GPT‑5.6 is now available in Figma Make alongside the existing model options. Select it from the model picker in the chatbox. Available on all plans.

The team behind Bud (formerly Orchids), an AI-powered platform for building web apps and internal tools, is joining Figma. Bud was built around the idea that AI could ​“democratize the ability to build software,” and the acquisition fits neatly into Figma’s push into that same territory with Figma Make. The announcement doesn’t say what the team will work on, but the direction isn’t hard to guess.

Rachel Platt, Figma Education Designer, walks through four ways to stop wasting prompts on setup: Make kits, guidelines files, templates, and file duplication. The most useful tip is the guide​lines​.md file — a plain markdown file Make reads automatically with every prompt. Write it once, get the context for free every session. You can even ask Make to draft the file for you from a description of your design system.

Nikolas Klein, PM on Figma Make, walks through how Code Layers work in practice. The mental model is deliberately familiar: duplicate a code layer to explore alternatives the same way you’d duplicate a frame. What’s new is that those alternatives are working experiences your team can interact with, comment on, and prompt against — all in the same file. The extract-to-design flow is the detail worth pausing on: you can pull any state or screen from the code layer back into editable Figma layers, make visual edits, then push the changes back to the code layer and to your repo. Code Layers are in closed beta with a signup for early access.

“Figma Make changes who gets to ship things.” That’s Charlota Blunárová, whose collaborative embroidery app ​“Common Thread” took Best Overall after she built it in one afternoon with no engineering background. It’s the most direct statement of what Figma Make is actually doing at the edges of the design community. The other five winners — including Aleyna Çatak’s head-and-lip-controlled navigation system ​“Pucker” and Lee Black’s gesture-powered ambient music instrument ​“Airwwave” — make the same point from five different angles.

Figma’s first Config-branded Makeathon, co-hosted with Contra, runs June 4–18: build something with Figma Make for a shot at $100K in prizes, including a $50K grand prize. All participants get Figma Pro free for the duration, and the first 10K to pre-register before June 3 unlock early access to Figma’s new design agent beta.

Three quality-of-life additions to Figma Make. Plan Mode lets you shape a project before generation starts — Make asks clarifying questions, drafts a plan, and waits for your approval before building. It costs more AI credits than a standard build, but the estimate shows upfront. Web Search & Fetch lets Make pull live content from the web or a specific URL mid-build. And queued messages let you stack follow-up instructions while the current generation is still running.

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.

Figma Make now supports custom skills — markdown files that capture conventions and workflows you use repeatedly, callable from any prompt with a slash command. Pair /build-from-prd with a Notion connector and any PRD becomes a prototype that matches your standards.

Makes now run natively on the Figma mobile app for on-device testing and touch interaction previews. Mobile creation and editing is coming soon.

The Figma Makeathon is officially live! $100,000 in prizes are up for grabs. Check out the guidelines to get started.

From design system documentation and PRDs to user research and feedback, Make can now pull in context from across your product ecosystem. Figma added new featured connectors for Amplitude, Box, Dovetail, Granola, Marvin, and zeroheight. You can also connect Make to any remote MCP server by setting up a custom connector.

Once you’ve installed and authorized a Make connector, just hit @ in your Make file and start typing the connector name to pull external context directly into your prototype.

In this interview, Jay Dalal chats with Laura Dunn, Head of Design Research for the GM Human Interface Design Team. You will learn how Laura uses Figma Make as a UX researcher to communicate visually with designers.

Once your design system is in Figma Make, you can really reap the benefits of working with design and code side by side and start actually using your system. This article walks through the specific technical problems of pulling a design system out of a monorepo to make it accessible in Figma Make.

“These updates give you more precision and control when bringing ideas to life in Figma Make: preview a to-do list for your more complex prompts so you can see, verify, and even edit the plan before it runs; manually edit text or delete specific elements to quickly fine-tune your prototypes; and a new navigation bar where you can route to a specific screen of your prototype.”