Ask a developer what their app is and they’ll point you to a repo. Ask a designer and they’ll open a Figma file. Ask a PM and you’ll get a Jira board.
All three are essential. But none of them show you the experience — the connected flow of screens, states, and transitions that your users actually navigate.
What is an application, really?
An application is a graph. It is the collection of actions and destinations that allow a user to achieve a goal. Every tap, every transition, every conditional branch, every error state — these are nodes and edges in a structure that exists in everyone’s head but nowhere on screen.
Your code defines it. Your designs envision it. But no single tool lets you see it.
Here’s what that graph looks like for a typical SaaS product. Click any node to trace its path — and notice the dashed lines connecting flows across sections (like Login leading to Dashboard, or search results opening a project):
That’s a simplified version. Your actual product has hundreds of screens, thousands of states, and countless cross-connections between them. The graph is already there — it’s just invisible.
The missing layer
Code, design, and project management tools are extraordinary at what they do. The challenge isn’t with any one tool — it’s that there’s a missing layer between them:
Code shows you the parts. Engineers see files, functions, and components. They can tell you what exists, but not how it all connects. A component called <PaymentForm /> tells you nothing about the seven different states it can render, the three screens that lead to it, or the two error paths that branch off it. The code is correct — it just doesn’t show you the shape.
Design shows you the vision. Designers craft screens in Figma with intention and care. But designs represent a point in time. As the product evolves — especially with AI-assisted development — the gap between what’s designed and what’s shipped grows. Not because anyone failed, but because there’s no shared, living view that keeps both in sync.
PRs show you the diff. Reviewers see lines of code — what changed. But as AI tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot generate more code faster, it’s increasingly hard to visualize what a change means for the user experience. We call this Review Blindness — and it’s not a failure of the reviewer, it’s a limitation of the tooling.
Each lens is valuable on its own. What’s missing is a layer that connects them — a view of the full experience graph.
The graph is the connective tissue
Here’s what we believe:
- The graph completes the picture. Code, design, and project management each capture a dimension of your product. The graph ties them together into the connected experience your users actually navigate.
- The graph should be visible. If you can see the full shape of your app, you can reason about it better — review changes in context, spot gaps, and communicate across disciplines.
- The graph should be automatic. No one has time to manually maintain a visual representation of their app. It should generate itself from what already exists.
- The graph should be a shared surface. Engineers, designers, and PMs should be able to look at the same living view and have a conversation grounded in the real product.
Why now?
Three forces are converging that make this layer more important than ever:
AI is accelerating development. Tools like Cursor, Copilot, and autonomous coding agents are helping teams ship faster than ever. That’s a good thing — but it means changes are happening at a pace where a visual understanding layer becomes essential, not optional.
Teams need a shared view. As products grow more complex, the gap between what engineers know, what designers intend, and what PMs track widens. A connected graph gives every discipline a common reference point.
AI agents need context. The next generation of coding tools won’t just write code — they’ll need to understand the experience they’re modifying. A graph is legible to both humans and machines. It helps AI agents make better decisions, not just faster ones.
What Natural Link is building
We’re building the missing layer — a way to see the graph that already exists inside your product.
We won’t detail every mechanism here — we’re in early access and the product is evolving fast. But the core idea is simple: your application has a shape. It has nodes (screens, states) and edges (transitions, actions). That shape can be extracted, visualized, and used as a shared foundation for how teams understand, review, and evolve their product.
We call this the Natural Graph.
It doesn’t replace your code editor or your design tool. It connects them. It gives you the view that’s been missing — the living structure of your product, visible for the first time.
The shift we’re excited about
We see the industry moving toward:
| Today | Tomorrow |
|---|---|
| Reviewing code changes in isolation | Reviewing experience changes in context |
| Design and code as separate truths | A shared, living source of truth |
| AI agents that write without context | AI agents that understand the experience |
| Documentation that goes stale | A living, queryable graph |
This isn’t about replacing what works. It’s about adding the connective layer that makes everything work better together.
Code and design are the foundation. The graph is the view.
Your codebase is brilliant. Your design system is solid. Your team is talented. What’s been missing is a way to see the full picture — the connected experience you’ve built — in a single, living view.
We’re building that at Natural Link. If this resonates with how you think about software, we’d love to talk.
Curious about our vision? See what we’re building on the Natural Link home page. Ready to see your app as a graph? Request access — it’s a 20-minute conversation, not a sales pitch.