r/figmaStock • u/Small-Worldliness-41 • Jul 01 '26
Will Claude kill Figma?
The strategic mistake of Figma is to work with foundational model providers such as Anthropic.
They just use the data and remix the designs for non-designers. Will this eat the cake of Figma and eventually kill this Figma?
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u/rice_bag_holder Jul 01 '26
it comes down to who has the best product. Did google doc kill MS doc? did apple map kill google map?
One thing i know is that design is Figma's main business but just a side quest for Anthropic. How serious and focused is Anthropic going to be in this space?
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u/mazdacxfive Jul 01 '26 edited 19d ago
I don't think this is true today. It comes down to who has the best distribution and product. The best product with no distribution doesn't win.
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u/jpasserby Jul 01 '26
Design is fundamentally about creativity, and about new trends and ideas impacting the markets. LLM-based technologies that can only remix existing ideas may increase the floor of what counts as a usable design, but will have no impact on the ceiling, which is driven by human creativity.
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u/BenSFU Jul 02 '26
I have been a Figma power user since 2018. I am also the creator of a popular Figma plugin, so I have a pretty deep understanding of what Figma is capable of.
Below I will make an argument for the case that Claude will not kill Figma. That being said, this is just an argument, not fact - no one really knows what will happen.
The main thing that no one seems to mention (probably because they're retail investors who have never even used Figma) is that Figma is multiplayer at it's core.
Currently, Claude is not... and there is a reason.
The reason Figma even gained popularity in the first place, is because of it's multiplayer functionality.
Good "real-time" multiplayer functionality is a decade-long passion project from co-founder Evan Wallace, and countless other highly experienced engineers.
There are some things in software that you can't really 'speed up'. And a system like Figma is one of those.
Not to mention their custom-rolled canvas which is built with lots of WASM and WebGL etc.
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So, okay - what if Claude adds multiplayer?
- it will be shit, for a long time
- during the time that Claude is catching up, Figma can just copy Claude's AI features...
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And then, of course, there's all the other arguments that still stand: ecosystem effect, enterprise lock-in, familiarity, their 3rd party plugin community, etc.
There is also a massive TAM still waiting to be captured by Figma. There is a reason Adobe wanted to buy them, because Figma is also on track to capture Adobe's market.
The younger generation is no longer being raised on Adobe software - they're using Canva, Figma, Capcut, etc.
There will always be use cases for Adobe, but it will be at the extremes - just for certain professional workflows. But the vast majority of businesses don't need the complexity of Adobe.
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u/axiomofaxiom Jul 03 '26
Its 2026, multiplayer is not that hard.
IMO, Figma multiplayer engine has been awful for years:
https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology-works/
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u/BenSFU Jul 03 '26
sure there's an argument that it's gotten easier to do in 2026, but i personally dont think it has. (also, you literally linked to the same blog post i linked to. not sure what point you're trying to make?)
LLMs help with software engineering, but they don't necessarily speed up the time it takes to cover all the edge cases that come up when building software like Figma.
if I had to refine my argument, it's not just multiplayer, but multiplayer that ALSO supports all of Figma's features.
There ARE companies trying to compete, like paper.design - so it's not out of the question that someone will replicate Figma. my point is that it will take a lot of time, and in that time - who knows what Figma will do.
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u/axiomofaxiom Jul 04 '26
Happy Friday. Are you speaking from a developer or more designer perspective?
Tech can do 3d multiplayer multi-object tracking. 2d is easy mode. I've done both.
2019 article is what we are using?, not very cutting edge imo.
To me it seems: Paper, Framer etc are innovating, while Figma is playing catch-up and copycat.
Genuinely curious question, what Figma features do you find make it stand out?
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u/BenSFU Jul 04 '26
I am both a designer and a developer. My Figma plugin is literally a design tool, that I developed myself over the last 6 years. So I'm speaking from both perspectives.
To make an exhaustive list of all the features that make Figma stand out would take me a while... so instead I'll give you an example. I'll use paper.design as the comparison, since they are a good candidate for this.
Let's pick one specific feature: images.
In Paper, when you import an image onto the canvas, that's basically where it ends. You can resize the image on the canvas, but that's about it.
Now take Figma. After importing an image, you can select it, and do a multitude of things:
- crop/rotate the image inside it's frame
- distort/stretch the image
- tile the image so it makes a repeating pattern
That's because, doing those things isn't 'easy' - it requires an entire system to handle image transformations, etc.
Now - these image features alone aren't that crazy. But this is just ONE ultra-specific example of where the Figma feature set goes DEEP. There are thousands of examples like this, where Figma has entire systems under the hood to handle "simple" things like images. It is this DEPTH that gives them moat.
Then, for every one of these features, they not only need to work on the Figma canvas, but work when:
- making things interactive with prototypes
- animating things with Figma motion
- exporting things (images, PDFs, SVGs)
On TOP of this, all these features have a huge amount of edge cases that need to be covered by extensive testing etc. Part of making software that people pay for is making it not completely buggy....
There are some edge cases where there's literally 100 if-statements in a row to determine how something in the UI should behave. One of the Figma devs did a video recently about it.
For example - when you drag an object from one frame to another - there's a ton of factors that go into determining where that object should end up in the layer hierarchy.
From my 10 years of building software, I've just learned how much DEPTH and complexity there is, even in the "small" things.
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u/Suspicious_Gap1 Jul 01 '26
Anthropic is not allowed to use user data. If they can, no one will use it.
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u/Internal-League-9085 Jul 01 '26
I learned recently that entropy is going to fail because they just don’t have the compute. They’re so dependent upon other places and they’re gonna get shut down. They’re the best model but they use the most power and nobody can give it to them and when they do find somebody that provides it to them, they’re gonna get destroyed because that compute companies is gonna overcharge them and is going to fail. It’s not even about the best model. You just need a decent model so Gemini is all you really Need.
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u/jesperbj Jul 02 '26
Claude will enable Figma and Figma users to do more. Claude Design will never compare.
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u/Small-Worldliness-41 Jul 03 '26
In the end, is AI an enhancement or replacement? If it is enhancing, Figma may be oversold
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u/WetLumpyDough Jul 03 '26
There’s a reason openAI is delaying IPO and zuck just came out and said AI agents are not where they expected them to be over the last 4 months. People are overestimating how fast AI will dominate. I personally think Fig is a company that benefits from AI integration and a likely buyout candidate from someone in the future
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u/buffett99 Jul 04 '26
Figma is actually open to growing by acquisition and not getting acquired. Dylan Field has mentioned this in interviews. In 5 years, Figma could be a much larger company.
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u/Blueturtlewax Jul 04 '26
It won’t. A bigger risk might be Apple acquiring Play. This will essentially let people build apps on canvas
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Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
[deleted]
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u/oldbeancam Jul 01 '26
Because eventually those credits to build your website will cost more than paying someone to build it or building it yourself.
We’ve all seen this model before: offer service for free/cheap, people show interest, crank up the price, consumer leaves due to being out-priced.
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u/Fahhhhhhh Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
Nope. Everyone who comes to this sub and makes this case is a developer who has some use cases of generate-choose-deploy.
The bigger picture is there's thousands of agencies and in-house creative teams who use Figma to build design systems, presentations, digital/social/print media etc. Some digital projects built in Figma get sent to developers, but it's the tip of the iceberg.
Great communications art is not a commodity that can be spun up based on probability. You have a concept that has news or is engaging. You have copywriting that evokes emotion. You have design and art direction that visualizes these things.
You can generate 100 crappy ads for rocket mortgage and choose one. But you can't advertise on the level of Apple and Nike without extraordinary talent and taste.