My highlights from Config 2026: tools and the human side of tech

The air this year was different. Whereas 2025 felt new and exciting as we were still figuring out AI tools and their quirks—this year in 2026, AI was at the forefront and if it wasn’t in the talks, it was definitely talked about in person.

It reminded me of the story Sho Kuwamoto told a few Configs ago. In the early 2000s he and his team were building web tools and it felt like everything had already been built and the good old days had long passed. But the reality was that it was just the beginning, a new era for tech.

Figma continues to ship

There were a lot of cool demos to highlight and Dylan kicked off the keynote saying that code is a material:

Code Layers—turn any layer into working code with a click, then explore a few directions side by side. The Figma → code round trip has been the sore spot for years. This is the most direct swing at it yet. As excited as I am about the potential of this feature—having worked in legacy code bases, I think the reality might be much more complex. I want to stay optimistic but thinking about the code bases I’ve seen over the past few years—that stuff gets messy fast.
Figma Motion—timeline, keyframes, and presets right on the canvas, wired into your design system so components animate at the component level. This one seemed most interesting to me—but here too, I wonder if Claude Code will at some point just eat Motion’s lunch. It wasn’t long ago that I was arguing with a designer about using custom animation tools only to become a Claude Design / Claude Code animation convert. Sure Claude doesn’t do everything right but it is pretty impressive how much better it’s gotten.
Shader fills and effects—AI-generated, fully parameterized, with real controls on canvas. Stackable and code-ready. This is cool and designerly, hopefully it’ll make designs exciting and a bit more bespoke and differentiated.
Generative plugins—describe the tool you want in plain language and get it. No code required, shareable with your team. I haven’t played around with this one yet but seems like fun. If durable code isn’t required and you can resolve things with a few preset prompts—it makes you wonder, is everything just going to be a series of prompts? Most likely not but as LLMs get better, it feels like we’re inching closer to this future.
Weave—a node-based canvas for building reusable generative workflows and publishing them out.

Our design roles just got bigger

Everyone says Figma is dead—but personally I don’t buy it. Our roles as designers are definitely evolving. If over the past few years we were expected to ship mocks—now we’re expected to prototype and potentially even ship PRs.

Personally, I find it liberating. I hate arguments about craft in Figma when what ends up being built is so off the mark. You can tell engineers what to do, reference the Figma—but sometimes you just gotta go in there and do it yourself. Back in 2015, I was doing just that, helping finesse front-end with CSS and teaching developers along the way. No arguments back and forth, just productive conversations, in-person and everyone learned something.

In fact this is exactly what one of the talks was about from a design agency leader, who encourages his designers to get into the code and use LLMs to get the front-end output just right, with now 84% of production being written by designers.

A speaker on the main stage, the screen beside him showing a beige office corridor captioned "We'll circle back to you on that. We need to weigh our options." — The handoff, illustrated—where the work goes to wait

A wall of indigo and white mobile app screens from a client project, shown on the main stage under the studio's mark — The other end of it—client work shown in the talk

Outside of the usual tech demos—the talks that resonated with me were human-first.

Vicki Tan—“Ready for the world”

I’m not going to lie, I’ve been a huge fan of Vicki Tan. The amount of care, craft and consideration and masterful blending of design elements but especially wielding color in delightful ways has always left me in awe.

Her talk traced how she turned stagnant creative energy into Ask This Book a Question, an illustrated choose-your-own-adventure for adults about decision-making, designed and written in Figma.

Vicki Tan on stage in front of a wall of twelve cover explorations for Ask This Book a Question — Vicki Tan—the cover explorations behind Ask This Book a Question

Vicki shared a raw, unfiltered and touching story about her family, her challenges with wrangling the book from cover to content—there was so much to unpack here. In fact I was so excited about the talk that I immediately ordered the book.

Ask This Book a Question by Vicki Tan lying on a wooden table—a white hardback with a yellow spine, a blue door on the cover — It arrived a few days later

Lauren Hom—“Managing multiple creative passions in a world that tells you to specialize”

Lauren is a lettering artist, muralist, designer, and—more recently—a trained chef. She’s spent 15 years doing work for Vans, Target, Google, and Pinterest, and she built that career out of passion projects that happened to catch fire on the internet.

Lauren Hom on stage beside a yellow slide showing a fan of her hand-lettered greeting cards — Lauren Hom—hand-lettered cards from the Hom Sweet Hom days

She got her start at an ad agency. But when she found herself, at 3 am, eating raw raviolis on the floor of her cramped NYC apartment after a long shift at work, she knew things had to change.

She debated sticking around because it’s good for the resume. But when her mentor said if she’s going to pursue the ad business further—she realized that no, it’s time to go and there’s no need to stay at a place that no longer serves her.

Lauren Hom on stage, the screen behind her filled with rows of freshly cut ravioli — The raviolis

Lauren made the leaps, embraced her creative voice and broke the conventional business wisdom of picking a lane and sticking to it—become the person known for the one thing. Her whole talk was a working argument against that—the range is the career.

Lauren Hom on stage beside a slide of three passion projects: hand-lettering on a teal board, a mural in progress, and a lettered bowl on a red backdrop — Three passions, one career—lettering, murals and food

Of course it wasn’t without sacrifices. What made the talk real for me, outside of the 3am raviolis was the hard, intense work that she did, including many times on the weekends and the stress that came with it, sometimes thinking of it as how many days it will take off her life.

In the end it was all worth it. In her latest endeavor, Lauren is practicing her culinary skills to bring art to the world of food. In some ways this is a full circle—she started in ads, went into lettering and graphic design and now her food art work is featured in popular magazines.

Ryan Powell—“Legibility by design”

Ryan Powell is Head of Design at Waymo, and his talk was about building trust in AI systems.

A speaker on the main stage beside a large screen showing a neon wireframe visualization of a self-driving car's view of an intersection — How a Waymo sees the street

Three things I took away:

Transparency isn’t the goal. Dumping every signal onto the screen isn’t legibility—it’s noise. More doesn’t mean better.
Calibrate the feedback. The amount and kind of feedback has to match what the person actually needs at that moment. Over-explain and you erode trust just as fast as staying silent.
Intent over status. The bar isn’t “the user can monitor what the system is doing.” It’s “the user understands what the system is trying to do.”

Waymo is an extreme version of the problem—if you don’t trust the system you don’t get in the car.

And it’s a wrap

Last year I said we were in a golden age and the tools were still crude. Now, we’re at the epicenter of the evolution or perhaps revolution. The talks that stuck with me were less about tools and more about the humans. The creatives, their brave leaps into the unknown and their ability to steer their focus on the right things that nurture them (and their bank account).

Config takes over the street outside Moscone

We’re in a time of rapid change no doubt. Code is becoming cheaper. Design and intent are still key.