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Kaari replies: ​“The ​“make your own things” from generic blocks idea is warm one, and I do appreciate it. Where it starts to lose me is when it tries to force a reality that doesn’t really exist, and it’s not what people do or look for. Look at any craft. The kitchen. The workshop. Purpose-built spaces filled with purpose-built tools, often shaped by centuries of tradition (also sometimes known as experience). Serious craftspeople don’t operate in primitives. A chef doesn’t stock ​“a knife”, ​“a pot”, ​“a carrot”. They have a specific knife, a specific size, a tradition they trust.”

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.”

Kaari clarifies his thoughts in an article: ​“I tend to think about design as a search, not a production pipeline. You start with a messy problem. Early on, you do not know the answer. This is why I never fully buy the idea that design is about output. I agree that design is useless without shipping, but the process of designing is not. The design process, and the suffering part of that process, are valuable. […] Use whatever tools you want, but be deliberate about what mode you are in. Protect exploration from premature constraint. Invite constraints when you are ready to learn from them. Use code as feedback, not as a cage.”

On constraints: ​“If you let constraints define the space too early, you do not just get a worse outcome. You lose outcomes that never get discovered.”

On unification: ​“The dream of a coherent universe is compelling. A world where ideas move from chaos to clarity without translation loss. Where designers can build and builders can design. I see the desire, and it can be good. But unification has a shadow side. It can turn into standardization. If everything is built from the same primitives, you get the same patterns repeated across teams. Tools raise the floor, but they can also lower the ceiling if they quietly define what is worth attempting. If the easiest path is always the most conventional path, convention becomes the product.”

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.”

Karri Saarinen reacts to the announcement of a visual editor in Cursor: ​“Whenever a designer becomes more of a builder, some idealism and creativity dies. Not because building is bad, but because you start out including constraints earlier in the process than they should. […] People forget that the creative process is not about tools. It’s about forming a vision, and then translating that vision into some form.”

10 years since Figma launched on December 3rd, 2015. Congrats on a big anniversary!

More Variable modes for people on Pro and Org plans. Instead of 4 modes, Pro plans now offer 10 and Org plans 20.

It’s wild how long it takes to build some of these larger features. Jacob Miller, a Product Manager for the Design Systems and AI team at Figma, shares an early exploration for slots from 3 years ago! I’ve been begging Jacob for slots at this year’s Config and got a feeling that they’re already working on it, but still it will be launched only next year.

If you wonder why it’s taking so long, Jacob wrote an insightful reply on how his team approaches these changes: ​“With design systems features, we have to plan them years in advance. Things like components, variables, and styles are used on the order of billions — one wrong move will result in breaking files and ruining critical design work. We have to be methodical. […] With DS features, I’m usually planning them around 3 years in advance.”

If you’re curious how slots and other new features will work, check out Jacob’s AMA.

Tom Johnson has an in-depth thread on how dithering works, how it breaks, and some tools to get it to look best.

The official Figma MCP server now supports Gemini CLI, OpenAI Codex, and Atlassian is coming soon.

Tommy Geoco shows his workflow for building Lorelight with Figma and Claude Code.

Figma Make is pretty great for building custom diagrams for your research.

Another use case for Connectors is pushing code from Figma Make to a GitHub repository, which can be used as a project backup or source for deployment to your preferred hosting platform. Future updates to the Make file can be manually pushed to the repository. Connectors will become available later in October.

Dylan Field shows the new Figma app in ChatGPT in action with the tech tree generated out to the year 2100.

An early preview version of the new monospace font from Paper, based on Geist Mono from Vercel.

The Cut tool allows you to precisely divide vector objects and shapes into separate objects. When editing a vector, select the Cut tool and either click and drag to slice an object or click on a point to split the vector. Don’t miss a little fun interaction detail that Rogie and Tim sneaked in.

Dylan Field shows a couple of projects he built in Figma Make with pre-release Sonnet 4.5. He notes that the new model is very good at planning and was able to precisely transform a Figma design into a functional code with a single prompt.

Tasteful isometric illustrations made in Figma Draw by Shreya Rao.

Another demo of using the new MCP server with Claude Code.

Watch Lee Robinson go from design to code with GPT-5-Codex and Agent.