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

What if the future of product design isn't about replacing designers — it's about giving every team access to one? For solo founders, stretched design teams, and early-stage startups, great UX has always been out of reach. Banani is trying to change that by building an AI product designer that doesn't just generate code — it generates design. In this episode of _Just Now Possible_, Teresa Torres talks with Vlad Solomakha (CEO & Co-founder), Vova Parkhomchuk (CTO & Co-founder), and Vlad Ostapovats (Founding Growth) about how they built Banani from a Figma plugin proof-of-concept into a canvas-first AI design tool generating hundreds of thousands of designs per week. Vlad Solomakha brings a decade of design experience to the product — and a very specific vision of what it means for AI to produce beautiful, tasteful design rather than average, undifferentiated UI. You'll hear how they engineered their agent to handle parallel screen edits, manage per-screen context across canvases with hundreds of frames, and make surgical edits without regenerating entire screens. They dig into the "gulf of specification" — the mismatch between how designers think visually and how agents understand text — and what they're building to close it. It's a detailed look at what it takes to build an AI-native design tool that puts the designer in the driver's seat while letting the agent handle the production work.