Skip to content

Gui Seiz designs at Figma. His team uses Claude Code to bridge design and code. And he still reaches for the canvas when precision matters.

Seiz, speaking on Claire Vo’s How I AI podcast:

I don’t think we’re there yet in general with these code tools in terms of the precision editing that you want to do. […] I think still the gold standard for me is just being able to drag stuff around. And you can do a lot with a click that would take you a hundred words to write and to really precisely nail. No one wants to prompt for the exact hex code or the shade of yellow and that kind of stuff. That’s just easier to just quickly do and directly manipulate.

Seiz isn’t anti-AI. His team pulls production code into Figma via MCP, edits it visually, and pushes it back to the codebase. He’s bullish on what that does to the old workflow:

It’s definitely changed our workflows in a way that it’s really blown up what a workflow even is. Before, for the majority of our careers, we’ve had a very linear, agreed-upon workflow where you increase fidelity as you go on. Because it’s really expensive to work in code, and it’s really cheap just to trade ideas and sketch them out. But AI basically collapsed that, and it’s just as cheap to riff in code as it is to riff in design.

The cost of exploration collapsed. The need for direct manipulation didn’t. Both can be true.

Subscribe for updates

Get weekly (or so) post updates and design insights in your inbox.