Ephemeral Design

Ricky Zhang's argument that design files should return to being disposable drafts, leaving the design system as the only durable asset and code as the single source of truth.

The problem of two truths

Product teams have long maintained two mirror-image sources of truth — a "truth of intent" in Figma and a "truth of implementation" in code.³ This made sense when code was expensive and pixels were cheap, so teams validated in the cheaper medium first.³ But design files are inherently a simulator: they don't account for network latency, data complexity, rendering behavior, or accessibility tooling. Code is the only artifact that contains the full reality of the system.³

The cost of keeping two truths aligned

• Busywork. Updating Figma after a feature ships is documentation theater that creates no user value.³
• Translation loss. Polished mocks hide implementation complexity and suppress engineering objections until midstream.³
• Inevitable drift. A Shopify internal audit found 14% of implementations had drifted from a robust design system within a year.³
• Over-engineered Figma. Tokens, variables, and modes shifted cognitive load onto designers, turning them into "Figma admins" maintaining fragile logic with weak refactoring tooling.³
• Zombie logic. One team had 300+ Figma components vs ~120 in code — carefully built variants nobody used.³

The paradigm

As AI drives the cost of code toward zero, the case for high-fidelity simulation collapses. Ephemeral Design proposes:³

• Figma as a whiteboard — for divergent thinking and clarifying logic, not pixel-perfect replicas.
• Archive after launch — once a feature ships, reference the live product (code), not a months-old mock.
• A lean design system is the only durable asset — kept tightly synced to code: if it isn't in code, it shouldn't be in Figma.
• Code previews become the shared language — decisions are made against the real product experience.

Boundaries (the source's own caveat)

Zhang notes Ephemeral Design works best today for teams strong in product logic, fast-moving, with a high talent bar. Where visual expression is the product — marketing sites, brand-heavy experiences — abandoning traditional deliverables needs more experimentation.³

Why it matters for the role

Ephemeral Design dissolves the handoff and makes design and engineering parallel co-creation in a code-centered environment — exactly the territory the design engineer occupies. It pairs naturally with Verification Asymmetry (verify in code) and the AI shift (vibe coding to adjust real product directly).³