Introducing Kombai 2.0 - the first AI design engineer. We keep hearing that AGI is almost here. Still, we’re stuck with coding agents that don’t have taste and design tools that don’t understand our codebase. Both are artifacts of a world where design and engineering were two different jobs,... with a handoff in between. That world is changing fast. Today, designers ship code, engineers want to escape handoffs, and everyone wants to build tasteful UX. Kombai is built for this new world. Design and engineering, finally on the same side.show more

been waiting for something like this since figma started letting devs inspect designs. felt like half a solution for years

yes! design as code, fully editable from canvas to browser is the way. And we are excited to build it

Dipanjan this is awesome

Thanks, @VadimStrizheus . Means a lot 🙏 Would love for you to take it for a spin.

every design-to-code tool claims it understands your codebase until you check whether it reuses your existing components and tokens or just emits fresh Tailwind every time. that gap is where the handoff quietly comes back.

that all-from-scratch hell is definitely one of biggest struggles for today's AI-forward frontend/ fullstack devs

In building one of my weaknesses has been design (it watches 30,000 posts every day and tells you what is important in AI). I will try this to see how its taste improves things. Thanks! Great to see you respond to @a16z's "taste is what will matter in the future" posts.

@a16z Thanks, Robert! Design is exactly the kind of weakness Kombai's meant to take off your plate. Would love to see what it does for alignednews. Happy to help if you hit any snags.

Thats so cool! fantastic!

Thanks @kimmonismus

You gotta be joking right ?

hey! sorry that it turned out this way. this is one of those stochastic BAD responses that we try to suppress, but clearly need to do a better job on. :-( also, looks like, the generic prompt that mentions AI without any other design instructions, is probably causing some of our "taste" harness getting bypassed by the model. will try to rein that in too. In the meantime, some recommendations: ->add a short instruction that gives the agent some design direction. even something as brief as “make it visually stunning” should work much better ->turn on the "high creativity" toggle optionals: ->run with 3 variations instead of 1 so that you get more creative directions to choose from ->”auto” agent variant will be much more token-efficient than ultra for such tasks from scratch, without any quality tradeoff 🤞this won't run into the same issue again. If you DM me your email that you are using with Kombai, I’ll also be happy to add some extra credits to your account so that you don’t run out of trial limits while testing this.

the taste part is the trap honestly, if you manage to get that then one of the big AI guys will buy you

haha! I'd completely agree that crafting taste is one of the most interesting pieces of the puzzle. :-)

design and code used to be two different jobs. kombai 2.0 just made it one.

Let’s gooo!! AI design engineer! Now I wonder if it can be attached into any agent harness like Codex or Claude 👀👀

thanks @ziwenxu_ . We are working on a MCP that should work with other harnesses. Please keep an eye out on our releases 🤞 @bholebababa

@bholebababa 💪💪💪

i can finally inherit some taste through my Kombai agents 👀

because the hard part was never writing code, it's knowing what to build, why, for who, and making sure it doesn't break in production. kombai 2.0 might be the first to crack that nut with ai-fueled design engineering.

Thanks @adelbucetta . looking forward to see what you build with it

RIP to the 47 tabs i normally need open to move a button 12 pixels to the left 🕊️

ngl been waiting for this since figma let devs inspect designs. everything before was lowkey half-baked

Thanks @heyrobinai

this is some good tek

Design and engineering finally sitting at the same table feels long overdue 👏🏻

exactly! and many teams and builders have already started doing this in their roles. But the tooling hasn't caught up

I've already started testing this update, and it's really cool

finally an AI designer with a taste 😭 we are so back

1.0 was good 2.0 will be better!

Huge news 😁 congratulations 🎉

As someone who works between design and development every day, this is exactly the direction the industry is heading.

Ohhh very excited for this - everything I have tried so far still is like a 5/10 LFG

Thanks for being a partner, @JamesonCamp. It was great learning from your early feedback

Thank you!

@sunalsood @AnmolUx worth giving this a shot 👀

Brilliant. especially since I have been so bad with design analysis. And have seen that most design tools can shape screens, but they usually do not understand the technical system those screens must live inside.

this is incredible. congrats on the launch Dipanjan!

Thanks Prajwal! it has been great to have you as an early user :-)

incredible work has been done!

This is adressing the real painpoint!!! Fantastic!

this is what I call proper design agent lol. edit via chat always fell short in my case

💯 too many LLM loops to try 5 versions of a h1!

This is exactly the gap that needs closing. Design tools that understand code and coding agents with actual taste? Finally. Question is, how clean is the code it outputs and how well does it handle real constraints like performance and accessibility? Have you shipped anything real with it yet?

yes. large part of our own UI and website are designed and coded with Kombai. also most of our 100K+ users, including engineers, design engineers from large orgs as well as builders, use it regularly for their real product/ sites

That is impressive

@Dipanjan_Dey this sounds crazy cool. do you think it'll help designers and engineers communicate better? like, actually?

We surely hope so :-) I think a lot of design-engineering communication issues actually stem from designs being built without codebase context and constraints. So when the design comes to the engineers, they miss out on details that needs to be implemented in code (e.g. animations & translations) and have things that cannot be implemented with codebases constraints (e.g. mismatched tokens). We believe design as code, made with full codebase context would help solve that

@Dipanjan_Dey totally agree. ever tried having a design session with engineers early on?

Congrats on the launch! Finally a way to iterate fast with AI on the canvas!

“AI design engineer” is the right pitch and also the trap. design taste without codebase context is dribbble slop. codebase context without taste is enterprise gray soup. shipping both is the actual hard part.

couldn't agree more that design taste and codebase context has to exist together. them being in their respective tool silos is one of the big problems with current AI agents. this is exactly what we have tried to solve using kombai. do give it a try!

Dipanjan, this is really cool. Being an engineer, cannot wait to explore!!

hi @sufyanmaan - thanks for the encouragement. Please let me know if you have any feedback once you get to play with the tool

Awesome 🔥

This is exactly what we've needed. Design tools and coding agents have always been disconnected. Kombai 2.0 finally merges them, beautiful tasteful UIs on an infinite canvas that turn into clean, production-ready code that actually understands your repo, components, and tokens. No more painful handoffs. Just fast, high-quality iteration from idea to shipped product.Big congrats to @Dipanjan_Dey and team. This feels like the future of frontend building.

somewhere a product manager just lost their favorite handoff meeting