Nick Babich, writing in UX Planet, takes inventory of where Figma still earns its place once teams stop treating the mockup as the deliverable:
One thing is clear: the conventional process in which UI and UX designers spend hours and days pushing pixels to create perfect layouts is no longer the reality for many organizations. The reason is simple: in the AI era, time-to-market has become a critical metric, and most companies would rather ship a “good enough” product quickly than spend extra time perfecting every detail.
The concept of Figma as a design tool originated from the conventional design process. You could say that Figma is an almost perfect design companion for designers who follow a traditional UI/UX workflow.
But the problem is that the conventional design process is no longer the reality for most organizations.
Organizations that embrace rapid prototyping are switching to tools that allow them to build and ship quickly. Instead of starting with static UI mockups in Figma, they jump straight into the prototyping phase using tools like Claude Code. In this phase, teams create coded prototypes that later evolve into fully functional products.
Figma’s role is narrowing from everything-tool to exploration-and-iteration tool, and narrowing is not the same as dying. Babich is now drawing the lines around what that specialized future actually looks like: design systems (especially the ones already living in Figma), complex enterprise workflows with real business logic, and the brand and visual-identity work where taste is the whole point.
On Figma Make, Babich is blunt:
But the problem is that Figma Make is still nowhere near tools like Codex or Claude Code in terms of output quality and overall user experience. Claude Code and Codex are significantly more capable, flexible, and comfortable for rapid product development workflows. Even for simple tasks like creating a prototype of design imported from Figma, Make tends to add a lot of visual defects.
I scored Figma Make 58 out of 100 at launch. It has improved since, but Babich is right about the gap. Make is competing against tools that were born for code generation against a working repo; Make was retrofitted onto a vector editor. That difference shows up in every prototype that looks fine until you zoom in.
On design systems, Babich:
In other words, you don’t necessarily need to maintain your design system in Figma; as long as you can provide access to a GitHub repository containing your design system, you’re in a good position to generate consistent interfaces.
If the design system can live in the repo and the agent can read it directly, the Figma library becomes a mirror rather than the source. That doesn’t kill the Figma file. It does change who has to maintain it and why.
