Config Makeathon2026
Plonk–Musicmakingforeveryone
For the Config Makeathon, I used Figma Make and Cursor to create Plonk, a simple and playful tool for making music.
I started with a question: How can music creation be more accessible and playful? Many music tools are quite powerful, but can be challenging to learn and overwhelming for beginners. Music toys (like the Otamatone) are easy to learn but not very powerful.
My goal was to create something in the middle that makes it easy for anyone to jump in and start making music, with a reasonably high ceiling for the things they can make.
Try playing with Plonk!
Or open in a new page at plonk.figma.site
A bit about process
To start, I explored rough concepts in Figma and then quickly tested the promising ones in Figma Make to see how they felt to interact with. Eventually, I landed on the idea of taking a sequencer-like UI and stripping it down to the basics. Sequencers felt like the right balance between something that’s visually obvious, easily learnable, and yet also powerful enough to support endless different outputs.
From there, much of the rest of the work was polish: using Figma Make & Cursor to prompt a music generation system into reality, continually refining the UI, and then adding quality of life features until it felt great to use.
More and more of my daily work revolves around AI-coded prototypes, which came in handy while working on Plonk. I developed my own prompt workflow that optimized my token spend while giving me a high level of control. I primarily used Cursor's Composer 2.5 Model, with a few strategic Claude Opus calls where it made sense to.
