Figma Make: The First Real Shot at Fixing Design Handoffs
You can watch the YouTube video above or read ahead if you are more inclined to read:
Figma just announced Figma Make—its new AI coding agent. On the surface, it's another attempt to automate product development, but dig a little deeper, and this one might actually matter.
Example screenshot of Figma Make
While many AI dev tools aim to replace designers, Figma Make appears to reduce the role of developers instead. However, Figma is in a unique position to unify design and development into a single workflow—if they don’t screw it up.
Why the Current Process Is Broken
If you’ve ever tried to turn a Figma design—or any other design—into working code using developer agents or even ChatGPT and design screenshots, you already know the pain:
Hover state details? Gone.
Dropdown values? Gone.
UI structure? Flattened into screenshots and fragments.
And any other detail not present in a simple screenshot? Also gone.
The result: the AI developer agent ends up guessing what was intended. Endless reimplementation just to get things right. Even minor changes can lead to full rewrites because the AI has no clue what changed. This is the sorry state of design-to-code handoff today.
Diverging Paths: Designers or Developers?
Startups like Lovable, Bolt, and Replit are betting on skipping design altogether. That works great for MVPs and indie builders. But in real products, where UX nuance, branding guides, and structural integrity matter? It’s a non-starter. Plus, these tools expect designers to work through AI prompts, forcing them to abandon the tools they already know.
Figma Make flips that. It empowers designers to continue using the tools they already love while replacing the developer with an AI agent. In reality, developers aren’t removed entirely—someone still needs to resolve edge cases, fix logic, and optimize performance. But they’ll have to do so within whatever tools Figma ends up building.
It’s the mirror image of what Lovable, Bolt, or Replit are doing.
Why Figma Might Actually Pull This Off
Figma already owns the design workflow. Especially for web design, it’s where modern design lives. With Figma Make, AI is embedded directly inside that environment. It has access to all the important details:
Component structures
Design history
Interactions
Variants
Layout rules
That gives the AI detailed context no external tool can match. The AI doesn’t guess what changed—it knows, and can even fetch more details if needed. This way, it can respond with better code, informed by actual design intent.
This is the unfair advantage Figma Make has. Others may build similar UIs, but they don't have the ecosystem or the depth of design context.
What to Watch For
These are still early days. The current release is a limited beta—the promise is there, but the product isn’t fully formed. Not even close.
Key questions to keep an eye on:
Will Figma build serious developer tools or stay design-centric?
Will developers adopt it—or feel excluded?
Will it bridge the gap—or just widen it?
Potential, But Not There Yet
Right now, Figma Make is just another "describe and generate" AI tool. But it doesn’t have to be.
If Figma gets this right, it could become the first real unifier between design and development—solving the handoff mess, reducing guesswork, and bringing both sides into the same workflow.
Not today. But soon (™).
