When Luke Dupont came back from the holidays in January, he noticed that everyone around him was building. “I got really scared because I wasn’t,” he says. “I was still just doing the thing that I’m really good at, which is Figma.” So he took the opportunity to dive in.

His demo revisits an idea he first explored about a year earlier: rethinking how a merchant’s online store could be built inside Shop. The first version was a Figma prototype, but it never went far. “It felt very static and very not real,” he says.

This time, he went straight to a working prototype. In an afternoon, he built a version using real merchant data and Shop’s existing components. He shared the first cut at 4PM on a Friday, got a simple "keep pushing," and came back after the weekend with a much more complete vision: a store where every section could be rearranged, rebuilt for different shoppers, or generated from a prompt. And instead of turning the new concept into a deck, he shared the prototype directly through a Quick link so the team could see updates as he made them.

Across Shopify, designers are getting closer to code. Design apprentices Pearl Sequeira and Taylor Cottrell are two strong examples.

Pearl recently redesigned how the Shop app collects and displays buyer reviews. She started her exploration in Figma, then built the experience inside the app using Claude Code and Codex. “It helps us make decisions really fast, cut things that don't work, and double down on things that are beginning to look good,” she says. While she still uses Figma to map out a direction, she now turns to code to test the motion and interactions that are difficult to communicate with a static mock.

Taylor approached a similar problem from the other direction. Before opening Figma to design a new feed card, he dropped an old engineering spec into an AI assistant to quickly map out the technical constraints. The tool surfaced details like latency, lazy loading, and deduplication before he drew a single screen. Because of this groundwork, his subsequent conversations with engineers started from a shared understanding.

For much of her career, the things motion designer Yaël Bienenstock pushed for “would often just get watered down more and more as we got to the end of the project.” Motion was often the last thing on the timeline, squeezed into the nice-to-have category. Now, she can build them herself.

Her demo features a floating character she created for the design team's website, whose jacket transforms with every click. She modeled the character after a colleague using Krea, then jumped from tool to tool for the rest: Midjourney for the outfits, Gemini to fine-tune them, Rev for pinpoint edits on specific details, stills stitched into generated video, composited and timed in After Effects, then into Claude in the terminal for a working prototype an engineer could take to the finish line.

That creative freedom goes beyond work. With thousands of outfit photos in her camera roll, but no easy way to find them, Yaël built an app in her free time that turns mirror selfies into 3D avatars for cataloging her outfits, complete with animated icons and shaders.