A Choice Made Ten Years Ago
Ten years ago, I picked Sketch.
This was the era of designing websites in Photoshop. Sketch arrived with a simple claim: UI should be built in a tool made for UI. Light, fast, nothing extra. A craftsman’s instrument.
Then Figma showed up. Browser-native. Real-time collaboration. The whole team could open the same file at once. Everyone moved over. It was the right call.
But for someone who does every part of the work alone, “the whole team can see it” was never a feature I needed.
The Colors Don’t Match
One evening, I was assembling app screens in Sketch.
I started by importing screenshots from an HTML mockup. The colors were completely off. Browser color rendering and Sketch’s rendering are different beasts — that’s expected. Even with sRGB-to-Display-P3 conversion in the loop, things drift.
A screenshot is an image. Images are dead matter. Zoom in and they blur. Color shifts with the environment. There are no layers underneath.
That was the wall.
Breaking Through
The AI spoke up.
“Let’s stop using screenshots. I’ll rebuild the screens using Sketch’s native elements. That way the rendering is Sketch’s own — no color drift.”
What followed was something else.
Frame, Text, Shape. Generating Sketch native elements directly through the API. Status bar, navigation, cards, buttons, tab bar. Ninety-six API calls. Seven screens stood up in thirty minutes.
The image wall — that flat, dead screenshot barrier — was punched through with native elements. Not just readable. Writable. With layers. Color rendered exactly as Sketch would render it. Fully bidirectional.
The Question Has Changed
The problem Figma solved was human-to-human collaboration.
The problem Sketch is now solving is human-to-AI collaboration.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) support. AI agents can now reach into design files directly. Not just read. They can generate native elements. Manipulate layers.
The collaborator changed. From human to AI.
The tool I chose ten years ago had already answered the question that surfaced ten years later.
Returning, but Not to the Same Place
A return to origin — but standing in a place nothing like the one I left.
Another thing happened that night. (To be continued.)