Figma is a work tool only and I'm disappointed by its MCP tooling which feels late and behind where it should be, I just feel forced to use Figma Make which stays in their walled garden without practical utility and connections to my actual codebases
[0] https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-des...
[1] https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/
[2] https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/how-figmas-multiplayer-tech...
But the fundamental problem is that it’s hard to get a design system right long-term, especially because it’s so intertwined with your code and whatever component library you use, which is a layer your designer will never touch. I don’t really see Claude Design fixing the fundamental Storybook hell of designing reusable and pretty components and layouts, but I don’t see Figma or any other tool solving it either.
What’s the solution? It feels like something that needs to be fixed more deeply at the component level.
I did not say anything of the sort.
i.e. The OP doesn't need to answer yes to their question for OP's claim to be true, yet their question pretends otherwise. (non sequitur)
In response I suggest that the engineers using AI also lack code judgement (because they are not reading it either). I don't think questioning the AI use is the actual topic here, it is the shifting roles. Who says it's the designers that are taking the new meta-role? It's probably the FE's honestly.
The role shifting doesn't mean that it's the best path forward. I'm simply stating that it is happening.
I want to be wrong because I'm watching the death of my entire career, but everything I've seen is pointing to this as an inevitability. We are shipping better and more secure code, and doing it easily twice as fast. Many development teams can be cut in half today with no reduction in output. I don't want to say it out loud at work yet, but we're actually producing too much.
Is that bad? Not to anyone who has managed dev teams and is familiar the incredibly tortuous and painful job of trying to corral a bunch of humans with varying skill and enthusisam levels to create software.
Many times I have written up design documents to kick off dev teams on multi-week or month projects. Now I could feed those into Claude Code and get results in days. This stuff is exciting beyond belief in just getting shit done.
This is a golden era for any established company with an existing customer base. My question to them would be "with Claude Code, why aren't you carving through that massive backlog of feature requests that has been building up over the years?".
A lot of people seem to look at this as job threatening, and it surely is for junior devs. But for companies that already have a strong senior talent bench, it's time to raise the ambition levels and ask not how many jobs can be shed, but instead just how fast and hard can we go now we have these new superpowers.
I have a complicated nextjs webapp, and I havent had to write front end code in six-nine months now.
I was wondering if PenPot (https://penpot.app) might be sitting pretty in this new agentic era, considering that they took the direction of designs being actual markup, unlike the canvas approach in fig - if that’s even something that interests them.
So tools like Figma is nice in that regards as it's simpler to iterate on (From simple to hardest: Sketch on whiteboard|paper, Wireframe tools like Balsimiq, Figma|Sketch, css code) because it's pure fiddling with various properties. Figma has direct feedback while the code may require a compilation phase.
But I think it's part of a larger mistake Figma is making: they seem to have shifted to an extraction mindset too early, assuming they'd captured the market, right when the ground beneath them is starting to shift.
It's most visible in their pricing model evolution, which is now explicitly anti-collaboration. Figma used to be the obvious default because you could quickly share files with non-designers, so they could view and make small edits without fuss. Now that requires a paid "seat", along with a confusing mess of permission flows.
It's platform wide too. I taught a college design class recently, and had students sign up for Figma because it seemed archaic not to teach them to use it. Instead of just giving any ".edu" address a free account (like they used to) students are forced through a 3rd-party process of uploading transcripts to prove education status. A few of my students got rejected or ran into confusing errors, and never got access… Now I have to re-evaluate whether its worth using when teaching the class again.
This is such a weird self-inflicted wound for a collaboration platform to make. The big tools that won on collaboration (eg. Google Docs) have understood that low-friction sharing is critical to becoming the default choice. And that being the default is a flywheel that drives adoption, both in users and in tooling.
I think Figma was trying to juice their numbers leading up to their IPO, so they could cash out. It's sad to see, but I wouldn't put money long term Figma until they show evidence of a mindset shift.
Building the same design system component in code versus in Figma is going to be slightly more succinct in code; Figma’s primitives don’t have the sort of conditionals and control flow that code has. But code is much less malleable than drawing on a screen, and creative freedom is harder to achieve in code.
UI can fix the gap where code feels less malleable than Figma, but complexity comes largely from the worlds that humans create, and humans apparently want to create 8 modes for 4 products and 2 light/dark modes. If you want the same setup in Claude, it’ll be a little easier to maintain, but not much less complex.
dang•59m ago
Claude Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806725 - April 2026 (732 comments)