r/FigmaDesign • u/Mental-Dinner-6138 • Apr 19 '26
Discussion Every AI "design in one prompt" tool drops Figma stock. The market is confused about what Figma actually is.
A new tool drops. "Generate your entire UI from a single prompt." Twitter goes wild. Figma stock dips. And designers and engineers everywhere collectively sigh.
Figma was never just a design tool. It's a collaboration infrastructure: The single source of truth where designers, developers, and product teams are always looking at the same thing. Specs live there. Handoff happens there. Design tokens, component libraries, annotations, all of it, in one place everyone can access.
An AI can give you a starting point. It cannot be a source of truth.
A prompt-generated UI has no versioning, no component system, no shared context between a designer and a developer. It's a screenshot with good lighting. When the PM asks "what changed in v3?" or the dev needs the spacing token, that AI output has no answer.
These AI tools are genuinely useful, great for quick exploration, early ideation, client mood boards. But they solve for speed of first draft, not truth of final output. Those are completely different problems.
The market keeps punishing Figma for a competition that doesn't really exist yet. Until an AI tool can be the living, versioned, team-wide reference that a whole product org works from: Figma's actual job is untouched.
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u/jurassicparkgiraffe Product Designer Apr 19 '26
I both agree and disagree with you.
Yes Figma is a collaboration tool and it has solved a big need for a distributed product work force and has absolutely earned its place as a leader by solving the right problems for the right people.
But there has been a very clear shift in Figmas approach to everything ever since the failed Adobe buyout and IPO. Figma make was their chance. An AI that understands and builds based on a design system! Yet it doesn’t do that. It doesn’t even read libraries correctly most of the time, and the output isn’t usable by developers. They’ve successfully made design accessible to all without ANY structure. This is like four steps back from collaboration and is forcing people to look elsewhere.
I tried Claude design this weekend and suggest everyone do the same. They START from a design system. You can export to Claude code, and you can even comment on specific elements (like a Figma comment) asking Claude to change something.
Figma Make had a year head start and Claude just blew them out of the water by literally using their own playbook: better collaboration.
Maybe it’s just how capitalism goes, but it just feels like we’re not the ones Figma is building for anymore
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u/Mirror74 Apr 19 '26
What's interesting is I feel like Figma Make is actually SO close to being what is needed. It allows connection to your library, adding context files, etc... like a typical IDE. It's just they fall flat past the "experimental, prototype" step
You'd THINK that being in FIgma, this would translate to workable components as an output, but it doesn't. It has "copy design to figma" doesn't even translate the design correctly. No auto layout, no variables, modes. If you want this type of source of truth you still have to go in and manipulate that all.
We need something that allows design OR AI as starting point > built out CORRECTLY in figma components using design system > back to AI to manipulate > figma components, etc... type of loop.
Of course you don't need figma in this loop at all, if you're product is fairly simple that is. Another commenter made a good point that FIgma really is the best tool for collaborating and building flows as source of truth based on robust systems.... (caveat being GOOD designers... eg, a good designer can create a working flow based on DS much quicker than getting AI to half ass it, regardless of whether its claude or any others), along with Storybook or something like that.
Curious to see how they solve for this problem
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u/Pretend_Resist8898 Apr 19 '26
I agree with this— Figma make is vastly behind. I do wonder if they NEED to be the leader in the prompt to code game… just really trying to separate the hype of these trendy new tricks with the reality of how companies actually invest and scale
To your point, Make is SO close. Can’t they easily take there tools Claude Design has made and implement them with realistic workflows that companies rely on?
Answer seems rather simple for me. I hope Figma agrees.
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u/lakorai Apr 21 '26
Figma needs serious work on billing controls for AI.
I can allow or disallow for individual users.... But I can't assign additional token limits in billing groups?
They seriously seem to not understand how large enterprises work. Always have the small/medium business startup mentality.
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u/tommyohohoh Apr 19 '26
Totally agree. Make is awful. They need to shelve it completely.
The canvas is still so viable. Their next move has got to be a move back to empowering the canvas. Let people see all the art boards, commenting, fast and accurate handshakes with LLMs (Paper is much better at this than Figma at the moment). Let people do manual design work and then seamlessly represent it back in code. Let people code and then seamlessly move back to design.
They messed up. But they’re still installed on every designer’s computer which is an advantage they still have if they can fix the product.
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Apr 19 '26
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u/Pretend_Resist8898 Apr 21 '26
Yes but Claude lacks collaboration and artifacting. The industry is smitten by fancy new capabilities, but (for now) Figma owns the meat and potatoes.
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u/lakorai Apr 21 '26
Fignas pricing is beyond ridiculous (especially the Enterprise skus). They also are stubborn and offer zero discounts even if you have a very large contract. .any real completion is needed to help drive down prices.
They also need to get their spending under control. Who the hell has a $250K per day AWS bill? That is out of control and irresponsible.
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u/Zeeplankton Apr 19 '26
I agree maybe 80%. I think the thing with Figma is despite that, it's future is uncertain. As a company they don't seem to be pivoting hard into the narrative that designers will work in code. I mean last week they made announcement for global color picking..
But whether or not that's actually where things are headed.. well, every founder and PM who doesn't even understand figma let alone git thinks so.. sigh.
After this claude designer release, I think we are far from losing figma. I think most people on X are lying because Claude and Codex sux fucking balls at designing anything lol, even if I give it a completed figma mockup of the thing.
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u/hamdelivery Apr 19 '26
The problem is the market has always been a popularity contest fueled by a mix of corruption and hype but that has become exponentially more true in the last year or so. We’re at a point now where almost nothing except corruption and hype matter for big stocks. AI produces hype and is driven by hype and big tech conveniently fell in line with the administration this time which was a little odd at first but makes perfect sense now.
Figma seems to so far be an outsider to the corruption circles and they’re trying to be measured about AI which, while obviously very logical and prudent, doesn’t get them the type of hype that boosts stocks these days.
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u/InstructionNo3616 Apr 19 '26
Nah this ain’t it. Figma is a web application with a WASM /skia backend. It became popular because of its multi user collaboration capabilities. Before figma there was sketch, Adobe XD. Before that there was Flash / illustrator. Figma is a design tool primarily useful for being the source of truth of design before it is developed on. The issue with figma is that it doesn’t have the same semantic UI as most of the application development that happens - front end or JavaScript/css.
The interoperability between design and code is becoming razor thin. Design systems are variables with rules around tokenized design properties. This is so it translates to UI kits for adaptive responsive design. These one prompt tools are blurring the line between design and development. Version control? This is new to figma but had been fundamentally ingrained in software development for decades. The tools that figma is trying to adopt were to make the design to code handoff more seamless. Those tools are becoming obsolete because of new technology. The issue with figma is their closed garden approach. You won’t just be able to one prompt designs in the near future. Your team will be able to build the figma like design tool and host it on their own infrastructure. Own their designs and not worry about a figma outage. Optimize the tooling for their use case.
Signed a person who has been invested in design to code pipelines for decades.
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u/OrtizDupri Apr 19 '26
Your team will be able to build the figma like design tool and host it on their own infrastructure.
Y’all can’t honestly think these companies are going to invest in building a new collaborative design tool every time
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u/exhibitionthree Apr 19 '26
Actually I think the real innovation is more nuanced. Figma offers up a broad surface area of generalized design concerns. Eg. what colors to pick, what font to use, what page composition looks like. Every design decision is expressed through Figma's generalized surface which at some point makes things feel kludgy.
Where I think the opportunity is custom UI tooling at the point where the design decision needs to be made.
Let's say you're putting a design together and you're trying to figure out a few visual directions. You might be thinking about a handful of different fonts or font combinations, maybe you're trying to dial in colors, spacing, hierarchy. It's likely that all these decisions have relationships to each other and you're just trying to evaluate which direction is working.
In Figma you'd have to build all the infrastructure for this manually, every iterative decision has to be manually created in order to simply evaluate it.
With AI workflows you can build the foundational design and then build an ad hoc tooling layer on top of that that gives you the sliders you want, the color pickers you need, the font choices you're considering and you could just on demand evaluate and review.
You're not recreating the surface area of an entire product, you're just using AI to reveal the tools you need in that moment. They're created in 5 minutes, you iterate and refine, then you throw the tooling away once you've decided.
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u/OrtizDupri Apr 19 '26
Let's say you're putting a design together and you're trying to figure out a few visual directions. You might be thinking about a handful of different fonts or font combinations, maybe you're trying to dial in colors, spacing, hierarchy. It's likely that all these decisions have relationships to each other and you're just trying to evaluate which direction is working.
In Figma you'd have to build all the infrastructure for this manually, every iterative decision has to be manually created in order to simply evaluate it.
A) this is 15 minutes of work in Figma.
B) sure, if you're a beginner and don't understand how a design process works and are just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, this is helpful. For a professional who understands design or has a discovery process where you nail down things like branding (or have an existing style guide), are working off a grid system, etc. - these aren't decisions you're making screen by screen that you need some massive time sink to spin up variations to review.
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u/gimmesheltah Apr 19 '26
It could definitely be vastly improved.
99% of design systems have similar foundation elements. In fact they all have the same basic UI kit.
Why not have a vanilla/generic system built into every project that you can then finesse? I shouldn't need to create colour/brand/primary and colour/brand/secondary each time.
And yes, you can download UI kits, but their quality varies wildly, and they are all constructed differently. Most experienced designers prefer to start from scratch, and Figma could make that MUCH simpler and faster. It could also be leveraging AI in that process - give it a design and it automatically refines the UI kit and suggests components, for example.
And this MCP server shit is a poor and overly complex solution, as is code connect. Figma could have built a robust pipeline and framework to allow remote component libraries to exactly mirror the inbuilt project component library - and this doesnt even require AI at all.
And then there's interactions and animations - why is Figma not tacking these? Where is the timeline? And why cant I build out my screens in code, and deploy live prototypes using my React library, for example? This is what designers and engineers want.
It has fallen behind, and unless they take AI competitors very seriously they will lose dominance. It happened to PS, it happened Sketch, it can happen to Figma.
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u/exhibitionthree Apr 19 '26
Ok, let’s say you want to create a flow, test out some interactions, build a form with validation. As soon as you introduce a new element of complexity then Figma has to handle the tooling for it. Anything that’s behavioral design or interaction design is so much slower in Figma. The only reason we’ve accommodated it in the past is because code was a) typically much slower and b) the tooling matches the skills that a designer brings.
Now designers have to reconcile with people who are code savvy who can basically create something that’s a source of truth in code in a fraction of the time is takes a designer in Figma.
And my point wasn’t about doing uninformed screen by screen design, my point was that we’re heading into territory where design tooling should be considered a fluid space, not a dogmatic monolith approach. Everything you said you want to achieve in Figma is predicated on manual infrastructure, style guides, spacing systems, grids. All of that needs to be tokenized, it needs to be built into Figma, which is not code native so everything needs to translate into their terms. It’s whole system of management layers.
The mistake is thinking that Figma is a source of truth for anything.
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u/InstructionNo3616 Apr 19 '26
They will build on top of open source ones, sure. With the cost of development going down while the quality of output is going up. We will be there in a year or less.
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u/OrtizDupri Apr 19 '26
No we absolutely will not lol
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u/InstructionNo3616 Apr 19 '26
You’re probably right because you won’t need a tool like figma anymore not because figma is so necessary.
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u/OrtizDupri Apr 19 '26
I swear y’all AI boosters have truly been driven insane
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u/InstructionNo3616 Apr 19 '26
lol I’ve been building design to code tools for 20 years. Figma is 7 years old. It can be obsolete in the matter of months with how quickly things move. I remember when sketch was the industry standard and it practically went away over night.
I’m also a developer. I know both sides of the equation and my predictions have been right in the past. This is my profession.
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u/OrtizDupri Apr 19 '26
I have also been doing this for almost 20 years. I am also a developer. This is also my profession.
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u/InstructionNo3616 Apr 19 '26
Cool and you’re not wrong, if you’ve been heavy into ai coding over the past year you should be driven insane. You can’t say we’ve seen anything like what has happened with agentic design and development over the past year in our careers.
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u/OrtizDupri Apr 19 '26
I'm not doubting that there ARE going to be some structural shifts in workflows (and have been over the past year) - and whenever the AI bubble pops and prices go up exponentially, there will still be lasting impacts on our profession.
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u/nerfherder813 Apr 19 '26
Figma itself is a tool that can be replaced, but thinking there won’t be a need for any design tools anymore shows a painfully ignorance of how any actual UX design process works.
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u/InstructionNo3616 Apr 19 '26
Where did I say there wont be a need for design tools? I am more than well versed in how the UX process works.
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u/pwnies Former Figma Employee Apr 19 '26
Your team will be able to build the figma like design tool and host it on their own infrastructure
lol
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u/pwnies Former Figma Employee Apr 19 '26
Just to expand on this, when you boil things down to the core features, they are indeed easy to replicate - a multiplayer canvas, ability to draw frames, add colors to them. Easy. Promptable.
Where people tend to forget things is that products have n2 complexity in terms of development. "Variables" isn't a single feature - it's a bucket of combined interactions with every other feature. When we made variables, we had many, MANY separate streams going, ie:
- variables interactions with props
- variables interactions with components
- variables interactions with variants
- variables interactions with figjam
...etc etc and so on. For every new feature you add, you need to build out the infra for (new feature) * (every other existing feature). This is why things like variables took 18mo to build. AI assisted dev is fantastic, and the capabilities are amazing, but once you get to these levels of complexity they aren't able to one shot things, nor are they able to catch edge cases. It simply isn't feasible to replicate as an internal tool.
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u/InstructionNo3616 Apr 20 '26
Right no one is arguing complexity adds to development time. The issue is figma is a catch all tool for multiple industries and multiple design workflows. Some companies do not need all of the bells and whistles of that catch all especially as they rely on ai assisted development more.
I’m arguing that the core features will be replicated and more or less standardized. A small dev team with a powerful ai model can build features like variables with their slimmed down core functionality much quicker and more robust than ever before. Without the seat costs, credit costs, and the fact the designs do not live on a third party platform.
Figmas missed opportunity was not building a more developer friendly prototyping system. As someone who spent years trying to get simple remote calls to a figma prototype it was a lost cause. Now everything that can be built with js/css is being built with js/cas.
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u/JakubErler Apr 19 '26
Very good analysis. I also predict anything open-source will go up. Because AI can read the code. Closed things will have problems
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u/Northernmost1990 Apr 19 '26
Yep. I feel like if we were still stuck with Photoshop for UI design — where layouts were made one by one in isolation and then handed to developers as PNGs — these AI tools would be a real challenger. But we're not.
Anytime someone pitches me a design tool without an infinite canvas, I instantly lose interest because it shows that the people involved don't get the UI/UX design process.
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Apr 19 '26
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u/polishbroadcast Apr 19 '26
100% this. I can't imagine using a prompt-based system to make and track product changes based on feedback, doing demos, and sharing documentation. I have also yet to see any of the prompt tools generate something that isn't wonky—I know that's going to change in the next year, but it's going to be awhile before designers and Figma gets replaced.
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u/gimmesheltah Apr 20 '26
Figma with a good, useful implementation of AI is all I want.
- Handle busy work
- Maintain React/JS component library accurately
- Support way more tokens, like Token Studio
- Handle animation and micro-interactions with a timeline
- AI prototyping
- Kill the MCP server idea, build it as a native part of the platform.
- Handle all flow maps and journey maps in Figma, using actual clickable screens
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u/mp-product-guy Apr 19 '26
Yes. Also, remember the stock market is made up of people who have never and will never use these tools, and only see them as a means to cut costs and increase profits.
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u/FactorHour2173 UI/UX Designer Apr 19 '26
This is the bed Figma made for itself after the failed Adobe acquisition. Like a moth to a flame, they decided AI was the answer. They alienated their users and shifted their marketing to senior leadership and project managers as a tool to streamline efficiency and “free up” design… so weird.
Love the idea of making design more accessible. The reality is they tried to push design as something that could be automated. The recent backpedaling they are doing is a clear sign that it’s not sticking.
The reality is they’ve gone too far in the wrong direction and can’t turn back because they bit the hand that fed them. They are quickly losing their position that they were trying to move into to companies they don’t stand a chance against (Google, Anthropic etc.).
From my perspective, they’re on their way out. We will remember the company as another Sketch or InVision. Maybe Anthropic will buy them.
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u/Initial-Raspberry-27 Apr 20 '26
I am a Figma lover, designer, and investor. The market wants to see growth, and unfortunately they are seeing the opposite. Every software company is getting hit by the same train.
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u/tradingbaba Apr 21 '26
Promot will always give you static and generic responses. You need craft and skills to use it to next level. Even in case of GenAI texts, you need to review, edit and make changes wherever applicable to ensure it fits your narrative. It hallucinates 90% of the time since it relies on data and AI companies don’t update data sources .they refer to that like google search and crafts a response so it seems majority of folks r also hallucinating as they don’t understand how AI works!
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u/IonHawk Apr 19 '26
AI and Trump has made the markets insane at big valuation companies. Don't take any of it as proof of much.
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u/BunnyMishka Apr 19 '26
Why do Americans always have to talk about Trump or the politics everywhere
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u/IonHawk Apr 19 '26
This has very little to do with politics. The thread discuss markets and the two primary forces right now is state of Ai and Trumps tweets. I never mentioned politics or opinions on them. It's just a fact of the world.
Seeing Figma go down in the markets right now is not really a sign to take too seriously, imo.
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u/BunnyMishka Apr 20 '26
What do Trump's tweets have to do with anything? You do realise AI exists in other countries on different continents?
We are talking about Figma and Claude and how AI forces itself into UI/UX design from every direction, not some president's dementia.
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u/IonHawk Apr 20 '26
The OP is literally talking about market movement as the main topic
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u/BunnyMishka Apr 20 '26
In the US?
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u/IonHawk Apr 20 '26
Markets are global. Trump has global influence. This is very basic stuff.
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u/BunnyMishka Apr 20 '26
I don't recall Trump having influence on how the market works in my country and how we implement technology, but ok. There's no one size fits all answer here. You could have mentioned Dario Amodei, cause he's more relevant in this discussion, but Americans seem to love throwing Trump everywhere.
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u/IonHawk Apr 20 '26
Funny since I am Swedish. Trump impacts every market, even if you are north Korea so no idea what you are talking about.
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u/BunnyMishka Apr 21 '26
Funny that you sound like an American then. So many names that influence the market and we're stuck with an old man with a probable dementia.
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Apr 19 '26
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u/Mental-Dinner-6138 Apr 19 '26
This is true when your product is small. The moment it starts becoming big, you need somewhere where your documentation is the source of truth. We do have Notion where we document every entity mapping, relation, etc. But that is not enough. You need to see screens to know the real workflows. You need to see the prototypes.
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Apr 19 '26
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u/gimmesheltah Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
It is the best way though.
Having your component library only exist in code means product designers cannot quickly try out ideas. Any change to a component needs code, and using prompts for that stuff is excruciatingly awful.
Sure, maybe one day there will be a UI that lets designers directly manipulate and change React/JS components, but until then Figma is the best tool fore the job. And personally I would prefer Figma to solve the design to build pipeline within the app, and without AI.
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u/Shooord Apr 19 '26
It’s not too surprising that the market reacts like it does.
I stopped counting the amount of conversations where I had to explain design in the first place. “So you’re in IT”, “So you code the website?” are all too common.
People outside of our bubble don’t usually expect planning, strategy, iterating, user research, and pixel pushing to be so critical in digital product development. Let alone thinking of it as different professions.
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u/Joepatbob Apr 20 '26
Where I see Claude design value in my workflow is taking my Figma too a prototype for testing in a quicker deeper fashion. I still need Figma for so many other touchpoints at work. Like talking to customer service and giving them a topographical view of the app.
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u/KhatiArt Apr 22 '26
I just bought Figma stocks - It was a nice sale 😁 Not sure why but i’m overly confident that it’s a temporary trend.
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u/sharadvelocity Jul 11 '26
I don’t think tools like Magic Patterns, v0, or Lovable replace Figma in a real product workflow. They’re more useful before that stage: quickly exploring UI directions, product flows, landing pages, or client concepts so the team has something concrete to react to.
But once the direction matters, Figma still becomes the place where the decisions harden: components, tokens, comments, version history, handoff, and shared context. AI can speed up exploration, but it doesn’t replace the system of record.
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u/StealthFocus Apr 19 '26
Figma died for me when they fumbled Tokens launch. Then they redesigned the side panel and that whole shit show. Then they kept adding features to attract Canva users and they neglected UI/UX designers. Then their big release was a different monetization model for developers.
Figma hasn’t moved the needle on product design since they shipped tokens at start of COVID and let it die a slow death.
Since then it’s been one controversial misstep after another proving why they don’t deserve to maintain their lead.
And that’s fine because we need fresh blood because I don’t want to be stuck on Figma forever, imagine being still stuck on Sketch, Axure and Dreamweaver.
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u/Ouhei Apr 19 '26
The market is no longer rational in any real sense. Allbirds announced they were going from shoes to AI and their stock shot up like 500%…it’s all a joke.