I attended a design conference last week where Figma has been basically delegated as a design library tool, and that was it. They'd use it as a source of truth for components such as buttons, colors, typography, etc, but the actual design work that was being done was done through Claude Code. Multiple designers who had this stack said that they preferred it as their designs were now closer to what the end user would experience (i.e. code). One person actually eschewed Figma completely and used Storybook as the source of UI truth. I think that Figmas moat is a lot smaller than people think and that within a year or 2 there's going to be some very solid competitors out there.
Yep, my experience as well coming from Big Tech although they'll be buoyed by intertia for some time. And yes, source of truth just makes more sense in code, so I don't think there's much of a moat there either. I think there's still value in this collaboration layer, but collaboration will change substantially as well and take a different shape. The world where the design team spends weeks / months designing, refining, and doing crits on the same file just doesn't make sense now - it was driven by the high costs of implementation so the decisions had to be made upfront. That's going to change.
It is truly staggering to see a tool used by (almost) every large tech company in the world so quickly lose ground. I don't think they're done done, but their position in the value chain has shifted drastically.
There's already Paper Design and Subframe which handle design to code better because they're built for it. Figma is slow and not building what they need to build to keep up. Perhaps they'll make an Adobe and acquire one of these.
Paper Design etc all have the same fundamental problem as Figma - they’re designed for a process that won’t exist as we know it within a few years (and arguably half way there already). All of these canvas-based design tools assume that people want / need to directly manipulate things on a canvas fist before building vs going straight to building it (and by building I also mean you can ask Claude to build you 10 prototypes for different directions so exploration is not dead, just starts elsewhere).
Paper is canvas-based but code-first. Subframe is not canvas based and is fully code based. And yes, designers will always need to be able to directly manipulate the canvas for some things.
>Why bother with a drawing tool when you can literally mockup with real components and react etc.
I think that there's still value for the canvas (I'm a UX designer). I like seeing changes in the vector tool first, and then pushing out any changes to a JSON file where it can be used by the AI tool. That being said, this is just my preferred way of working, so somebody else may not even want to use Figma.
I totally get that. But soon will it be your primary mode of output vs yet another way to try ideas? Like how we sketch on paper to get creative juices flowing.
