Figma-to-Code AI Pipeline: Impressive Progress, But Deep Questions Remain

The design-to-code workflow is rapidly consolidating around Figma, with 82.3% of designers using it as their primary UI tool and roughly 60% of high-spending customers already using its AI codegen feature, Figma Make. A new industry standard for design tokens, DTCG, gained stable status in late 2025 and is backed by major players including Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Figma itself. However, unguided AI models pointed at real Figma files frequently produce flawed output — hard-coded colours, invented components, and mixed framework conventions — revealing the limits of a naive pipeline. Monday.com's design-to-code implementation demonstrates the approach can work well, though it still requires developer intervention to clean up generated code. Beyond tooling and quality concerns, the author argues the more significant shift is a quieter one: a fundamental change in who performs design-to-code work and who is truly accountable for the decisions AI tools make automatically.