The prototype was a beautiful lie | by Margarita Skiada | Workable Design | Aug, 2026 | Medium
I’d spend days wiring up screens that looked real but weren’t. The buttons didn’t do anything. The data was fake. The spacing was pixel-perfect in the mockup and subtly wrong the second an engineer rebuilt it in code. Everyone nodded at the demo, and then the real work — the part where the design meets the actual product — started from scratch. One option we considered was giving designers a playground in GitHub — a sandbox to build in, but detached from the real code. And to be clear, that playground is genuinely great for a certain kind of work (more on that later). But I kept snagging on one question: for the smaller stuff — a single interaction, a fix I wanted to hand cleanly to engineering — why build in a vacuum? Why not experiment safely in the source — pull the actual code and build on top of it? So I tried it. I started prototyping inside the actual product codebase. On a git branch. Using the same components engineering ships. It began as a personal experiment — one branch, o