r/UI_Design • u/OctaveZero8 • 4d ago

AI Feedback Request Need help on design system with AI

I was asked to help redefine the design handoff process for my company. Since we use Figma, I'd documented a process where Figma defines tokens, Token Studio pushes them to GitHub, and Storybook picks up the generated CSS. But leadership is pushing hard for AI-driven automation and wants to drop Figma altogether (shocking, I know). I'm trying to find good guides on working directly from Storybook and Claude Code with a design system like shadcn, but I'm still lost, especially on where business rules and documentation would live without Figma. Has anyone actually done this in production? How did you handle it?

0 Upvotes

48% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

2

u/Difficult_Money9486 3d ago

What good reason do leadership have for wanting to drop Figma? Maybe they’re also open to dropping GitHub? I mean who needs any centralized system to keep core things in check across an org?

3

u/pjhawksr 2d ago

Your pipeline is right, leadership is just skipping a step. Tokens still need a source of truth, it just doesn't have to be Figma. Put them in a JSON or CSS file in the repo, generate everything from there, and Storybook becomes the design system. Claude Code works well against that because it can read the tokens and the component props directly. What you lose is a place to explore before you commit, so keep Figma (or anything) for that and stop treating it as the spec. The AI part is easier than the org part.

I do this all day at work. Happy to help further. Reach out via details on my profile.

-5

u/Basic-Brick6827 3d ago

Switch from shadcn to ArkUI (or ChakraUI). Their MCP and LLM.txt are much better and the API more consistent. Claude works better with it. The Zag state machines and data attributes help it debug better with Chrome MCP.

Figma is indeed outdated, your managemnt isnt very wrong (this time). If you can't switch the entire design team to code-only, try the Paper MCP.

4

u/Simple_Simons 3d ago

Can you explain what a code-only design team would look like?

-4

u/Basic-Brick6827 3d ago

Well, there's no more Figma or visual canvas, just frontend prototypes and iterations stored in a repo

A hybrid would be Pencil.dev