“Locofy Lightning converts Figma designs to frontend code in 1‑click, powered by LocoAI’s Large Design Models (LDMs). Get responsive, interactive designs & reusable code components with better class names.” Won 1st Product of the Day at Product Hunt!

“Effective product development hinges on a well-defined process and seamless team communication. However, implementing these concepts can be more challenging in practice.” AMA discussion hosted by the team of advocates — Lauren Andres, Akbar Mizra, Mallory Dean, and Anthony DiSpezio.

Replit Vice President of Marketing and Design David Hoang talks about how AI is reshaping the future of product design and development, and the role it’s playing in the company’s team and products. On synergy between design, engineering, and AI: ​“Whether you currently work more in engineering or design, AI offers augmentation for you to do both. Engineering and design are on a course to become one tightly woven discipline.”

On hiring with regards to their Artificial Developer Intelligence (ADI) strategy: ​“At Replit, we’ve always leaned towards hiring multidisciplinary designers who understand the technical depth it takes to create software and bring it into the world. Each designer has the output of three to five designers that you’d ordinarily work with. They code, prototype, review pull requests, do unit testing, facilitate research sessions, and run workshops, too.”

More Figma-to-code solutions: ​“Trace helps you convert your Figma designs to live SwiftUI prototypes within minutes. You can also preview, view code, edit, export, etc. on the fly. Trace uses AI to write SwiftUI code and compile the entire project within minutes.”

Replit launched an experimental Figma plugin that converts designs into runnable React code. ​“Generate a Repl directly from Figma, and instantly share a static React app with your team. Then, use Replit AI to add functionality and get your code production-ready.” Read more about this experiment in their blog post.

Designer Advocate Lauren Andres shares tips on how to streamline handoff when it’s a constant stream of WIP designs, communication, and collaboration. Her advice involves using annotations in Dev Mode, adopting a shared language, organizing your files with sections and ​“Ready for dev” statuses, archiving old designs, and leaning on components.

Dualite converts Figma designs and prototypes to React and HTML/CSS. ​“Create reusable code components with semantic naming from Figma variants in a single-click. Use tagging for turning static layers to external links, input fields, buttons and embeds.”

Erez Reznikov shows some examples of the divergence between how code and visual design tools treat interactive elements and components in general, then suggests an alternative to the handoff process. ​“Construct tools and processes for designers and developers that will make it much harder to not be on the same page. Suppose a design tool would be made out of real elements, with an already existing, verified structure, that is backed by code beneath it all. You mainly see web builders do it today, like Webflow and Framer. When you use an element like a checkbox in these apps, it’s a real, working checkbox.”

I’ve seen Penpot 2.0 being brought up in some Dev Mode conversations, and while their support for CSS Grid Layouts is something I’d love to see in Figma, I do not think one-off copy-pasting HTML/CSS snippets is the way to go. It’s a ​“no man’s land” between no-code solutions and framework-specific codegen plugins that could be customized for the organization’s needs and connected directly to the components in code. (Thanks Christine Vallaure for sharing the video!)

An interesting take from Jacob, a co-founder of Pierre — one of the dev tools I’m most curious about. ​“Figma is where I go to approximate a finished product. World-class Product teams collaborate here on rough sketches with components built to track their perfectly engineered counterparts. […] Instead would love to see Figma start building their creative suite. Specifically, imagine a Figma engineering tool? Built from the ground up? With the same Figma principles? And built to be interoperable with their design tool…”

Loved Tom Lowry’s thoughts on designer-developer collaboration in this thread. I think most teams agree that the traditional process of throwing designs over the wall to engineers is broken and we need better tools, but I’m also cautiously skeptical of designers working directly with the source within the design tools. While this is already possible for marketing websites (hello, Webflow and Framer!), products and design systems bring a whole new level of complexity and challenges. This iteration of the Dev Mode seems like a first step in the right direction to me, but the road ahead is lengthy but bright.

After being introduced at Config 2023 last June, Dev Mode will move out of free beta on Wednesday, January 31. Last week, Figma showed improvements and features they’ve been wrapping up before the release. Annotations are a big one — ​“designers can share additional context, specs, and measurements that are connected directly to designs, and developers can easily see designers’ notes as they work, ensuring that they don’t miss any crucial callouts during handoff.” Teams that did this manually will save a ton of time and effort. (As the top comment on Reddit suggests, flow arrows are a missing piece for annotations and something I’d love to see brought from FigJam.)

The compare changes modal was redesigned to show diffs both visually and in code. This is one of my favorite features, and I wish it wasn’t limited to the Dev Mode. I duplicate frames to riff on ideas all the time, and the compare view is an incredible tool for reconciling the differences between the two versions.

Enterprise customers can set plugins to run by default in Dev Mode for all files in their organization — ​“for example, you may want to check that you’re using a design system correctly, show links to design systems documentation, include information about internal APIs to use, or confirm whether a design uses components that already exist in your codebase.” Finally, the Figma for VS Code extension was redesigned to run plugins and improve the navigation and discoverability of design files. Instead of having to pan around a large canvas, you can easily select from a grid of frames and see frames individually with a focused view.

Tutorial Tim dissects a beautiful Fey website and shows how to leverage developer tools in the web browser to extract CSS values and implement them in Figma.

Jake goes into the relationship between design and development in product creation and illustrates it using a quadrant model, dividing the process into four key areas: product design, design patterns, product development, and development patterns. Successful collaboration requires trust and a deep understanding of each other’s perspectives.

Teams building .NET applications may know Uno Platform, which recently launched v5.0 and now includes the first and only Figma to C# Markup export plugin. Now designers and developers using the platform can generate C# Markup directly from Figma. 

I shared the teaser in issue #132, but last week Builder​.io introduced Visual Copilot, ​“a completely reimagined version of the Builder Figma-to-code plugin that will save developers 50–80% of the time they spend turning Figma designs into clean code.” The major difference between Visual Copilot and previous design-to-code tools is a specialized AI model that was trained to solve this problem. The features include one-click conversion, automatic responsiveness, extensive framework and library support, customizable code structures, and easy integration with the existing codebase.

One of the most exciting parts of this announcement is still in private beta and targeted at teams with well-maintained design systems. This feature in Visual Copilot uses AI to map reusable components in your Figma file to those in your code repository and generates code using your existing components when you have them. This could be genuinely useful to get the first rough version ready in no time.

Alright, so in the last issue, I wrote that ​“plugins for code generation in Dev Mode using GPT‑4 might provide an even better result.” It didn’t take long for a better example! Ben shows a new feature in Sidekick AI (using GPT‑4) for dropping a link to a frame in a Figma file to improve the code generation and even fix visual bugs. This looks freaking amazing.

This result is based on an exported PNG, so plugins for code generation in Dev Mode using GPT‑4 might provide an even better result.

Jake Albaugh and Emil Sjölander discuss using AI-based code generation (codegen) tools for augmenting your design to development process, not automating it. ​“Codegen isn’t just an automated, hands-off replacement for translating design to code; it’s best as an augmentation for you to more quickly understand design changes, and to keep your team in sync.”

Export icons from Figma straight to React, Vue, or Svelte components.