Building Banani: How a Canvas-First AI Designer Is Raising the Floor on Product Design
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What if the future of product design isn't about replacing designers — it's about giving every team access to one? For solo founders, stretched design teams, and early-stage startups, great UX has always been out of reach. Banani is trying to change that by building an AI product designer that doesn't just generate code — it generates design.
In this episode of Just Now Possible, Teresa Torres talks with Vlad Solomakha (CEO & Co-founder), Vova Kovalchuk (CTO & Co-founder), and Vlad Ostapovats (Founding Growth) about how they built Banani from a Figma plugin proof-of-concept into a canvas-first AI design tool generating hundreds of thousands of designs per week. Vlad Solomakha brings a decade of design experience to the product — and a very specific vision of what it means for AI to produce beautiful, tasteful design rather than average, undifferentiated UI.
You'll hear how they engineered their agent to handle parallel screen edits, manage per-screen context across canvases with hundreds of frames, and make surgical edits without regenerating entire screens. They dig into the "gulf of specification" — the mismatch between how designers think visually and how agents understand text — and what they're building to close it.
It's a detailed look at what it takes to build an AI-native design tool that puts the designer in the driver's seat while letting the agent handle the production work.
Show Notes
Guests
- Vlad Solomakha, CEO & Co-founder, Banani
- Vova Kovalchuk, CTO & Co-founder, Banani
- Vlad Ostapovats, Founding Growth, Banani
In this episode
- Why Banani started as a Figma plugin and what they learned from early organic distribution
- The canvas-first approach: why Banani is built around a design canvas rather than a chat interface
- How their agent architecture splits prompts into surgical edits instead of regenerating full screens
- The "gulf of specification" problem and what Banani is building to help agents and designers speak the same visual language
- Managing context across canvases with hundreds of screens — per-screen history with shared project context
- Why Banani doesn't compile running applications — just HTML/CSS mockups — and how that shapes everything
- How they evaluate design quality without traditional evals: spinning up 10 screens from one prompt to compare models
- Their approach to building at the edge of what's possible: identifying which model limitations to work around vs. wait out
- The role of context engineering and specialized agent tools in producing tasteful, high-quality design
Resources & Links
Chapters
00:00 Meet the Founders
01:12 What Bonani Builds
02:18 Why an AI Designer
03:40 Raising the Design Floor
06:23 Why AI Was Finally Ready
10:48 First Prototype Figma Plugin
14:10 Early Growth and Distribution
15:25 Standing Out in a Crowded Market
20:13 Product Tour Canvas First AI
23:40 Autopilot vs Manual Control
27:07 Tech Behind High Quality Design
32:08 Craft Beyond 80 Percent
33:40 Gulf of Specification
36:44 Proactive Agent Interviews
38:40 Canvas First UX Choices
42:54 Agent Architecture Under Hood
48:48 State History Context Tricks
52:32 Tooling Context Engineering
56:04 Navigating Busy Canvases
01:00:13 Betting on Model Progress
01:03:47 Shipping Around Imperfections
01:07:20 Try Banani and Next Steps
01:07:52 Building the Banani MCP
01:09:19 Final Thanks and Wrap
Full Transcript
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