Talking about the "design-code roundtrip that isn't" at AIE World's Fair

Here's the abstract for my talk on Wednesday of the conference (July 1):

Everyone is using Figma's MCP tools, Claude Code, or Codex. The demos are seamless. The narrative is compelling. What's actually happening under the hood is something else entirely. And the gap between the story and the reality is where your next six months of pain is going to come from.

I'm Jonathan Gordon, founder of ReWeaver AI and a programmer-turned-UX designer who spent 30 years in developer tools at Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Oracle watching the design-engineering gap widen in slow motion. I've seen every generation of tooling promise to close it. I know exactly where the seams are.

I wrote a technical teardown of what Figma's bidirectional workflow actually ships, what get_design_context does, what generate_figma_design actually captures (hint: it's a screenshot, not your design system), and why iterating through that loop 12 times leaves you progressively farther from your canonical design intent.

This talk will walk attendees through each step, backed by research and specific examples, and include a demo showing how drift accumulates in real time. The problem is not that drift happens; it's that it's happening exponentially. Let's talk about how we can stem that tide and keep humans in control of the process, not just "in the loop."

https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair/2026