The Figma design agent can now search the web. Type ​“search the web”, add a URL, or use the plus menu in the agent chat to pull in live content, reference real design patterns, and replace placeholder text and images with actual material.

Tab Groups brings folder-like organization to the Figma desktop app’s tab bar. You can group tabs by project, theme, or workflow, assign a color to each group, and collapse or expand them to stay focused without losing access to open files. A nice improvement for anyone working across multiple projects.

Check Designs scans your file against your design system and flags four categories of drift: hard-coded color, text, radius, and spacing values that should be tokens; color contrast violations below WCAG 2.0 AA or AAA; components sourced from unsubscribed libraries; and fully detached components. Each issue comes with a one-click fix. Unfortunately, it’s only for Organization and Enterprise plans now — a big miss for many teams on Professional.

Slots in Figma Design just got a set of guardrails: min/​max layer counts, instance restrictions to limit what can go inside a slot, an empty-slot default so slots stay visible on canvas, and auto-fill behavior. Slots are now generally available, and these controls make them genuinely safe to use at scale.

The Figma Chrome extension can now capture any web page or element and bring it into Figma as editable layers — including text, shapes, images, and frames. It’s not a screenshot: the capture lands as actual design objects you can manipulate. Still in beta and limited to paid plans, and worth noting that design system mapping isn’t supported yet — your library components and variables won’t be automatically matched to captured elements.

An official Figma walkthrough of the agent (currently in beta, rolling out since May 20) through three phases of a real design project: exploring directions, processing feedback, and automating repetitive updates. The most practical detail: the agent works with your connected design system from the first prompt, so generated screens use your actual components, variables, and styles rather than placeholders. Also worth trying a prompt like ​“what would a growth-focused PM say about these designs?” to simulate stakeholder pushback before the actual review.

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

“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.

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.

Figma ships a meaningful performance update across the board: 10x faster vector editing, 4x smoother Make frame rates, faster load times, 92% fewer memory warnings. Just the memory side of this update was six months in the making!

Gui Seiz and Alex Kern from Figma walk through the exact workflow they use to keep design and code in continuous sync using Figma’s MCP, Claude Code, and Codex. Their demo shows the full round-trip: pull a running web app into Figma as editable frames, make design changes on the canvas, push them back to code via Claude Code. If you’d rather read than watch the full video, the newsletter summary of this How I AI episode captures the key takeaways.

You can now type directly in the hex code input to access your color variables and styles. Lots of smart details: enter a hex value and see all variables and styles using it, colors are surfaced based on the context, and related terms are baked into the new algorithm (i.e., finding your ​“danger” variable when searching for ​“error”).

Joey Banks: “…trying Figma Console MCP has completely opened my eyes into what I can offload. Not because it replaces the enjoyable work that I was doing before, but because it handled some of the longer, more repetitive tasks so quickly, and actually so well. Creating 200+ variables took seconds, and mapping them to color swatch instances so the team could preview values was way easier than I expected.”

“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?

New device frames are now available for the latest iPhone 17 and Air models.

“Join Nikolas Klein (Product Manager, Figma) and Peter Ng (Product Designer, Figma) in the first episode of Design Roulette, where we challenge designers to create designs with no preparation. The twist? They’ll also have to spin the wheel and incorporate the chosen random design prompt into their design. In this episode, they’ll conceptualize ads for the mythical hot sauce, Véloce, using Figma’s new AI image editing tools.”