At $DAYJOBSTARTUP, we do hackathons twice a year. At the most recent one, an engineer sat down with a designer and set him up with Cursor. The designer looked like a kind in a candy shop, he was so excited to be able to rapidly prototype with natural language and not be clicking in Figma for hours.
A month later, he comes back to the engineering team with a 10k line "index.html" file asking "How do I hand this off?" (he was definitely smart enough to know that just passing that file to us was not gonna fly). We decided to copy the designs into Figma for the handoff, both because that was the existing way we did design/engineering handoffs and also because creating high fidelity designs (e.g., "this color from our design system" and "this standard spacing value") isn't in Cursor's wheelhouse.
We're probably going to spend more time working on a better setup for him. At the very least he should be working against our codebase and components and colors and design tokens. But I'm very curious to see where it goes from here.
As a product designer, this looks really interesting! I'm curious if you've experimented throwing caution to the wind and asking it to make an entire design system (colors, text, components), and if so, how well it's worked.
Nice use case! I built something along similar lines.. an ASCII wireframe generator to jump straight from idea to code with zero friction: https://bareminimum.design/. Also handy for quick UI critiques. Curious what you think.
I'm curious to understand more about your use case. I've been working on getting fellow designers out of Figma since it's easier to express intent in code now using LLMs.
I still have a lot of assets living in Figma, and for some things it’s simply faster to prototype there before moving to code.
Personally, I’d really like to automate part of the workflow around exporting from Figma and assembling a design system into components — right now there’s just too much manual work involved.
I fully agree with the comment but CLI tools don't do auth and session management in a consistent way. Besides, imagine if now every vendor out there need to distributed custom binaries for their services. Some of them do. Many don't.. but overall it is just increased security risk for the end user when the functionality that is delivered is simply an interface to an API.
I remember that a llm agents often store those in clear text files (I think claude-code beeing one of them). Many of the CLIs I use have a better secret hygiene than that i.e. allow passwords commands or use secret apis.
I can attest that ai agent executing cli binaries is better than use of an mcp, just because of the limitations of mcp, also figma mcp requires a pro license. Does the figma cli require a pro license as well ?
So if you map your design tokens to Figma variables first, components will reference them. Parsing CSS/Tailwind configs automatically could be a good feature though.
A month later, he comes back to the engineering team with a 10k line "index.html" file asking "How do I hand this off?" (he was definitely smart enough to know that just passing that file to us was not gonna fly). We decided to copy the designs into Figma for the handoff, both because that was the existing way we did design/engineering handoffs and also because creating high fidelity designs (e.g., "this color from our design system" and "this standard spacing value") isn't in Cursor's wheelhouse.
We're probably going to spend more time working on a better setup for him. At the very least he should be working against our codebase and components and colors and design tokens. But I'm very curious to see where it goes from here.
Extra chars from JSON are the least of our problems with MCP.
Personally, I’d really like to automate part of the workflow around exporting from Figma and assembling a design system into components — right now there’s just too much manual work involved.
How does it do applying styles from an existing codebase?
We have style guides, strong base css, etc. If that was represented when it built in Figma, that could be interesting.