The New Vibe Coding Stack: How Multimodal AI Agents Are Solving Graphic Design's Hardest Problem

"Vibe coding" was probably the most-used term in tech throughout 2025 and into 2026. The idea is simple: instead of writing every line of code yourself, you describe what you want in plain language and an AI generates the code for you. You guide the vibe, the AI does the work.

It changed how people build software. But there's a parallel revolution happening that fewer people are talking about, and honestly it might be even more interesting: vibe graphic design.

Same concept, applied to visual design. You describe a UI, an AI image generator creates it. No Figma, no Sketch, no manual pixel-pushing. Just words in, visual out. And the quality in 2026 is genuinely stunning — we're talking about AI-generated designs that experienced designers can't distinguish from hand-crafted work.

But vibe graphic design has a problem that vibe coding doesn't. When you vibe-code a React component, the output is actual code. It runs. It's editable. It's real. When you vibe-design a UI, the output is a flat image. It doesn't run, it's not editable, and it's not real. It's just pixels.

That's the gap this article is about. And it's the gap we've been working on closing.

Design's Hardest Problem: The Multimodality Gap

If you've spent any time in the AI design tool space, you've probably noticed something: the tools are incredibly good at generating visuals, but terrible at understanding the structure of what they generate.

An AI image generator can create a beautiful dashboard with a sidebar, data tables, charts, and a header. But ask it what font the heading is using, or where the button boundaries are, or how the layout would reflow on mobile — and it has no idea. Because internally, it doesn't think about those things. It thinks about pixels and patterns, not components and hierarchy.

This is what we call the multimodality gap in AI graphic design. Real design requires understanding multiple modalities simultaneously:

• Text needs to be editable text, not rendered pixels
• Icons need to be vectors (SVGs), not raster blobs
• Backgrounds need to be separate layers, not baked into the image
• Layout needs structure — containers, spacing, alignment — not just visual positioning
• Colors and fonts need to be extractable design tokens, not just observed patterns

The holy grail of multimodal AI design is an agent that can work across all of these at once. One that can look at a flat image and understand it deeply enough to reconstruct it as a structured, editable design file — complete with proper layers, real text, vector icons, and clean code that can render it.

That's the problem. Here's how we're solving it.

The Four-Layer Vibe Coding Stack for Design

We think about the modern AI design tool pipeline as a four-layer stack. Each layer handles a different modality, and together they solve the full problem. Here's how it breaks down:

Each layer alone is impressive but incomplete. Image generation without detection gives you pretty pictures with no structure. Detection without inpainting gives you element positions but no clean background. Detection without code generation gives you data but no usable design file. Figma AI conversion needs all four working in concert.

img2figma: Where All Four Layers Come Together

img2figma is the practical application of this entire stack, packaged as a native Figma plugin.

You upload an image — any image: a screenshot, an AI-generated mockup, a photo of a whiteboard sketch, a competitor's UI. The four-layer stack runs automatically: detect all elements, clean the background, generate the Figma structure. What you get back is a fully editable Figma design with real text nodes, properly positioned elements, clean layer hierarchy, and an extracted background.

It's an AI powered Figma plugin that functions as a multimodal AI agent. It sees images (vision), understands structure (detection), manipulates visuals (inpainting), and writes code (generation). Four different AI modalities working as one integrated pipeline to convert image to Figma.

For designers, this means the gap between "I have a visual reference" and "I have an editable design" drops from hours of manual work to under a minute. For the vibe coding workflow, it means you can go from a text prompt to an image to an editable Figma file to production code, all using AI at every step. Screenshot to Figma, image to editable Figma layers, convert UI image to components — whatever you want to call it, the result is the same: AI does the heavy lifting so you can focus on the creative work.

From PhD Research to Product

The team behind img2figma isn't a typical startup. We're AI researchers — people who spent years working on the individual pieces of this puzzle: object detection architectures, generative image models, vision-language models, structured code generation.

At some point, we looked at the landscape and realized the pieces existed but nobody had assembled them for this specific problem. The research papers were there. The models were there. The capability was there. What was missing was a product that connected them into a pipeline and made it accessible to designers through a tool they already use every day.

That's what motivated the move from research to product. We didn't start with a business plan. We started with a problem — the multimodality gap in design — and built the solution from the ground up.

What's Next for Multimodal AI Design

Every component in the stack is improving rapidly. Detectors are getting better at understanding complex layouts. Inpainting models are producing cleaner backgrounds. Code generation models are writing more accurate, more structured output. Each improvement cascades through the entire pipeline.

The trajectory is clear: we're heading toward fully agentic design. Describe what you want, and a multimodal AI agent handles the entire process — from generating the visual concept to producing a production-ready, editable design file. No manual steps, no tracing, no conversion headaches.

We're building toward that future with img2figma, one layer at a time. The AI design tool space in 2026 is just getting started.