jb

unpopular opinion: Figma proficiency is becoming a liability and nobody wants to say it. you mastered a tool that still ends with a developer rebuilding your work from scratch. it's giving "expert trap".

Over the past two months, my most impactful move as a design manager has been encouraging and supporting every designer to start building with Claude Code. Designers used to create a “source of truth” in Figma which was used for QA and accountability.. if anything was wrong, you’d point to the designs and say, “This is how it’s supposed to look.” The designers would take this artifact hand it off to engineers to build another “source of truth” on GitHub that would become the repo where other engineers can fork and build on top of. Now — the designer creates the source of truth on GitHub, and it’s closer to “the designs” because it is the designs. Less gets lost in translation, and everyone speaks in code. Figma remains useful for napkin sketches and quick visual experiments, but we are clearly moving beyond Figma as the primary document. The hardest part is getting set up—it’s daunting and scary leaving the things you love behind. People just need a little bit of emotional support to get started. But after taking the leap, everyone is feeling empowered and excited. They are all literally 10x’ing their productivity. The worst part is that engineers are a bit overwhelmed because they have way more PR’s to review.

Today’s Figma MCP update makes it one of the strongest integrations with Claude Code I’ve seen. You can now use Claude Code to design in Figma with the the full context of your design systems.