Design vs Code in 2025: How Generative UI Is Rewriting Product Collaboration

Meta Description: Generative UI is breaking down silos between design and code. Learn how AI-generated, real-time adaptive interfaces are uniting product teams and accelerating innovation.

Introduction
For decades, software teams have operated with a clear divide: designers shape the user experience, and developers hand-code it into existence. This “design vs code” separation created siloed workflows and inevitable friction. Product managers write feature specs, UX designers produce mockups, then engineers translate those designs into front-end code - a linear pipeline with handoffs at each step. In practice, each handoff risks misalignment and delays. Teams end up stitching together glue code and patching UIs to integrate new features or AI capabilities, rather than focusing on innovation. As one analysis put it, it’s time to “stop patching” legacy interfaces and “start building” new experiences powered by AI from the ground up (Stop Patching, Start Building: Tech’s Future Runs on LLMs). Enter Generative UI, an emerging approach poised to rewrite these rules and bridge the long-standing gap between design and engineering.

Generative UI sometimes nicknamed GenUI (short for Generative User Interface) refers to user interfaces that are dynamically generated by AI in real time, instead of being painstakingly pre-built in code. In a Generative UI system, the app’s front-end can literally design itself on the fly based on context, user input, and AI logic. Rather than every user seeing the same fixed layout, a generative interface assembles LLM UI components (forms, buttons, charts, etc.) tailored to each user’s needs and intent. Think of it this way: a typical AI chatbot might tell you how to file an expense report, but a Generative UI could actually build the expense report form for you, pre-filled and ready to submit (From Glue Code to Generative UI: A New Paradigm for AI Product Teams). The interface becomes an intelligent agent in its own right, not just a static set of screens. This paradigm shift is AI-native at its core it treats the UI as a live, adaptive part of the application logic, powered by the same LLMs that drive the app’s brain. In 2025, as AI agents and LLM-driven features rise in prominence (Rise of AI Agents), generative UIs are emerging as the connective tissue that finally unites intelligent backends with equally smart frontends. The effect is a breakdown of silos that will fundamentally change how product teams collaborate.

Generative UI and the Breakdown of Silos Between Design and Engineering
Generative UI is collapsing the traditional wall between design and engineering. In a world of AI-generated interfaces, front-end development and UX design begin to merge into a continuous loop rather than two distinct phases. We increasingly see hybrid roles sometimes called “design engineers” working at the intersection of UX and code to guide AI in creating interface components. With powerful language models able to generate usable UI elements following established guidelines, designers no longer have to manually push pixels for every state and screen. Instead, designers focus on high-level user flows, overall aesthetics, and defining the design system and rules. Developers, on the other hand, shift from coding every button and layout by hand to orchestrating the AI’s output and ensuring it fits into the application. In essence, Generative UI blurs the line between design and development: it enables a single AI-driven process where both disciplines collaborate through the AI. Designers input their intent (through prompts, style guides, or component libraries) and engineers input logic and context, and the AI generates the interface accordingly. Everyone works from the same source of truth the AI’s understanding of the user’s intent which eliminates the miscommunication that often occurs when design specs are handed off to dev in a traditional workflow.

Crucially, Generative UI is not the same as AI-assisted design tools or code generation scripts. It goes beyond suggesting a design or spitting out boilerplate code for developers to tweak. Instead, the generative approach means the UI is assembled by the AI at runtime, for the end user, on demand. The interface essentially “designs itself” each time you use it, adjusting to the user rather than forcing the user to adapt to a one-size-fits-all design (Generative UI The Interface that builds itself, just for you). This dynamic nature forces designers and engineers to collaborate in new ways. They must jointly train and tune the AI system rather than throwing deliverables over the fence. The old silos – where design owned the pixel-perfect mocks and engineering owned the code – give way to a more fluid partnership. Both disciplines contribute to a shared AI frontend logic: designers provide the palette of components and guardrails (e.g. approved styles, layouts), and developers ensure the AI’s choices are technically sound and properly integrated. The result is a UI that can evolve in sync with the product’s AI capabilities. When design and code converge through generative techniques, product teams can respond faster to user needs because the interface isn’t a fixed artifact it’s a living part of the software.

New Workflows and Tools for Cross-Functional Product Teams
Adopting Generative UI leads to entirely new workflows for product development. Instead of a rigid waterfall from product spec to design to code, teams can embrace an iterative, prompt-driven workflow. For example, a product manager or UX designer might start by describing a desired interface or feature in natural language essentially prompting the system with something like, “Show an interactive sales graph by date and region with filters.” An AI UI engine can interpret that request and generate a working UI prototype in seconds. If the initial result isn’t ideal, the team can quickly tweak the prompt or adjust the design constraints and generate a new variation. This ability to build UI with AI dramatically shortens the prototype cycle from weeks to hours. It fosters rapid experimentation: teams can try out new ideas by letting the AI compose new interface variations on demand, rather than coding each variant from scratch.

Generative UI also encourages more cross-functional collaboration in real time. Because the interface is malleable and largely defined by high-level instructions, product managers, designers, and developers can sit together and literally see changes happen by modifying a prompt or a rule. Imagine a brainstorming session where a designer and developer pair with a prompt-engineer (or the same person wearing all hats) to interact with an LLM and get instant UI outcomes. This shared process breaks down the old “over the wall” approach and replaces it with a collaborative design+build session mediated by AI. It’s not just theoretical companies are already experimenting with tools that enable “prompt-to-UI” generation for live prototypes. While earlier generation tools turned prompts into static mockups or generated code scaffolding, true GenUI platforms let teams skip directly to a working interface that users can interact with. In this new workflow, the lines between prototyping and development blur. A generated prototype is essentially the product, and improving it is a matter of refining AI instructions rather than rewriting code or redrawing screens.

We’re also seeing the rise of specialized AI UX tools and platforms designed for this cross-functional reality. Some tools focus on the design phase (e.g. turning text into design drafts), others on code generation (outputting front-end code from descriptions). But Generative UI engines operate at runtime, meaning they become part of the product infrastructure. For instance, developers can integrate an AI frontend API that accepts high-level intents and returns ready-to-use interface components. This allows even non-technical team members to contribute: a designer or PM can suggest a change in plain language and the AI front-end will implement it in the next user session. The workflow shifts to managing the AI’s behavior curating prompts, training it with design guidelines, and testing its outputs rather than manually building every element. In short, generative tooling empowers product teams to work more fluidly. Designers, engineers, and product leads share a common playground where design logic and code logic converge. The team’s focus moves up a level: instead of tweaking CSS or writing glue code, they are fine-tuning AI-driven interactions and user flows. This not only speeds up development, it makes the process more inclusive and creative, tapping into the collective expertise of the whole team.

Role of C1 by Thesys in Unifying AI Logic with Product UX
One notable example of this new generative tooling is C1 by Thesys, a generative UI API built specifically to bridge AI logic with product UX. C1 by Thesys is essentially an AI frontend API a layer on top of large language models that turns an LLM’s output into live, interactive UI components. Thesys designed C1 by Thesys so developers can integrate it with just a few lines of code into their applications. Once integrated, your app’s AI responses don’t come back as plain text or JSON for a developer to interpret; instead, they come back as structured UI elements (buttons, forms, charts, layouts, and more) ready to be rendered on screen. In other words, C1 by Thesys lets the AI not only decide what to say or do, but also how to present it to the user. It unifies the “brain” of an AI agent (the LLM’s logic and decisions) with the “body” of the product (the user interface) in real time.

By using a system like C1 by Thesys, product teams ensure that UI and logic stay in lockstep. For example, if an AI agent in your app gains a new capability or insight, you don’t need to manually build a UI to expose that feature the LLM can directly generate the interface for it via C1. Suppose your AI backend analyzes user data and determines that a specific chart would help illustrate its recommendation; with Generative UI, the AI can simply call for that chart component and provide the data, and the user sees a new chart appear instantly. C1 acts like an AI dashboard builder behind the scenes, capable of assembling entire dashboards or multi-step forms on the fly based on what the AI is trying to accomplish for the user. The developer’s role becomes providing context and constraints: they prompt the AI with system instructions (for example, defining the types of UI components allowed and the styling theme to use) and ensure any generated UI is plugged into the app’s workflows securely. The heavy lifting of actually creating the interface is handled by the Generative UI engine.

The impact on product collaboration is significant. With C1 by Thesys, designers can encode style guides and reusable components into the system so that any interface the AI generates will be on-brand and user-friendly. Developers can focus on core product logic and backend integration, trusting the AI to handle the routine UI layer. Product managers can see their feature ideas come to life much faster, since a description can turn into a functional UI in moments. Everyone speaks a common language not just design specs or code, but prompts and components. C1 by Thesys essentially provides a common platform where the team’s intent is translated into user experience instantly, removing the usual disconnect between what the AI “knows” and what the user actually sees. By unifying AI logic with UX through an API like this, Thesys is demonstrating how Generative UI technology can eliminate the need for tedious front-end redevelopment every time an AI capability changes. It ensures that LLM-driven product interfaces remain as fluid as the AI algorithms behind them. The result is a more cohesive product-building process: changes in AI behavior can be reflected in the UI immediately, and conversely, insights from user interactions can inform the AI all without a human having to rewrite the interface by hand for each iteration.

Real-Time Adaptive UI and How Product Collaboration Changes
One of the most game-changing aspects of Generative UI is the promise of real-time adaptive UI. Because interfaces are generated on the fly by AI, they can adapt instantly to user behavior and context. This has a profound effect on how product teams operate after an initial release. In traditional apps, if you discover users are struggling with a certain workflow or need a new feature, you’d log the issue, designers would propose a change, engineers would implement it, and you’d ship an update weeks or months later. With a generative approach, the UI could adjust in real time without waiting on a deployment cycle. For example, if analytics show that users frequently abandon a complex form midway, a generative interface could proactively break that form into smaller steps for those users who seem to be hesitating automatically improving usability on the spot. Similarly, an AI-driven UI might rearrange a dashboard for an individual user, highlighting the content they consistently engage with and hiding irrelevant sections. Two users could open the same app and see different layouts tuned to their needs, and those layouts could evolve continuously as their behavior changes.

This adaptability means product collaboration becomes more about continuous improvement and AI training than scheduled redesigns. Product managers and UX researchers can focus on monitoring live user interactions and then adjust the AI’s rules or training data to fine-tune the interface dynamically. The team essentially works with a living product that can be optimized in near real time. Designers might update the component library or style parameters based on user feedback, and that update propagates through the generative system immediately. Developers might tweak the logic that the AI uses to choose components (for instance, adding a rule that mobile users should always see a simplified navigation menu), and users could benefit from that change on their very next session. This feedback loop is vastly accelerated compared to the old model of periodic app releases. It’s a bit like having an ongoing conversation with your software the product team sets up the initial vocabulary and grammar (the components, the AI model, the guidelines), but the app is free to form new “sentences” (interfaces) in response to each user’s needs, and the team can correct or refine those sentences on the fly.

For product leaders, this changes the metrics of success. Instead of just tracking static KPIs like monthly release counts or feature completion, they start to look at adaptation metrics how quickly the UI can respond to user needs and how that impacts engagement. There’s evidence that embracing such adaptive systems yields real benefits: industry analysts predict that enterprises using adaptive AI interfaces will outperform competitors significantly in speed and user satisfaction in the coming years (Generative UI The Interface that builds itself, just for you). A real-time, LLM-powered UI can deliver hyper-personalization at scale, the kind of tailored experience that was previously only achievable with massive manual customization. Now, even lean product teams can offer each user a unique interface journey driven by an AI an AI UX that feels intuitive and personal. This level of responsiveness tends to blur the boundaries between roles on the team. Customer success feedback might directly influence UX tweaking via prompt adjustments; data science insights might lead to new UI components being introduced by the AI. In effect, the product becomes a continuously evolving service co-created by the team and the algorithm together.

What Product Leaders, Designers, and Developers Need to Know
As Generative UI gains traction, it’s important for everyone involved in building products to understand how it affects their role:

• Product Leaders: For product managers and tech leads, Generative UI is a strategic shift, not just a UI tweak. Embracing AI-native software means rethinking roadmaps and team processes. Leaders should champion a culture of experimentation and continuous iteration, since generative interfaces allow rapid changes based on user feedback. It’s also crucial to invest in the right infrastructure (like LLMs and generative UI APIs) and to break down silos on your team designers, devs, and data folks need to work in unison on the AI-driven experience. Product leaders should start developing a Generative UI strategy for their offerings, asking questions like: How can our product’s interface adapt in real time to different user segments? What design system and guidelines do we need to feed the AI so it stays on-brand? By planning for these, leaders can ensure their organization isn’t caught in the old paradigm while competitors deliver dynamic, personalized experiences.
• Designers: UX and visual designers will find that their role evolves but remains critical. Generative UI doesn’t eliminate design; it elevates it. Designers move from crafting one-off screens to defining the framework and rules within which UIs are generated. This means curating a set of components, layouts, and style tokens that the AI can use essentially giving the AI a toolkit of approved designs. Designers need to think in terms of systems and states: how should the interface respond under various conditions? They’ll spend more time on designing for flexibility for example, ensuring that components can stretch, shrink, or reconfigure based on content and context. Also, writing prompts and interaction logic might become part of the design process. Designers should become comfortable with a bit of scripting or at least collaborating closely with developers, as the line between a design spec and a coding script thins. Importantly, designers will serve as the quality guardians of generative outputs: they must review and refine how the AI assembles UIs, fine-tuning the style rules or adjusting the model’s behavior when the output isn’t user-friendly. In a Generative UI world, a designer’s intuition about user needs is more essential than ever – it just gets applied at a meta-level, influencing an AI that designs the details.
• Developers: Front-end developers will shift from being UI builders to UI orchestrators and integrators. In practice, this means learning to work with LLM-driven UI components and understanding the APIs or frameworks (like C1 by Thesys) that enable dynamic UI generation. Developers need to become adept at prompt engineering and context management providing the right inputs to the LLM so it produces useful interface elements. They will focus on how to plug those AI-generated components into the app’s state and backend securely. Error handling, edge-case management, and performance optimization remain important: e.g., ensuring the generative UI doesn’t introduce latency or weird behavior. Developers will also take on a collaborative debugging role – when the AI produces something unexpected, it may fall to the developer to figure out if the prompt needs adjusting, if a new component is required, or if the model needs more training data. In essence, coding shifts to a higher level: you’re still writing code, but often it’s code that guides the AI (like writing custom functions the AI can call, or setting constraints). The upshot is that routine UI coding is reduced. Developers can deliver features faster since they’re leveraging frontend automation by AI. But they must also stay vigilant about UX quality and consistency, working hand-in-hand with designers to continuously refine the generative system’s outputs. Embracing this new paradigm will require developers to expand their skill set into the realms of AI and data the payoff is the ability to build far more adaptive and powerful interfaces than traditional methods allow.

Conclusion
The year 2025 marks a turning point in how we build digital products. The rise of large language models and AI agents has shown what the “brains” of our software can do, but Generative UI is ensuring the “face” of our software keeps up. By allowing design and code to intertwine through AI, we remove the historical tug-of-war between form and function the interface can now be as smart, flexible, and context-aware as the AI behind it. Teams that adopt this mindset are finding that they can innovate faster and with fewer resources: instead of churning through cycles of mockups and implementations, they let the AI generate and regenerate interfaces until they truly serve the user. Design vs code is no longer a battle or a handoff; it’s a collaborative dance. Product managers, designers, and developers unite around a living system that they guide collectively. The UI becomes a continuously evolving conversation between the user and the product team, mediated by AI.

We are still in the early days of this transformation, and it’s not without challenges from ensuring reliability and consistency of AI-generated UIs to retraining teams on new workflows. But the direction is clear. Just as cloud computing abstracted away physical servers and accelerated development, Generative UI abstracts away static screens and unlocks a new agility in product design. Software can finally start to meet users where they are, adapting to each person in real time. The silos between vision and execution are coming down, replaced by AI-augmented collaboration. For organizations willing to embrace it, generative interfaces offer not just a new way to build products, but a way to build better products ones that feel personalized, intuitive, and alive. In the end, the winners of this new era will be those who learn to partner creatively with AI, letting generative technology amplify human insight rather than constrain it.

In short, Generative UI is rewriting the story of product collaboration. The old chapters of design vs. code are giving way to a new chapter where AI helps unify and accelerate the efforts of the whole team. It’s a future where the interface is no longer a bottleneck but a canvas that updates itself to realize the team’s vision instantly. As we move into this future, the question isn’t whether our approach to building UIs will change, but how fast we can adapt to make the most of it.

Thesys - Pioneering the Generative UI Frontier
Thesys is at the forefront of this shift, building the AI frontend infrastructure to make Generative UI a reality for every product team. Its flagship offering, C1 by Thesys, is the industry’s first Generative UI API a platform that enables AI tools and agents to generate live, interactive UIs directly from LLM outputs. With C1 by Thesys, the gap between an AI’s intelligence and the user’s experience disappears: your AI can literally create the interface a user needs on demand. Thesys has engineered C1 to work seamlessly with modern frameworks (via a React SDK and compatible API), so developers can plug in a few lines and watch their application’s UI become dynamic and adaptive. It’s a bold new way to build, replacing hardcoded frontends with responsive, context-aware interfaces assembled by AI logic. Interested in exploring this future? Visit Thesys to see how they’re enabling real products to harness Generative UI, and check out C1 by Thesys documentation to learn how you can start generating UIs from simple prompts. The tools for an AI-driven frontend revolution are here and Thesys invites forward-thinking builders to be a part of it.

References

1. Firestorm Consulting. “Rise of AI Agents.” Firestorm Consulting, 14 June 2025.
2. Deshmukh, Parikshit. “From Glue Code to Generative UI: A New Paradigm for AI Product Teams.” Thesys Blog, 11 June 2025.
3. Deshmukh, Parikshit. “Generative UI - The Interface that builds itself, just for you.” Thesys Blog, 8 May 2025.
4. Deshmukh, Parikshit. “AI-Native Frontends: What Web Developers Must Know About Generative UI.” Thesys Blog, 11 June 2025.
5. Deshmukh, Parikshit. “Generative UI vs Prompt to UI vs Prompt to Design.” Thesys Blog, 2 June 2025.
6. Gartner. Generative AI. Gartner, Accessed 15 June 2025.
7. Firestorm Consulting. “Stop Patching, Start Building: Tech’s Future Runs on LLMs.” Firestorm Consulting, 14 June 2025.
8. Boston Consulting Group. The Leader’s Guide to Transforming with AI. BCG

FAQ

Q: What is Generative UI and why is it important in 2025?
A: Generative UI (GenUI) is an approach where the user interface is generated by AI in real time, rather than being pre-coded by developers. It’s important because it enables truly dynamic UI with LLM capabilities interfaces can adapt on the fly to each user’s needs. In 2025, with advanced LLMs readily available, Generative UI allows software products to be more flexible and personalized than ever. Instead of every user seeing the same static layout, an application can present different components or layouts tailored to the individual. This means better user experiences, faster iteration for teams, and the ability to build AI-native software where the front end is as intelligent as the backend AI. In short, Generative UI is changing the game by making UIs smarter and more responsive, aligning the interface with the full potential of modern AI.

Q: How does Generative UI break down silos between designers and developers?
A: Traditionally, designers and developers worked separately designers crafted the visuals and interactions, then developers translated those into code. Generative UI blurs this boundary by introducing an AI-driven loop where design and code converge. Designers feed the AI with style guides, components, and high-level design rules, while developers feed it context and logic. The AI UI system then generates the interface following those combined inputs. This means designers and developers are essentially working on the same artifact (the generative model and its outputs) rather than passing documents back and forth. Collaboration becomes more fluid: a designer’s intent can be tested immediately by the AI, and a developer’s constraints are instantly reflected in the UI. By using a generative UI platform, teams create a single source of truth for the product’s look and feel, reducing miscommunication. In practice, this tight feedback loop unites teams everyone iterates together with the AI in the middle, rather than in isolated stages.

Q: What role do LLMs play in a Generative User Interface?
A: Large Language Models (LLMs) are the “brains” behind Generative UIs. They analyze user input, context, and the prompts defined by the product team to decide what the interface should show next. Essentially, an LLM in this context functions as a UI decision engine. Instead of outputting just text, the LLM outputs a description or specification of UI components (often structured data that represents elements like forms, buttons, tables, etc.). These are sometimes called LLM UI components. A rendering engine or SDK then takes that spec and turns it into actual UI on the screen. The LLM’s natural language understanding lets it interpret user goals and app logic to choose the appropriate interface for example, generating a chart when a user asks for data analysis, or generating a form when the user needs to provide additional info. The better the LLM is (and the more it’s tuned for UI tasks), the more context-aware and accurate the interface generation will be. In summary, LLMs provide the intelligence to match user intent with the right UI, enabling the interface to evolve dynamically rather than being fixed.

Q: Can Generative UI adapt the interface in real time to user behavior?
A: Yes, real-time adaptation is a cornerstone of Generative UI. Because the UI is generated on the fly, it can respond immediately to user behavior, context changes, or new data. This is often called real-time adaptive UI. For instance, if a user has trouble with a certain step, an AI-driven UI might break the task into simpler sub-steps on the spot. If a user’s context shifts (say, from novice to power-user over time, or from desktop to mobile), the generative system can alter the layout and components to suit the situation. Unlike traditional interfaces that only change when developers push an update, a Generative UI changes whenever the underlying AI logic deems it beneficial for the user. This leads to highly personalized experiences the software feels like it “understands” the user. From a product collaboration perspective, this means teams can address UX issues or optimize flows by tweaking the AI rules instead of waiting on development cycles. It’s a more proactive and continuous way of improving the UI, which can significantly boost user engagement and satisfaction.

Q: What tools or platforms enable teams to build UI with AI?
A: There are a growing number of tools in this space, each addressing different needs. On one end, there are prompt-to-design tools that help designers generate mockups from text (for example, early-stage design brainstorming tools). Then there are prompt-to-code or prompt-to-UI tools that generate front-end code from descriptions (helping developers scaffold applications). However, for live applications and truly dynamic interfaces, teams are looking at Generative UI platforms. One prominent example is C1 by Thesys, which is a generative UI API. It lets developers plug an AI model into their app so that the model can directly produce UI components in response to user input. Essentially, C1 and similar AI frontend APIs act as middleware between an LLM and the front-end framework, so the AI can drive the interface. Other components of a generative UI stack might include an SDK for rendering the AI’s output (e.g., a library that knows how to take AI-generated component specs and display them) and tools for designers to set the visual style boundaries. Overall, to build UI with AI, you need a combination of an AI model (LLM), a generative UI engine or API (like Thesys C1), and integration into your app’s front-end. These tools are rapidly evolving, and we’re seeing more platforms emerge as Generative UI gains popularity.

Q: Will AI-generated interfaces replace the need for human designers and front-end developers?
A: Not at all - in fact, Generative UI still relies heavily on human expertise, just in a different way. The AI doesn’t magically know what makes a good user experience or an on-brand design; it learns that from what humans feed into it. Designers are needed to create the style guides, component libraries, and UX principles that guide the generative system. Developers are needed to integrate the AI, set up the logic, and handle the complex edge cases or custom interactions that the AI might not handle out of the box. Rather than replacing these roles, Generative UI augments them. It takes over the repetitive and grunt work (like coding yet another form or tweaking layout CSS), freeing humans to focus on creative and high-level tasks. Designers can spend more time on user research and holistic design strategy, while developers can focus on core functionality, performance, and ensuring the AI’s outputs meet quality standards. There will always be a need for human judgment to define what the AI should do especially in making ethical and user-centric design decisions. What will change is the workflow: designers and devs will collaborate through the AI (as an intermediary) more than through static documents. So, instead of being replaced, their roles evolve to become more strategic. In summary, AI UX tools like generative interfaces are tools in the hands of designers and developers, not replacements. The value of human creativity and oversight only grows as the possibilities broaden with AI.