Building Banani: How a Canvas-First AI Designer Is Raising the Floor on Product Design

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

• Banani
• TL Draw

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