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I tried Claude Design yesterday and I have a theory for how this whole thing shakes out.
As product teams scaled and design needed to justify itself inside engineering orgs, it was pushed toward systematization — and Figma invented its own primitives to make that work: components, styles, variables, props, and so on. Some concepts are borrowed from programming, some aren’t, and the whole thing doesn’t neatly map onto anything. Guidance evolves, migrations pile up, and if you want to automate any of it you’re stuck with a handful of shoddy plugins. The beast is hairy enough that entire design roles now specialize in wrangling the system itself.
There’s always been a tense push-pull between Figma and code over what the source of truth should be. Figma won over Sketch partially by staking its claim there — their tooling would be canonical.
That victory had a hidden cost. By nature of having a locked-down, largely-undocumented format that’s painful to work with programmatically, Figma accidentally excluded themselves from the training data that would have made them relevant in the agentic era. LLMs were trained on code, not Figma primitives, so models never learned them. As code becomes easier for designers to write and agents keep improving, the source of truth will naturally migrate back to code. And all the baroque infrastructure Figma had to introduce over the past decade will look nuts by comparison. Why fuss around in a lossy approximation of the thing when you can work directly in the medium where it will actually live? If we want to make pottery, why are we painting watercolors of the pot instead of just throwing the clay?
At work, we’ve spent quite a bit of time back-porting design changes made directly in code back to Figma and it is not fun. I can’t share that file, but for a fair comparison, this is Figma’s own design system file for their product. I have to assume it was built by the most competent design system team you can find. And yet…
These are Figma’s own files. Built by their own team. This is the gold standard.
Imagine debugging a color that looks wrong. You check the component. The component uses a variable. The variable is aliased to another variable. That variable references a mode. The mode is overridden at the instance level. The instance lives inside a nested component with a library swap applied. At this point, you’re either considering picking up code or moving to the countryside and becoming a sheep farmer because one more minute of this will make you lose your goddamn mind.
So as the source of truth shifts back to code, Figma is left in an odd spot: holding a largely manual, pre-agentic system that nobody in their right mind would design from scratch today.
I think design tooling forks into two distinct shapes from here — and there’s almost a clock resetting between Figma and every other tool competing to answer the same question they answered in 2016: who can help me, a designer, get my ideas out fastest?