JetBrains Fleet introduces 'Design Assistant' for code-driven UI prototyping

Tech · 4 min read read

Design Assistant reads inline TODOs and component annotations to generate prototype pages with basic interactivity and styling. It can scaffold components in Kotlin, TypeScript, and Swift, and includes hot-reload previews that developers can open alongside code. The tool promotes a code-first workflow for rapid validation.

The assistant also suggests accessibility fixes and offers quick refactor hints to align generated markup with best practices. JetBrains integrated a review flow that allows designers to annotate generated prototypes within Fleet and send change requests that map back to code comments.

Users appreciated the reduced friction between ideation and implementation but asked for finer-grained style mapping to external design tokens. JetBrains said it will expand the assistant to support additional UI frameworks and deeper designer-developer handoff features.