Why Figma Make Might Be the Most Important AI Tool of 2025

What if your Figma design could become a working app just by asking? In this episode of the Next Wave, our guest is David Kosnik from figma. He showed us a demo of Figma Make, a mind blowing new tool that turns your designs into live working code with nothing more than a prompt. Whether you're a designer, a founder, or just someone dreaming up ideas on the train, this is the next evolution of software creation. David walks us through live demos of how Figma make builds dashboards, games and real data powered apps on the fly. And he shares figma's vision and what the future design and creation might look like in a world of AI native workflows. If you want to see the future of product design, this is the episode for you. Before we get started, you know, we spent a lot of time on these episodes and it would mean a lot to me if you could hit the subscribe button. It helps us grow the show and get on better guests to provide more value to you. So without further ado, let's jump in with David Kosnik from figma. David, thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here.

Yeah, thanks for having me. If you want to start off like explaining what Figma make is a little bit.

So Figma AI has been around a couple of years and we have a ton of AI features embedded in all of our products. So you can use them in figjam to summarize stickies and help you brainstorm inside of Figma slides. You can generate images and revolve if they don't have the skill set to engage in Figma design as fully as other professional designers. And also for designers to pick up where Figma has traditionally ended, you know, a lot of designers don't know how to code that, you know that deeply. And so it feels like a superpower to get something where you can bring in your designs and keep going.

Yeah, totally, totally. I mean like, you know, for a little bit background, I mean, I, I'm an okay designer and an okay coder. I'm not amazing at either one. And I, I've always like when I use Figma, I was like, okay, you know, I spent a lot of time making something beautiful and then to go actually code it, oh my God, it's a lot of work and usually when I go code it, I, I end up getting lazy and it looks slightly different, like, okay, that's good enough, that's close enough. So I was like, if I can actually get my beautiful design and press a button in the future and then be able to tweak it in AI. That would be amazing. So I'm hoping that's where this eventually goes.

Holy 100%. So while this is tracking on the database piece, which you can imagine, I just wanted to show sort of a couple other pieces. So actually over here I did have an example where I converted the same output into the Figma standard design simple design system, which we've open sourced and using those set of stylings instead. So you can see it's like now using this sort of Figma branded aesthetic and we're excited to do over time, much more here. I hear a lot of requests to use my literal components and I can show you the workflows we have for those today as well.

Yeah, that seems powerful. I've been using Claude Code and Factory both a lot more to create prototypes and just play around. And one thing is getting them to actually follow design systems. The best thing I figured out is like you can kind of like figure out, you know, you can kind of like map out part of your design system in like a markdown file or something and hand to them. But then it keeps forgetting. So if you had something just directly in figma, it seems better.

Totally, yeah. And I should mention as well, like, you know, people are used to riffing and editing in Figma, so it's not just in prompts. You know, you can use this kind of magic pointer tool and starts to go ahead and just riff on things.

In line and you can do that with your team. There is the multiplayer aspect to this.

Yeah, exactly. So I can go in here to share this file and everyone sees the same thing, just like you expect from Figma design. And actually multiple people can chat. So you see my avatar here in a multiplayer file, you'll see other people's avatars with their prompts. And something we've invested a lot in is making that work across modalities. So if someone makes changes visually here versus via prompts or even versus via code, it all plumbs through to everyone else. And so we want this to be a surface where an engineer can come and riff with the PM and the designer and make their own version on like. Okay, here's how exactly this should feel.

Okay, let's be honest. Your AI prompts aren't giving you the results you deserve, but with a little coaching, you can transform from basic prompts to engineering conversations that get you exactly what you want from ChatGPT. That's what this playbook delivers. Not just random prompts, but a step by step system with the exact techniques top AI professionals use every day, you'll have your own personalized prompt engineering system that delivers consistent results. Get it right. Now scan the QR code or click the link in the description below. Now let's get back to the show. And how does the multiplayer work with the prompting?

Basically, what happens while a prompt is running is that you get a loading state and you can pause it to run a new one. And so everyone gets that same experience. You can either wait for the thing that's been running to finish running, or you can kill someone's stuff before you.

And we found that works pretty well so far. And if I want to start riffing on this, I could have an inline contextual prompt for it, but I could also jump on over and see exactly the piece of code that corresponds to this and start changing that directly as well there if I have that context.

Yeah, I grew up on irc. For me, seeing this, I'm imagining some crazy collaborative project where everyone's just messing around and making something together. And just sharing the link online would be fun, but I could see how teams could actually get real use out of this.

100%. Yeah. I mean, I think that's been the magic of Figma always is. Like Figma was born on the web, it was multiplayer first. It's just sharing a link. I think there are starting to be more and more of these prompt to code tools, but I think we have put a ton of effort in to making this work really well with your team across different Personas and modalities.

Yeah. I'm curious though. I mean, obviously Lovable has been taking off and then there's V0 and there's a few different ones. So I mean, some of the functionality looks similar, but you know, what's the main difference is? The main difference is it's more like designer first and you can actually kind of get in there and tinker with the designs and things like that.

Great question. You know, I'd say first and foremost, this whole category is really early. You know, like we talk about the whole space like none of these things existed like a year ago.

Right.

It's like this whole space is getting figured out right now, which is really exciting. And a lot of that is, you know, building on the new capabilities of these models and trying to figure out the workflows that make sense. And so I'd say right now we've invested a ton in multiplayer as the sort of core thing you come to love and expect from Figma. And a lot on interop with the rest of Figma. So the design systems piece I explained is one, and maybe I'll give a quick demo for a second, which is say you have a mock. You're trying to build a sort of interactive visualizer for a solar system. This is a traditional Figma layer just from Figma design. I'm going to literally hit copy paste on this thing and go over here and say, make this interactive.

What you'll notice here is there's a little Figma icon here. This is not actually just a screenshot. This is all of the rich structured data that comes over with this. It's every layer name, it's every token, every variable, every property. We have done a ton of work on quality to be the best place at generating high fidelity results from designs as a starting point. And we've seen a really high percentage of our users start with designs as well. And we've optimized for that. You know, even in the blank prompt box, we say at the top, like, put your design in here. And so I'd say one of the things, you know, we've really focused on is taking the workflows designers already have in Figma and letting you go much further to express things at a higher fidelity through code, through interactivity in a way that's much lower effort than people have had before.

This seems like a natural evolution of the product, right? Because when I think about Figma, you know, when it was first suggested that I use it, you know, I used to use Photoshop back then. I still use it a little bit, you know, but you know, using Photoshop to create, to design a website is a pain. Like just dealing with all the different layers and how, how I was just. There's a lot more manual work to do, small little changes. And then you get into Figma, it's like, oh, everything's easy to move around and, and then only that. But then, you know, you guys started giving all the like code or you give like the CSS rules and all that kind of stuff you can use. And so obviously this is like a natural evolution, like, well, okay, now just give you the rules because then if you don't know how to code, that's hard to like know what to do with. But now literally just create the code for the designer.

Totally, yeah. And so here, this example finished cranking. So this was going to bring in a mock that had different itemized planets of a solar system. And you can see based on literally make this interactive as the prompt and the underlying structure of the Design that we brought in, it inferred that each of these different planets is its own entity moving at different speeds. They move around the circles. It created this functional speed scrubber that works. If I click on one of these planets, there's an overlay that comes out.

Did it know that because of the layer names or did it actually look at a picture or how did it know that infer.

That's right. So if I go back to the original design here, I can.

Drill down a bit and you can see each of these different planets has been sort of itemized with a planet name. So like Uranus orbit along with the arc that it takes. And so we found this kind of context is incredibly helpful for the model. And so you take a random screenshot and give it to any of these tools, they'll do okay, especially if you could write a longer prompt. But to the point of like, where is Figma different? Is like figma is already the workflow design teams, product teams are using to articulate design intent, to detail out specific workflows. And that data is super, super valuable to models. And they can pick up so much context from that to make the output really, really good with a lot less effort.

Makes sense. When I was thinking about Figma doing AI, I was like, well, right now, at least from like Twitter discourse, I know Twitter is kind of a bubble, but you know, it feels like the design community community is very, you know, I wouldn't say political, but more passionate about things. And in terms of AI right now, you know, there's definitely been some, some, you know, coordinate like the design community. That's the kind of anti AI and it feels like you kind of, you guys are kind of doing a great job of making it clear like, hey, this is not replacing you. I mean like, if I was a full time designer, this is amazing because like for me, whether you're designing or coding, you know, it is the art of creating things, right? You're creating things out of nothing. And now the idea that you could be a designer and not know how to code and you created something out of your brain and turned into a real design and then now you turn to a real product, that's just like, that's amazing. I don't think like most people realize like how magical that is 100%.

Yeah, it's been totally awe inspiring and I think we've been blown away by just how much people can make with this. And so maybe just to finish the demo section with a couple fun examples from real customers, this is one of A map. And this looks a lot like a mock. And I think traditionally a designer might end here, but you can actually use this map and that's like one prompt to add that level of interactivity and imagine the feedback you're going to get in a user study around. You know exactly how this works to find coffee shops.

Based on this. Another fun one. This was for a conference collecting all of the different iconography and the logos for a team that was planning the conference. And so it became a little bit of like their micro site for the design system of the conference that they all put together in Figma and published and sort of added all this wraparound with Figma Make.

That is so cool.

We've seen internal tools start to really take off as well. So this was a really fun one of like a color palette generator that someone on a design team built to make it much easier to get the right sort of compliant colors with the exact mixes in different scenarios. And this is the kind of thing that is so much more powerful as an app that you can explore and send around relative to a static thing. And you never would have gotten an internal tools team to fund, but now someone can actually go ahead and post.

Their team because they don't like the wait. Right? They just cut the idea and they design it and then it makes it.

Yeah, totally. And the last one, I've just been blown away by stuff we didn't optimize for, based on how good these underlying models are, a range of different scenarios. And so people have built full on 3D video games in this, which is kind of insane. And so like, you know, here's, here's one that someone built which is. I haven't actually even finished this game. There's like a whole different world, a bunch of different spells. There's like creatures that are kind of come out and start going after me. I'm like, wow, this is insane. That like, you know, literally just through prompting you're able to get to this level of expression.

You should make a, like an old, old school RPG with this. I used to play EveryQuest. That's actually how my career got started. It reminds me of playing EverQuest and like kiting mobs and like you got to do a spell and you got to run a little bit, then they're still coming at you.

I don't know. Yeah, someone actually recreated Doom, which is pretty wild.

Very cool. So I'm curious, like, where do you see, you know, who's the user of Figma Make? Is it going to be primarily designers or are you guys trying to reach out to people beyond designers as well? Because I definitely see how this becomes a superpower for designers. I am curious, you know, how other people outside of design would use this or how they get value out of it if they're not a designer. Or if you guys don't care about that, you're just you serving designers only, you know, and if other people use it, that's great.

Yeah, yeah, great question. Yeah, we optimized for designers to start and so we've done a lot to, you know, as I mentioned, bring over that context from Figma Design, but also make this a great place for whole product design engineering teams to work together. And so the fact that code is there and you can change that, the fact that you have a pointer and can directly, you know, change different aspects of the experience. Like all of these have been designed so that your designer, your pm, your engineer can use this as a collaborative multiplayer surface to iterate on what the product experience should feel like together. Which is what Figma's been great at historically as well.

That's definitely been the core right now, I'd say. We've started with prototyping as a hero scenario and we've been surprised how blurry the line is between what is a prototype and what is production. As soon as you can publish and start sharing with users and getting feedback and start using code libraries to hook it up to a real backend to storing data. We've seen people pitch VCs and get funding on things that they built in Figma make without anyone else involved with real users using it. I think we've been just totally blown away at the breadth of cases people are already using it for. Maybe to share one more example. We did a ton of dogfooding on this before it went live. It was really helpful in iterating on quality. We all generally have a dog fooding oriented culture at Figma, but this was over the top. We called it the Great Figma Bake off. And we had like 20 different meetings scheduled for the whole company in every time zone where people from the team would be there to answer questions or troubleshoot or help you work with bugs. We had a competition like what were the coolest things people made? And all sorts of people made. Inspiring. Thanks. And I think one of the coolest ones for me was someone on the HR team who had zero design background, zero technical background.

They used Workday as our source of truth for people data. They found a Workday API and they built a game that uses the real people data of the company that shows four faces and four names and you had to guess who is who.

Yeah.

And it became viral within the company of people like playing this game and trying to get to know their colleagues.

That's crazy.

And I was like, wow, this is something that no one would have funded as like effort.

What the hell are you talking about? Right. That's why I pitched that. Right. Yeah, let's go spend resources on this.

And it's like, you know, it's a Persona we didn't optimize for. Like we didn't build Figma make for HR people.

Right.

But it's just been totally inspiring to see how accessible it has made the process for everyone.

That's awesome. So you know, I've heard rumors of an ipo. I don't know if you know, maybe you can't discuss that or acknowledge that or whatever but you know, so I don't know if you can answer this next question or not, but I am curious like, where does Figma and Figma make, where does this go? Like what is, you know, in three to five years, you know, what's the best scenario? Where, how does this work?

Yeah, I can't make forward looking statements.

Okay.

Why?

I have two kids. I have a six year old and a three year old and my six year old over the last year has started playing iPad games. He's addicted to duolingo. He's a daily active user.

That's awesome.

Learning math and chess and that kind of stuff.

And he started using make before we launched and I was curious to see as a very much not our target Persona, how understandable would it be. And he is hooked. He will beg me to spend more time on make and know, walking home from school or you know, at the grocery store running errands, he'll be like, I had an idea for a new one, Daddy. Oh, that's so cool. And like, you know, he's made like six games now and he'll sometimes come home from school with like a sketch of like a map or a level and he's like, take a picture of this. Like we should use this as the starting point. And honestly it is like mind blowing and I'm so jealous.

Like Right, right, yeah. Imagine being a kid, like you have any idea and like, yeah, I can actually make this now. The AI will help me make it, you know. Yeah, I have, I have an 11 year old son, you know, and he, he grew up, he grew up in San Francisco around a bunch of like tech and game industry like executives and people like that when he was little. And so you got to see all this kind of creative world there, right? Like artists and things like that. We used to have like artist parties where we draw on the walls and he'd be there with artists drawing on the wall. And now we live in Japan and so I'm like, kind of, kind of miss that. He's not, you know, Japan's gray, but he's. No, he's no longer in that kind of, you know, environment. And I have been showing him things like replit. I showed him replit. He loved that, like we made that. He made like a little website with that. And he was making just different. One was for Roblox. Thankfully he's quit Roblox, but it was like, you know, different little websites and stuff. And he did one for Minecraft, which I like the Minecraft one better, but the websites were really ugly. So I was like, okay. You know, and he didn't really like how ugly it was, which I think Replit and those guys have gotten a little bit better. But I think some, like Figma make, where he could actually like go in and tweak the design itself too, would be awesome. For him to be able to see the whole process of like making it look good and then actually shipping it would be great.

Yeah, I love his feedback and both, of course.

Okay, I'll get them to you.

And I think to your question on, like, you know, what's the future look like, you know, five years from now? I think it's like, it's making the path from idea to production, idea to reality so much shorter. And like, you know, seeing even game toy examples with my son makes me realize the way people think about the workflow, the way you think about what's possible, the way you explore ideas is going to be totally different. And I think in this new world, design is even more important than it has been. Design isn't just pixels. It's empathy for users. It's understanding of your target audience. It's knowledge of current workflows and where they fall short. It's exploring the whole solution space and thinking deeply about each of the nodes that you might not have had time to in the old world. It's sending down every animation and interaction of the experience.

And so one of the things I'm really excited about in that future is like, safware is going to get freaking awesome.

So much more thought through, so much more explored. Every fit and finish is going to be better. And by the way, there's Going to be a lot of low quality software too. Like there's just going to be more software than has ever been made.

It's like in the early days of the web. That's why I've said in the podcast before is like the web, you know. You know, I grew up on irc, like the web used to be like fun, you know. Yeah, it was messy, it was, you know, it's total mess. But it was easy to get in there just like tinker and make websites and now you don't really see that anymore. So I'm hoping that stuff like Figma see he was, you know, it's total mess but it was easy to get in there just like tinker and make websites and now you don't really see see that anymore. So I'm hoping that stuff like Figma brings that back where the web becomes fun again because people can just have ideas and just easily make stuff.

Totally. Yeah. I think we'll see even more long tail personalized experiences for different schools and communities and people building stuff for themselves and the stuff that's built for everyone being even more sophisticated and helpful in a wider range of scenarios.

I think you'll place through some really interesting experiments around collaborative creation of things too. Like even though I was like joking before about like, yeah, be trolling my friends and changing stuff, but I think you'll see like communities like actually creating new kinds of projects and stuff together will be fun.

Totally cool.

So, you know, this is not a forward looking statement. This is a total theoretical scenario. So imagine you got a time machine and. Are you in San Francisco?

I used to be. I moved to New York actually.

Okay, okay, you're in New York. Okay, you're in a New York time machine. You get out, it's 2050. What's different? Is anything different? Does it look the same? Is it still the same bagels and pizza?

I mean, New York bagels and pizza are not going anywhere. Okay, honestly, 2050 is so far out. It's like so hard to imagine. Like 10 years, let alone that far is like, it's like, man, I have aspirations. I can like, you know.

There'S whole conferences on this stuff and it's like very hard to predict everything. Right. Waymo's coming to New York, I own a car. You know, figuring out how my kids get to playdates and stuff is hard. I'm excited for AI to get to a level of trust and safety and rollout to the point where getting around in the world is like a solved problem. And that seems like it's happening, which is super exciting. Like, Waymo is fantastic. Health is really hard. I personally have celiac disease and was diagnosed about two years ago. And it's been a whole learning journey about what can I eat and what are my sensitivities and so forth, and lots of blood tests and follow ups. And Even for me, ChatGPT has been so helpful in understanding what the terminology means and all that. And I think in broader access to that level of expertise with verifiable trust and awareness is going to be huge for society. And just like people understanding what's happening in their lives and things that are really core, from health to finance to dealing with the insurance because their house burned down, to all of those kind of core fundamental things that are like anxiety provoking, complicated and scary and it's hard to get experts who actually understand the whole system. And so I think that's going to be like incredibly meaningful in ways that are hard to really internalize still.

And then there's the really out there stuff of like, are we all going to have neural links or glasses on our faces that understand the world around us and are chatting with us? Are we going to have moon colonies by then? Is everyone going to be living longer? I hope all those things are true. And I'm an optimist and a tech futurist, but you get into singularity theory type questions.

Yeah, Once you approach the singularity, all bets are off. Who knows what the hell happens, Right?

Yeah. The health thing, that's something I think about a lot. Because if you think about a doctor, they go to school for eight years or whatever it is, and it's all about. It's not all about a lot of. It's about reading a lot of books and trying to retain as much of that knowledge as possible. And maybe if you're lucky, they retain like 5% of the knowledge or something.

And then over time they get more expertise by dealing with patients. But, you know, obviously AI could take in all that knowledge and over time actually understand all that we've learned and then start expanding upon that and then combine that with also, you know, collecting more data on us individually, you know, even like down at the lowest level possible. Like, it seems like AI will be able to understand us in the future. Like eventually we will have AI that like, okay, Nathan, what's going on with your body right now? You know, there's like, could be things totally unexpected, like, oh, some cancer started for this reason and you know, and then we can kind of solve it this way. That's going to. I think that sounds like sci fi for people, but I really strongly believe that's coming. It may take like 20 or 30 years, hopefully it's more like 10. But man, that's going to be such a game changer for people.

Yeah, I'd say also, you know, just on the, you know, the role of AI in the workforce as well, I think we'll see as it continues to evolve and capabilities come out. I think in every sort of industrial breakthrough and revolution there's been concerns about what it means and ultimately people have learned new skills and been even more productive on things that are even more meaningful. And so I'm personally really optimistic and excited and I think seeing people like my son start to use Figma make and tools like it in totally new ways makes me feel like there's just new frontiers to work on and what work means will change.

Awesome. It's been great having you on here and is there anywhere people can find you online? Are you active on Twitter, on LinkedIn or anywhere like that?

Yeah, I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn. David Kosnik. K O S S M I C K and yeah, thank you for having me on. This was super fun, really appreciate it.

Thank you.