designers.

Finally, it also speeds up the wider R&D process. This stronger design validation process means we get to go and build the actual product much faster.

The combination is powerful:

• A real prototype people can really play with, where every interaction works

• High-confidence validation from actual customers who’ve already used it

This combination has allowed our designers much greater influence over our product we actually build.

A real, interactive, AI-powered conversation prototype—vibe-coded by a designer.

3. Designers owning the Frontend

Finally, let’s put these two previous ideas together.

Designers are now taking on more and more complex front-end coding challenges. And we’re starting to build highly convincing prototypes, which are increasingly built using our internal Design System’s React components.

Extrapolate from here, and you can easily imagine designers moving beyond UI tweaks and throwaway prototypes, toward designers owning the entire frontend design and build.

We think that’s a much cleaner handoff point between the current messy handoff process, and we bet that it’s how things will look in the future. Engineers handle the backend; designers own the interface. No more misinterpretations of static comps. No more endless P3s and “move it three pixels to the left” back-and-forth. Just production-quality design, shipped by designers.

Example of a production-ready frontend, entirely built by a designer using our Design System.

Where this is leading design

Many designers are concerned about what AI means for their jobs, and that’s valid. But we believe it’s an incredibly exciting time to be a designer.

The confluence of shipping code, vibe coding the roadmap, and potentially owning the entire frontend redraws the boundaries of what design can be.

AI need not encroach on the role of designers. Quite the opposite: it can expand the frontiers of what we can do, and the impact we can have in our orgs.

If you’re worried that designers’ roles will be made obsolete because of all the new tools that are coming out—you don’t need to be. But you do need to be willing to step outside of the traditional boundaries of what it means to be a designer.

The frontiers now are wide open, and the role of design has never been more expansive. Designers now have self-determination over the quality of their products. The strategic influence they can have has never been greater. And the potential to reinvent the product development process with design as a key driver is here.

We are doing this right now in the Intercom Design team, and we hope others see the possibility too.