Comment by travisd
10 hours ago
At $DAYJOBSTARTUP, we do hackathons twice a year. At the most recent one, an engineer sat down with a designer and set him up with Cursor. The designer looked like a kind in a candy shop, he was so excited to be able to rapidly prototype with natural language and not be clicking in Figma for hours.
A month later, he comes back to the engineering team with a 10k line "index.html" file asking "How do I hand this off?" (he was definitely smart enough to know that just passing that file to us was not gonna fly). We decided to copy the designs into Figma for the handoff, both because that was the existing way we did design/engineering handoffs and also because creating high fidelity designs (e.g., "this color from our design system" and "this standard spacing value") isn't in Cursor's wheelhouse.
We're probably going to spend more time working on a better setup for him. At the very least he should be working against our codebase and components and colors and design tokens. But I'm very curious to see where it goes from here.
This is doable. I set something similar up at scale. Figma Variables/Tokens -> Token Studio (Style Dictionary, essentially) -> Our Component library <-> Storybook -> MCP
Atomic component system, good page level template coverage, great prop support.
The LLM consumer nor the designer is allowed to write directly back to the library. Those changes need to go through a governance process to prevent drift as their are multiple product teams consuming it and we still don't have a reliable way to make sure Figma and the component library are always 1:1. Maybe in a company of a single designer.
So while this setup is arguably more fleshed out than what you have it still requires multiple humans in the loop.
Sure, there are a billion Medium articles about how it can be done with tokens but its much messier at any kind of scale.
Haha I did the same with our product manager and designers. One of our designers just got her first (tiny) PR merged this week.
I am somewhat fearful of having created a monster, but at the same time I think it’s good to knock down barriers to knowledge and learning. All else equal, I think a designer or PM with some exposure to code is better than one without.
What I’m fearful of are 10k line PRs and pressure from product to “just ship it.” Past a certain threshold a PR will be really tough to review, to the point that it would be preferable for an engineer to have handled it from the start.
I think we will need deeper integration between figma and the codebase/storybook. Shared color palette definitions, integration of storybook components with figma components, stuff like that.
The Figma MCP that you can use to handover to your agent and simply say “implement this” is already pretty impressive.
Why not just give him a branch? I've found underestimating "non-technical" people a folly in the AI era. They can easily boot up projects with agentic AI assistance.
Same here. Really curious on where this leads. Firstly, I feel that the speed and complexity increase that comes with agents can only be dealt with people adept both in the domain and in general AI tools.
Basically, to really leverage this I think just knowing Figma perfectly previously or being a noobie and knowing Claude Code perfectly isn't gonna cut it.
Building things is fast, but building something that is gonna stick is gonna be more difficult now you have so many options.
The game has changed.