State of Play Stephen Haney: He Canceled Figma 4 Months Ago. Here's What He Built Instead.
Feb 23, 2026
Stephen Haney, founder of Paper and longtime builder of design tools, discusses making a canvas that talks to agents and syncs with code. He covers connecting any agent to design workflows, MCP-enabled production-to-canvas imports, and a future stack of agents, code review, and a connected canvas. They also explain why his team canceled Figma months ago and how live HTML can become the design source of truth.
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Three Tool Future For Building
- The future professional build stack will be three tools: an agent, a code review tool, and a canvas.
- Stephen Haney explains the canvas must be agent-connected so designers can draw or prompt and the agent can act on live code and data.
Let Users Bring Their Own Agents
- Let professionals bring their own agent rather than bundling one; support multiple agent integrations.
- Paper connects to Codex, Cursor, CloudCode so teams can pick the agent that fits each task and swap month-to-month.
Canvas As An Agent Interface
- A connected canvas becomes an interface to agents, letting designers prompt by drawing, not just typing.
- Haney argues spatial reasoning and multiplayer direct manipulation still matter alongside prompting for many tasks.