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

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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