Figma on X

Enthusiasm is the largest theme at 16 people, and it is about the act of designing: people call Figma their favourite tool, say they will never stop using it, and describe it as fun — one credits "figma and taste" for work you can't prompt. Close behind, 14 people treat it as where the work gets done: components, grids, design systems with tokens and variants, ten to forty variations of a sketch, and files clients open and comment on.

8 say the AI side earns its keep, most concretely the agent clearing layer-by-layer prep that would have taken hours in about a minute, plus MCP workflows that generate screenshots or run Weave video. 6 welcome specific fixes: text hyphenation and word wrap, Motion, the Chrome extension, Specs announced at Config India. 6 are hostile — "Do not buy figma", fighting it to get a design approved, or tired of opening it every day.

Breakage and AI connections are level at the top, 6 people each. The bugs named are concrete: pages showing "unavailable offline" mid-flight, Figma Make PDFs whose preview collapses once saved, instance properties applying to the layers below, Motion renders stalling at 10% when shaders get heavy, mirroring to a phone overheating it.

On the AI side, people cannot connect Claude or the Figma MCP server at all, find the results disappointing once ChatGPT is wired up, or note that nothing ships designs back into Figma. Handoff and price are level at 4 people each: Figma's own MCP is described as sending context rather than clean code, and one designer points to changes stuck between Figma and production; on price, the pro tier is called not worth it, one keeps a subscription only for archived files, and others note rivals do the same for free. 3 call the tool bloated, slow and Adobe-like; 3 hit wrong or missing device frames.

Building in code is by far the largest alternative, at 16 people — bigger than any single tool named. It ranges from "kill Figma. Not literally" and builds made in about 70 prompts with no canvas opened, to a softer split: prototype in code, then polish in Figma; skip the mockup and fix the ugly parts in code. Others come back for spacing and states, for laying four or five directions side by side before committing, and for handoff.

Paper, Canva and Adobe apps are level at 5 people each. Paper is named as Figma's successor the way Sketch once was, with a workflow of exploring in Figma and copying into Paper, which is HTML-based. Canva shows up through a new image model that plans layout first, leaving people saying their Figma files "wish they planned first". Adobe apps are named as the thing people left, including a 15-year subscription cancelled for Figma, Claude and Framer. Claude Design and Pen appear twice each, as stages work passes through on the way back to Figma.

Questions lead with moving work across Figma's borders (7 people): whether a tool can export layered Figma or PSD files, how to get an AI-generated screen into Figma, whether a Figma file can go into Claude Design — one tried the plugin route and got a blank screen — and whether Figma outputs code directly.

3 ask whether Figma is still needed at all: designing in Figma first or letting AI generate the UI, whether someone still uses it, and how a new tool differs from "figma + llm". 3 simply ask whether a posted design, hero section or interaction was made in Figma. 2 are newcomers, asking "What does Figma even do?" or for learning tips. Singly, people ask which AI tools to pair with Figma, whether it does real-time collaboration, and where Figma Agent's first result differs from a component library's rules.

Each wish here is one person's, with nothing repeated across themes. One asks Figma to let external agents use image generation. Another, liking the agent, asks "where are the sticker packs for regular Figma files". One wants shortcut controls for export on the iOS app, and more of them on desktop.

An engineer would use Figma for system design, calling it "a gap I'd actually use". One wishes their Figma files had Canva-style discipline — layout planned before anything is drawn, text designed as part of the composition. One simply wants Figma to use.