Figma Community now includes Apps, a new category that connects Figma to external tools, including AI systems and third-party products. Find them in Extensions alongside plugins and widgets.

Luis Ouriach argues that modern design systems have become the centerpiece of software development in an AI-first world, shifting from a siloed support function to the primary mechanism that tells LLM-based tools what to build, and therefore directly shaping code quality, speed, and brand differentiation.

Luis on what the ​“shadcn-ification” debate is actually about — not the visual uniformity, but the organizational misread: ​“The mistake isn’t in the ingredient. It’s in thinking that having access to good ingredients is the same as knowing how to cook.”

Stakeholders are concluding that the design system infrastructure is done because a great foundation exists. The teams that have spent years practicing design systems understand exactly why that conclusion is dangerous.

Jenny Wen, who brought FigJam from concept to launch at Figma and is now design lead at Anthropic, talks at the Double Diamond podcast about designing Claude itself. The key difference from traditional software: ​“When you are designing now with these LLMs, you basically can’t map out all those flows. You basically just have these core primitives and these specific states that you want the model to get to, but the possibilities in which the user can actually interact with the model are just basically endless.”

Ridd walks through a workflow where Paper acts as a visual canvas that Claude can ​“proactively” explore and prototype in. The interesting bit is his framing of Claude Code as a coworker and Paper as a shared whiteboard. That’s exactly what I wanted when last week I commented on missing agents in Figma after spending more time in Cursor.

Jenny Wen leads design for Claude at Anthropic, and in the past, she was Director of Design at Figma, where she led the teams behind FigJam and Slides. At Lenny’s podcast, she lays out how AI is collapsing the classic ​“research → mock → iterate” workflow into two main jobs for designers: supporting rapid implementation alongside engineers, and setting shorter 3–6 month product visions that keep a swarm of agents and builders pointed in a coherent direction. Jenny describes the day-to-day at Anthropic as equal parts surfing internal prototypes, pairing with engineers, and doing last-mile implementation herself. She still sees Figma as critical for exploring many directions and fine visual decisions, but treats Claude as her primary stack for long-running tasks and front-end polish.

Mallory breaks down how brand designers can use variables to scale brand expression in Figma. Learn what variables are, how they differ from styles, and how they support real brand use cases — from multi-brand systems to scalable templates.

Pablo Stanley: ​“I’m a designer. For years, my world has been Figma, Sketch, Adobe. Nice GUIs with buttons and panels and things I could click. The terminal? That was a black rectangle where the dev team did hacker things. No buttons. No UI. Just a blinking cursor judging you for not knowing what ls ‑la meant. And now? My design tool of choice is the terminal.”

Dylan interviewed post earnings on TBPN: ​“We discuss Figma’s growth, the rise of Figma Make, the shift from linear coding to a visual-first product loop, why taste becomes the real moat in an agent-driven world, and why design is the ultimate differentiator in 2026.”

Dylan Field joins Deirdre Bosa from CNBC for a pre-earnings interview and an announcement of the Code to Canvas partnership with Anthropic. Dylan argues that AI coding tools will dramatically lower the barrier for writing software, but product design and understanding human needs remain essential; AI cannot replace the judgment, taste, and empathy of designers and product teams. Figma is a collaboration and orchestration layer for this new world, where many more people can create software but still need a shared space to ideate, design, and align on what should be built.

Miggi presents the new vector point box transform controls, letting you resize selections of vector points as a box instead of nudging each point manually. This makes symmetry tweaks and proportional adjustments much faster and fills a gap in Figma’s otherwise excellent vector tooling. It’s the kind of unsexy but high‑leverage improvement that will matter more the deeper you are in vector-heavy files.

Rogie King introduces Vectorize, a new AI-powered action in Figma Design and Draw that converts any raster image into fully editable vectors in one click. This feature finally removes the need to use 3rd-party plugins or to redraw assets, while still letting you tweak paths, use color variables, and turn ​“messy” starting points into reusable components.

Meng To shares a concrete end-to-end workflow where OpenClaw runs as a local ​“agency layer” that talks to files, shell, browser, and Telegram, while Codex acts as the focused coding specialist for real repos and multi-task queues. He replaced tools like Notion, Midjourney, Cursor, and v0 with local Markdown files, Nano Banana Pro API, and four specialized Telegram bots to compress a 3‑month and 5–10 person product cycle into about a week while working solo. This setup is powerful but requires non-trivial security setup, careful prompt and reference management, and still leans heavily on code review and system hygiene rather than ​“hands‑off” autonomy.

Tom Johnson outlines a nine-step AI-heavy design workflow where he starts with messy voice transcripts, uses Claude and tools like Willow, Notion, or Granola to structure the problem, then lets AI generate a deliberately bad but functional app as a scaffold. This matters because it reframes AI’s weakness at UX as a feature: a cheap way to explore directions, expose edge cases, and pressure-test scope before committing to real craft in Figma and a proper engineering handoff.

The Glass effect is now generally available, and Miggi introduces a few updates: add Glass to any object, shape, or text; design Glass with non-uniform corners and precisely round each corner radius; use the Splay property to control how light bends around an object’s edges; and apply variables to Glass properties to easily connect to your design system.

Ridd shares his mental model for deciding which tools to reach for when coding with AI. Also available as a Dive Club video.

Nikolas Klein, PM at Figma: ​“Today, we’re introducing the ability to embed Figma Make prototypes into Figma Design, FigJam, and Figma Slides, along with new editing tools that help you build and share your best ideas.”

Joey Banks shares a simple way to get started with variables structure when he is not sure where to begin: ​“One very simple approach that’s worked well for me is separating variables into non-interactive and interactive buckets. […] Non-interactive variables describe the environment. Things like background surfaces, text, icons, and borders that don’t change based on input. Interactive variables describe behavior, such as actions, states, and feedback that do respond to input.”

Marcin Wichary, Design Architect at Figma, started a microblog about software craft and quality. His writing is always wonderful and insightful — instant subscribe.

Speaking of Tom, in this interview with Jay, he shows the DM he sent to Linear’s CEO to get an interview — and later the portfolio and case studies he used to land the job at Vercel.