Sketching with code
February 24, 2026
Sketching with code is a different mode, but it feels natural to me. I can often draw faster on a keyboard than with a stylus. Over the years, I developed a physical sketching system—symbols, color coding, hierarchy through line weight—as a shorthand to accelerate ideation. Sketching with code is the programmatic extension of that same system. The shorthand I built for pen and paper trained my instinct for what to feed the machine.
How to approach prototyping early stages of UI design? These have been contentious issues amongst design professionals for a long time now. Do high fidelity early stage designs tend to lock us into specific approaches before we properly explored the space of possibility?
Now we can develop working prototypes in a matter of minutes. How does the design process change? How do we adapt to that? Here David Hoang talks about his design process and how he incorporates code generation into that.
