The Case for AI in a Figma World

And the next week, they’ll come back again with new iterations based on feedback. Same wonderful documentation, same mind-boggling levels of detail. Week, after week, after week.

I don’t show up like that. I don’t present my screen and share my Figma designs, walk through my documentation, and explain every interaction and the context of the journey. I share my screen and present a live, coded, working version of my idea. I get feedback, and I make those changes in real time, and everyone sees those changes immediately.

There’s no documentation or annotations required. No journey for context, because every single person in the review can open the link I shared and click through. Instead of seeing my journey fully curated in Figma, they can experience it in real time, like a real user.

Figma is Being Replaced

The reason my work looks and feels so different from my coworker's is that they’re designing how we all used to.

Research > Journey Map > Ideate > Design > Feedback > Design More > Prototype > Review > Hand off to your engineer

It takes time. And each of those steps requires documentation, communication, and presents an opportunity for something to get lost in translation. And once it does finally come back from the engineer for QA, it’s going to be obvious what it was that got lost in the fray.

Figma is no longer the primary tool. AI is. As the Head of Design at Linear put it, “We use Figma more as a sketch to build the final product in code.”

That’s how I work, and it’s proved a powerful tool for creating good work and creating it fast.

What Was Figma, Anyway?

Think about it this way: Figma isn’t where the design happens. It’s the tool I use to represent my vision. The design already exists in my mind; I can already picture it. What Figma allowed me to do was show that idea to other people in a tangible way.

Put simply, it’s an alternative to explaining my idea. But now, we can just explain our ideas. And the new listener has infinite patience to listen to us explain every tiny detail.

Because of this, I can create more than a visual representation of my idea, and in far less time. I can create a fully working prototype, or even a finished product, just by talking about my idea and explaining my vision for it.

And instead of just nodding along, the new listener goes, “like this?” Then shows you what they understood you to mean. And you can explain what they got right, and what they got wrong. Within a handful of minutes, they fully understand your vision, and you can see it on the screen.

The days of creating mockups are dead.

No Variables, No Poorly Named Layers

This is where, to me, a working prototype is better than a Figma mockup. In Figma, I’m designing every state of the element. I have to make a default, make an inactive, make a hover, make a focus, make an active, make a selected, and make an empty state. I’m exhausted just talking about it.

Think about creating a form in Figma. A basic form:

Make an input component > copy it > make an active state > copy it > make a filled state > copy it > make a disabled state > connect them all

I haven’t even set the variables yet, or made it a component, or a component group. And now I have to do that for radio buttons, selects, and submit buttons.

Making a form takes a long time. And you haven’t even made the rest of the page that it sits on.

In Cursor, or Claude Code, or whatever you’re using, you can make a form in minutes. All of the states are there. You can actually type stuff in the inputs, and not just click it and make text magically appear that’s already perfectly filled.

The time savings are enormous.

Figma Isn’t Going Away

Before you freak out, I’m not saying we’re all giving up Figma. It still has a purpose, and I still use it all the time. I just use it differently now.

It’s no longer the canvas for high-fidelity final designs. It’s my sketchbook. It’s where vague ideas find their direction.

If I don’t have a vision to explain, I might need to sketch eight different ideas and see what starts to come together. I still build my color palette, typescale, and a smaller version of a design system there. It’s a great place to catalog ideas. I just don’t need to take them further than necessary once my vision forms.

You’ll still need to know Figma, and you’ll still use it. The corporate overlords are not going to take away your favorite design tools. I promise.

Like all tools, the good ones allow us to work faster and more efficiently. They allow us to unleash our creativity and imagination, and bring ideas to life. Figma allowed us to communicate our designs effectively and made it easy to do so; it revolutionized the world of design for the web (or apps).

Now we have new tools, and they’ll revolutionize the way we work in many of the same ways. And those new tools are here. Those new ways of working are already taking shape. The time to start learning is now.