The handoff is dead. Long live the artifact.

The traditional design-to-development handoff is a translation exercise: a designer describes an interface in one medium, and an engineer re-creates it in another. Every translation loses information. Spacing drifts. States get skipped. The hover behavior that lived in the designer's head never ships.

Process patches don't fix structural gaps

Teams respond with process: redlines, annotation plugins, handoff meetings, design QA. All of it treats the symptom. The disease is that the design artifact and the code artifact are two different things maintained by two different groups, drifting from the moment they are created.

One artifact, two renderings

The alternative is structural: make the Figma component and the coded component the same thing with the same name, the same variants, and the same tokens. Card/Stats/Default in Figma is <StatCard> in code. When a designer picks a variant, the engineer already has it. There is nothing to translate, so nothing is lost in translation.

This is the architecture Pegasus is built on. The naming convention is the bridge: every one of the 1,540 Figma components maps to a TypeScript component with matching props. Handoff stops being a meeting and becomes a lookup.

What changes for the team

Designers stop writing specs and start pointing at names. Engineers stop eyeballing screenshots and start composing. Review shifts from 'does this match the mock' to 'is this the right component' — a question that takes seconds to answer with Storybook open next to the Figma file.

The teams shipping fastest in 2026 didn't perfect their handoff. They deleted it.