Christine Vallaure, a UI designer who teaches Figma and AI workflows, offers designers a map of the hidden infrastructure between a convincing Figma-to-code demo and a production workflow:
The demos show you one clean layer working under perfect conditions. Your actual work needs three or four layers stacked together, and nobody shows you the stack, because the stack is where it gets messy and half-solved. The confusion comes from not knowing they are separate things at different stages that need different skills.
A useful distinction is between context and connection. Figma’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) connection can expose the file, markdown can preserve working rules, and skills can make repeated tasks more consistent. None of those guarantees that a generated button is the button already maintained in the product. That takes an explicit mapping to the codebase, plus someone responsible for keeping it current.
Look at the whole stack. Each layer covers the hole under it. The pipe lets Claude see your design. The note carries your rules. The recipe keeps your repeated jobs consistent. And the mapping, the top layer, is the only one that truly welds design and code together so they never drift.
But that top layer needs a codebase, developers, and constant upkeep. Most people do not have that, and should not pretend to. So for almost everyone, the design and the code will drift the moment either side changes, and that is not a sign you set it up wrong. It is simply what these tools are without the expensive wire: they take a snapshot and build from it. When things drift, you regenerate. You do not try to hand-repair a connection that was never really there.
That makes the stack an ownership map as much as a technology map. Each added layer creates another artifact that can become stale. The right setup is the most infrastructure a team can actually maintain, rather than the most complete diagram it can assemble.
And the flip side holds: if you are not this team, do not build like this team, or you will spend your life maintaining a machine you never needed and cannot keep up with.
