How Reddit’s designers build ultra-realistic prototypes with Figma + Cursor
Summary
Reddit built a custom prototyping harness that lets designers and PMs ship production-ready prototypes with real data in days instead of months—eliminating Git complexity and keeping teams aligned through a design system scaffold that abstracts away infrastructure friction.
Key Takeaways
- Eliminate Git/DevOps friction by building a custom desktop app that auto-clones repos, scaffolds projects, and handles boilerplate setup—designers and PMs never touch terminals or branches.
- Use production data in prototypes to unlock stakeholder buy-in—mocked Figma designs don't resonate because they're not personalized, but real-data prototypes let leadership actually test features instead of imagining them.
- Build review gates into your prototyping workflow: generate many ideas, review all of them, pick the best one, then spend engineering time on that single direction—reduces waste and keeps teams focused.
- Create a design system baseline that absorbs new product features over time—think of it as a 'mountain' that becomes everyone's starting point, so designers inherit tested patterns and components automatically.
- Add micro-controls for stakeholder testing: device switching, theme toggling (dark/light), navigation locks, and feature flags—prevents unguided exploration and keeps prototype testing focused on specific design decisions.
Related topics
Transcript Excerpt
Now, the distance between design and product is wide. If we made everyone a builder, they could vibe code new features and products easily. And so, we made a harness that uses our design system and all of our components, UX patterns, [music] and it keeps all the designers and product managers on rails. And so, this way that you can make a million ideas, they can be reviewed, and then you can pick one, and then that's where we spend our time, and that's what goes into prod. >> I have not heard anybody say, "Okay, go ahead and let you off into your production data and render that." >> why that we do this is because Reddit has personalized data. But if designers are mocking everything in Figma, and then they show that to leadership, leadership's going to look at that and be like, "This isn't …