Designer Fund surveyed 900+ designers across 60+ countries and conducted 20+ interviews with leaders from Anthropic, Framer, Linear, Notion, Shopify, Sierra, and Stripe. The headline number: half of respondents have shipped AI-generated code to production, and designers are now using double the AI tools they were a year ago. Designers are quietly absorbing PM and engineering work, but hiring loops, performance reviews, and team shapes haven’t caught up.

Tom Scott breaks down how the Staff role differs from Senior in kind, not degree. Senior designers execute well-defined features. Staff designers question whether the work should happen at all, spot where teams are solving the same problem in three different ways, and turn that into reusable patterns. Useful if you’re trying to figure out which of your current habits actually point toward Staff, and which are just more Senior.

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Yuhki Yamashita, Figma’s CPO, lays out the company’s worldview behind the Design Agent, Make, and Weave launches. When generating a working app is cheap, the bottleneck moves upstream: choosing the right direction and shaping it with care. He proposes a ​“go broad and deep at the same time” workflow, where Make spins up parallel prototypes and Weave becomes the room where teams compare, argue, and refine. A tidy thesis for a launch week, and the tools clearly exist to enact it.

Round up of four AI workflows Figma sees teams adopting: prototyping in code first and pulling it back to the canvas via Codex to Figma, generating dozens of layout variations on the canvas, building a Figma Make prototype before writing the spec, and using Make kits with MCP to carry design system context into the code. The through-line is that the artifact teams align around is shifting from the mockup to the working prototype.

A conversation between Figma’s Design Director of AI Gui Seiz and engineer Alex Kern on how AI inverts the old economics, code used to be expensive and design cheap, now both are cheap and the bottleneck moves to intent. The companion piece to the two MCP posts and the Code to Canvas tutorial elsewhere in this section.

Emma Webster’s overview of why MCP exists and what it changes. Without context, AI coding tools work from a screenshot — they see the end result, not the decisions that went into it. The Figma MCP server hands agents structured access to components, tokens, and layout decisions instead. Useful as the conceptual baseline before getting into the applied workflows in the lab.

Brett McMillin shows a concrete loop: an agent reads a coded export flow, finds every state the developer shipped (success, error, loading, edge cases), and generates fourteen designable frames on the canvas using the design system. From there, the designer riffs on three animation directions, the /sync-figma-token skill flags token drift between code and variables, and a generate_figma_design call produces an annotated side-by-side diff.

“We don’t think designers should generate a one-shot screen and call it a day.” That sentence from the announcement is Figma’s vision for the design agent in a nutshell. The framing is explicitly co-pilot, not auto-pilot: the agent runs in front of you on the canvas, riffs to spark an idea, and then hands it back to your mouse and direct manipulation. Pair that with native access to your libraries, components, and tokens, and the bet is clear – the winning AI design tool is the one that already knows your design system, not the one that generates the prettiest screenshot.

Rolling out gradually in beta over the coming weeks. During beta, the agent won’t consume credits. See also the official announcement at The Figma design agent is here.

TBPN’s 20-minute interview with Dylan Field on the day of the Design Agent launch.

A short onboarding walkthrough for the agent beta. Worth watching for the suggested starter prompts: generating alternative layouts, starting from scratch using your design system, working together on canvas, and getting feedback.

Miggi compiles a thread of agent prompt examples paired with screen recordings of each one running.

A few updates to Grids – reorder columns and rows by dragging, automatic positioning, and automatic rows – the last one is my favorite!

Lauren Budorick, a software engineer at Figma, walks through six optimizations behind a recent ​“10x faster vector editing” announcement.

Make can now connect to a local repo and edit your real production code, not just a sandboxed project. Designers point at an element, adjust properties or leave an annotation, and the agent finds the relevant code, commits the change, and opens a PR through standard GitHub flow (SSH for other providers). It also handles dependency installs and spins up the dev server for you. Closed beta on the Mac Beta desktop app and beta usage doesn’t burn credits.

The on-camera companion to the Make-on-Local-Code launch. The most interesting bits beyond the blog: a Figma editing panel inside Make for direct style changes, multi-element annotations pinned to the rendered screen (including voice mode), and MCP server support for resolving merge conflicts and CI failures. The pitch is that designers get agency to ship the change themselves while the engineer’s review workflow stays untouched – apple for early access.

Alexia Danton, Designer Advocate at Figma, walks through seven tactics for stretching Make credits further. The most useful ones are the least obvious: use the Edit tool and ​“Go to source” for small visual tweaks instead of prompting, codify repeated instructions into a guidelines.md file so Make doesn’t relearn your conventions every turn, and reach for Gemini Flash on routine iteration while saving Claude Opus for ambiguity and high-fidelity work.

Five workflows that show what Figma Weave is actually for: chaining AI nodes on a canvas to blend two references into a style guide, fan out variations across aspect ratios, run eight distortion filters in parallel, generate rotatable 3D models through Rodin 3D V2, and composite stills into rendered video.

Name slide rows, drag to reorder them, and jump between sections directly from Presenter or Audience View. Sections also show up in the layers panel in Design Mode, which keeps long decks navigable as they grow.

Buzz’s spreadsheet-driven asset generation gets the obvious next step: multi-select cells in the table view to edit copy, swap brand imagery, or change sizes across hundreds of variants at once. Resize works on a single asset or the full set, with preset or custom channel sizes to fan out a campaign in one operation.

Three months into life as a public company, Figma has its first activist. Hedge fund Findell Capital sent a letter to Figma’s CEO and board pushing for three things: streamline the product portfolio down to Design, Dev Mode, FigJam, and Make; cut R&D (projected to exceed 30% of revenue in 2026) and stock-based comp (around 27% of revenue versus Adobe’s 8%); and launch an independent investigation into the Anthropic relationship. Findell flags the sequence in April — Mike Krieger resigned from Figma’s board on the 14th, Anthropic shipped Claude Design on the 17th — and notes two remaining board members are material Anthropic investors. The fund still calls Figma ​“a generational company” with ​“a true moat.”

Leandro Casteel, design manager on Figma’s brand studio, sits with lettering artist Erik Marinovich (Nuform Type) to unpack the Q1 26 earnings posters they made together. Erik traces his approach to type back to apprenticing as a bricklayer under his dad, picking stones from a two-ton pallet to build pathways like a jigsaw puzzle. The same instinct shows up in his letterforms: graphic compositions you’d want to stare at even if you never bothered to read the word.