Everything's a Canvas Now
Spline launched Omma, Paper shipped Snapshot, Google Stitch got its biggest update — and all three are betting on the same thing.
Three design tools shipped major updates in the same week, each betting on a different theory of what design looks like when AI does more of the work.
Spline↗ launched Omma, a separate product from the 3D tool you already know. It's an AI canvas that takes a prompt and generates interactive web experiences with 3D, motion, animation, and UI in a single workflow. It runs multiple AI agents in parallel, respects brand rules and design systems, and exports cross-platform to web, mobile, and XR. At $29/month, it's positioned as a serious product. Production fidelity is where every generate-and-ship tool has hit the wall so far; Omma hasn't been tested there yet.
Paper shipped Snapshot, a Chrome extension that lets you paste your live website into Paper↗'s canvas as editable HTML and CSS layers. No screenshots, no text descriptions. You start from the real thing and iterate from there. Given that Paper↗ is already built on actual HTML/CSS rather than Figma↗'s SVG canvas, this is the logical extension of that bet. One response on launch: "being able to grab something from prod, paste it into the canvas, and have Claude spin it up six different ways is insane."
Google Stitch shipped its biggest update: multi-screen generation, an infinite canvas, voice interaction, and interactive prototyping that maps user journeys automatically. The DESIGN.md format, which exports your design system as agent-readable markdown, is the tell: Google is positioning Stitch as something you pull into a larger agent workflow rather than work in exclusively. Figma↗ shares dropped on the day of announcement. All three are trying to do the same thing: make the designed version the shipped version. Canvas tools, code-first tools, voice-first tools, tools that start from your live site. Nobody has cracked it yet, which is why there are so many different bets running simultaneously.
The sharpest data point this week wasn't a product launch. Lenny Rachitsky published data showing that design hiring hasn't grown since 2024, even as AI makes engineers move faster. PM and engineering hiring recovered last year. Design hiring didn't. Whether it's a lagging indicator or something structural, design didn't follow the same recovery curve, and the design tools industry is the canary.