“Join Figma designer advocate, Ana Boyer and OpenAI product designer, Ed Bayes as they talk through roundtripping between code and canvas.”

Figma explains how its new MCP server lets Codex generate Figma Design files from live code and, in the other direction, use Figma frames as structured context for agentic code generation.

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.

“Bringing Claude Code workflows directly into Figma lets developers, designers, and even hobbyists capture a real, functioning UI from a browser — in production, staging, or localhost — and convert it into editable frames on the Figma canvas. Code is powerful for converging — running a build, clicking a path, and arriving at one state at a time. The canvas is powerful for diverging — laying out the full experience, seeing the branches, and shaping direction collectively. Going from code to canvas helps teams move fluidly, so work can narrow when it needs to and open up when it’s time to collaborate.”

My guess is it’s based on the html.to.design technology that Figma acquired last year, which is a huge time saver and an essential part of my toolkit. I haven’t tested Claude Code to Figma yet, but the result in demos looks very similar to what I usually get from the plugin. Which makes me wonder why they limited it to Claude Code instead of making something like a universal ​“Send to Figma” browser extension?

“Ryo Lu pioneered new patterns for collaboration as founding designer at Notion. He now leads design at Cursor, shaping how software gets built through a fusion of design and engineering. In this conversation with Soleio, he explains Cursor’s approach to design and how the product will evolve to empower designers who build.”

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.

Theo shares a 22-minute demo of OpenAI’s new Codex desktop app, pitching it as a ​“Cursor killer” after using it for a week of real work.

Ed Bayes from Open AI shared a 2 minute demo of using the Codex desktop app’s Figma skill to turn designs into front-end code with 1:1 visual parity, including all CSS classes and styling.

On a recent livestream, Product Designer Megan Bednarczyk and Software Engineer Nile Phillips from Figma demonstrated how PDE teams can use AI-powered diagramming to tackle complex problems and visualize the bigger picture.

With the Figma MCP app in Claude, designers, developers, and product managers can now create AI-generated FigJam diagrams.

A new feature in MagicPath: ​“The best way to turn your Figma designs into real, interactive prototypes. No MCP. No plugin hell. Just copy and paste your design into MagicPath and turn it into code with pixel-perfect accuracy — assets preserved.” Read Pietro Schirano’s thread.

Stephen Haney is interviewed about the origin story and tech stack behind Paper, one of the most interesting design tools of a new wave. ​“Paper is a browser-based design tool focused on the early, exploratory phase of design. It gives designers a fast, expressive canvas to think visually, experiment freely, and play with things like shaders, gradients, and motion without worrying about handoff or engineering constraints.”

Ryo replies: ​“Code isn’t a cage, it’s the only material that’s actually boundless. You can rebuild, restructure, and reimagine faster than any other medium in human history. The idea that working in code locks you into existing patterns is only true if you’re afraid of the material. […] Sketches and explorations feel free because they let you avoid the hard questions. Building forces you to answer them, and that’s where you discover what actually works.”

Ryo Lu replies: ​“Great tools should unify, not fragment. They should connect the designer’s canvas with the builder’s editor, connect the writer’s outline with the team’s roadmap, and let patterns repeat and evolve across everything instead of trapping them in separate silos. Designers can build. Builders can design. The old line between ​“design tools” and ​“dev tools” is an artifact of the software we had, not the people we are.”

Nice improvement to the Cursor Browser, providing a quick way to tweak design. It’s not a replacement for Figma, but a more hands-on way to make changes without prompting or switching to code. Who would think this feature could initiate a big design debate?

“We’re excited to release a visual editor for the Cursor Browser. It brings together your web app, codebase, and powerful visual editing tools, all in the same window. You can drag elements around, inspect components and props directly, and describe changes while pointing and clicking. Now, interfaces in your product are more immediate and intuitive, closing the gap between design and code.”

Fantastic update to shadcn/​ui — now you can pick your component library (Radix UI or Base UI), visual style, theme, icon set, base color, fonts, and build something that doesn’t look like everything else. Shadcn/​ui was always highly customizable thanks to well-thought-out design primitives and treating components as a boilerplate, but this release takes it to the next level.

The new all-in-one Affinity app, combining Pixel, Vector, and Layout, is now completely free. Only AI tools are locked behind the Canva premium plans — I’m wary of free tools, but this is an interesting strategy.

Speaking of shadcn, Vercel launched a free course on the fundamentals of modern UI development with shadcn/​ui. I’m happy to see a high-quality introductory resource for teams adopting this stack, as a mental shift from building with homegrown intertwined components to a composable, reusable, and themeable library could be challenging.

A great resource for front-end engineers from Vercel, authored by shadcn and Hayden Bleasel: ​“Modern web applications are built on reusable UI components and how we design, build, and share them is important. This specification aims to establish a formal, open standard for building open-source UI components for the modern web.”

As new tools blur the lines between design and engineering, I strongly believe that any designer working on or contributing to a design system will benefit from understanding these concepts.