Ex-Figma.

For context, this blog was released the same day Canva made their announcement for Brush, which looks to be further along in this area: https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/canva-brush/

I'm glad Figma is pushing in this area. I do think that Figma has one of the best UI datasets out there in the world, and for the most part they've been sitting on it letting it get unused. Excited to see where they take this, but I do think they should be looking at image models in addition to LLM-based edit models (I'm biased as I left figma to start a image-mode-based UI design tool) as I find they're more capable in this area.

How does training an AI model to understand Figma's editing workflows help it make precise design changes while preserving the original layout and component structure?

I've used various combinations of Codex, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Figma's MCP, Figma Agent, Pen.dev, and Paper.design for product design. I have previous experience with front-end dev so I'm more technical than the average product designer.

In my experience, Figma Agent and Figma's MCP leave something to be desired. I'm sure Figma Agent is useful for people who haven't used Claude Code or similar before, but it really requires most of your product's context to exist in Figma for it to do well.

As soon as your product's context exists out of Figma, then it starts to drift and hallucinate its own styles. Using the MCP with an AI that has access to your code provides better results, but even it will have trouble remembering what page I'm asking it to edit.

I know they're trying to address this by adding features such as guidelines and specs, along with linking your Figma files to GitHub repos, but my complaint with these features is a lot of the companies I have worked for do not use the very specific tech stack that Figma supports with these features. If it's anything like code connect, it may take years to get more broad support. Every company I have worked for is a C# Microsoft/Azure house.

This does not help with my broader frustration with Figma which is there is a lack of focus/vision. They're trying to compete on all fronts by developing all these different products/features and it doesn't really feel like they have a cohesive story for what the future or product design is. Granted, I think most of us in this industry don't either, but when am I supposed to use Figma Make vs. Figma Agent vs. Code layers?

They keep blurring the line between them when in all honesty I'm more interested in just using the AI agent I pay for to code what I need and bring it into a canvas for archiving/exploration when I need it.

I might be wrong or mistaken, but it seems like a big disadvantage for Figma that in order to use an agent with Figma, it has to be a specially trained Figma-aware agent and not just whatever agent I personally want to use.

Feels to me like a big issue that a smart competitor could take advantage of. I want to use my agent, I don't want to pay Figma to use their agent.

I'm also a bit salty about Figma ratcheting down hard on API calls, which creates customer service issues for any product that integrates with the Figma API. So maybe I am biased, but based on comments in here it also seems like the Figma MCP isn't very good either. Is Figma's long-term strategy to go full walled garden?

I've completely replaced my Figma usage by just keeping a `/design/{project}` route where each one mimics a Figma document and I just have the agent build out things in html/css/react/etc

I find it a huge distraction to ever draw anything in Figma now

Anything would be better than their current embarrassing AI roll out. The only way you can get something halfway decent is to put Claude Code into Fable or some equally high intent window and make an animal sacrifice.

Then the whole thing is effectively useless because of server-side font licensing. Your expensive brand font cannot be used by the MCP so you then need an additional layer of client-side Figma plugins to replace the placeholder font with your real font.

I think figma has numbered months - frontier AI in naked html is getting to the level of design that is honestly stunning - all of those "svg of a penguin riding a bike" training examples must be doing something because I've seen Opus one-shot an SVG of a logo vs scraping a PNG and it was pixel perfect. Claude design, while it came out a bit light, is now very capable.

I know figma has a strong fanbase and companies are all rolling their own "post-trained" models for their built-in AI, and figma is a great product, but the fact frontier models can basically do in html what figma does in it's intermediary format sort of point to where the chips will land in terms of what you will need to use figma for in a few iterations.

I haven't used canva in 6+ months either for the same reason and I don't think either's userbases are growing honestly.

The ship has sailed on Figma. It's easier, faster and better to prototype directly via coding agent.

How will Figma outlive Claude Design or any LLM-based design tool in the next 2 years... I really do wonder

Bitter lesson learned in 3... 2..

I know Dylan Field recently posted they made the Llama's 70B model do amazing things but the AI training field is an absolute snake pit.

But then again they have money to burn ig.

Ok, so, how is Figma still relevant today when agents can write any design in HTML?

Easier to maintain, scale, and can use most of the components of the design system directly if you're doing web.

So... I'm not quite sure why I would use this over using GPT/Claude/Gemini directly for design?

Bitter lesson, etc, and training an entire VLM to prevent text overlap seems a bit much, especially since GPT 6.* /Claude 5.*'s vision are good enough that it rarely ever happens for me, and if they do make a mistake, it's generally a 5 minute fix?

Totally agree with bitter lesson problems here. It’s clear one of the next things taking off right now is the ability to understand and use graphical UIs. I bet they could find some way to get OpenAI to specifically train on Figma, it’s a good use case on both sides. They might do it anyway I guess.

I'm always surprised when my pro-figma sentiment is met with cries of "fanboy!"

Figma has consistently done better than most at nailing the UX. Maybe I'm enough of a generalist that it always feels great to me, and super specialists lament the lack of their super special needs being met (genuinely, a valid gripe for the specialists).

I've tinkered with Figma AI, and it's just good enough to keep me tinkering. It's not creating magic yet, and it's certainly not outpacing claude design to the point where I always pick figma.

I am enthusiastically optimistic that Figma will push the UX on agentic design to where I come to figma every day again.

I'm curious if they'll make this model to be a bit more creative than existing models. I know it's weird to ask for creativity in such case, but I'm already a bit annoyed that Opus 5.5 or Sol or whatever else is quite good at creating clean / consistent but soulless designs. In order to get something really out-of-template it needs a lot of iterations and preps. Or maybe I'm just bad at UX/UI design and my AI setup feels that :D

The Figma MCP is so bad, it is almost unusable. Letting the calling AI write some javascript to implement a design?

I moved to OpenPencil after they nerfed the MCP server for free accounts.

Comparing it to sol medium isn’t that great. Opus 5.5 med, or even xhigh is on another level. It works great with pen.dev. They’re doing amazing work!

I'm honestly not sure what took them so long. They've had Figma Make out for about a year/a bit more than a year at this point. Make can call OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models, and I have no doubt that all those companies structured a deal in a way that lets them view what users are requesting, rejecting, editing, etc and train their models on that information.

With the ability of models to generate design-system aligned interactive prototypes in HTML/Tailwind... there really isn't a purpose for Figma. I use to love it - now I don't touch it. It doesn't really help my process to have not-HTML to work with. Maybe for mobile apps?

Figma, Adobe, Canva all have huuuuge editing model practices that they are licensing to their existing enterprise clients

Its surprising to me that the market is still stuck on SaaSpocalypse not noticing that these companies have pivoted hard in an impressive and revenue generating way

Its to the point where their consumer facing products are a sideshow and distraction, but thats what people are familiar

They’re selling tokens just line all AI forms, with huge enterprise commitment payments up front

1.) They should have been doing this 3 years ago

2.) You can use any agent with Figma

3.) You can use any agent with not-Figma

I used to really respect Figma's engineering team and have been blown away by the degree to which they've dropped the ball with AI.

All they need is to expose their existing API very well over MCP and give a "screenshot" feature agents can utilize and the agents are good to go.

they need to use nemotron for true sovereignty and stop paying the tax (just like salesforce and servicenow)

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