Replit as a Figma Replacement

I was sent this tweet a few days ago:

I talked to the CEO of a moderately big tech co who said they’d replaced Figma with Replit. This surprised me because I don’t even think of them as being in the same business. But he said Replit is so good at generating apps that they just to [sic] straight to prototype now.

On first read, my reaction was slightly negative.

It’s generally good for more stages of software and web app design to be accessible to more people. However, this workflow of rapid prototyping (instead of designing and wireframing) often shifts work and discovery from the design stage into the build stage. These stages become more intertwined, making it harder to separate concerns and manage complexity.

One of the lessons developers with more than just a few years of experience have learned is that the quickest, most painless time to fix problems is during the design stage; it’s easier and quicker to build the right solution than to fix the wrong one.

This understanding made me skeptical of transitioning from designing and wireframing to rapid prototyping with Replit as a good direction to take a company, but now I’ve reconsidered. While I certainly think it’s true that the best place to solve problems is in design, I think I may have overcorrected for it. I now think it’s actually more reasonable that, in expectation, you’ll spend more time creating wireframes, designing more deeply, and navigating feedback loops than you’ll save compared to using only quick prototypes. There’s no reason to only do one or the other; you can optimize further by attempting to anticipate which projects will benefit from extended design.

Overall, I’ve changed my mind about the direction that company chose to go in over the past few days and I now think this is a positive sign, especially given how much deploying products can slow down as companies grow. Of course, this was all obvious ab initio to the developer reading this.