Guests
- Vlad Solomakha, CEO & Co-founder, Banani
- Vova Parkhomchuk, 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
