Happy Monday.

I sat down with Amelia Wattenberger, designer-engineer at Intent, building what they call a post-IDE environment.

New episode of State of Play just dropped and she articulated something I've been trying to say for months:

The real working surface of designing software is a document that sits between you and the AI agent. Amelia calls it a living spec, the new source of truth.

This one gets deep in the weeds, and I felt right at home.

– Tommy (@designertom)

Anthropic shipped Claude Design. The design system ingest is the part to watch.

Claude Design reads your codebase and your Figma files, extracts your brand tokens, and applies them automatically to every prototype, slide, or one-pager you ask it to make.

Anthropic Labs launched Thursday, powered by Opus 4.7 with a 3.3× vision upgrade. Anthropic's CPO Mike Krieger resigned from Figma's board the day before.

Coincidences don't get more on-the-nose.

The news cycle covered it as "ChatGPT-for-decks." Wrong frame. Prompting your way to a prototype has been a category since Lovable and v0 — it's commodity now.

The move to watch is the onboarding flow.

Point it at your repo and Figma file once. From then on, every artifact is on-brand without a designer in the loop. Figma stock was up 5% on the news. The market might be wrong.

Every major productivity jump has been a new abstraction layer: punch cards to assembly, high-level to components, components to agents.

Each one trades control for reach, feels wrong to people below it, obvious to people above.

Amelia's argument is that the current transition is missing its abstraction. We bolted agents onto chat windows and called it a product. But chat is a transcript, not a source of truth.

As she put it on the show: "It's like figuring out what a code base is from the git commits."

The living spec is her answer. A markdown document that sits between you and the AI agents. You write intent. They work from it and write back. You correct. The spec stays current with the work.

If she's right — and I think she is — then the next wave of tools is going to get judged on whether they produce a spec you can trust, not a demo that looks good on launch day. That's a different bar.

Full conversation here.

That's it for today.

I'm rebuilding one of my own projects as a proper living spec this week and will report back on what breaks.

If you've landed on a real source of truth for your AI-assisted work — Obsidian, Linear, something custom — reply and tell me what it is. I'm collecting answers.

See you Friday.

Tommy