Jason M. Lemkin tested Figma Make by asking it to redesign Saastr.ai, but it failed to understand the site's context. He says Base44, Replit, Lovable, and v0 do much better. The failure raises questions about whether established builders like Squarespace can compete with AI tools that miss basic details.
First vibe coding experience I've had in 6 months is Figma Make. It's, you know, I tell you one thing that happened to me this week is I tried Figma Make for real for the first time. And for my use case, it was terrible. It was much worse than Base44, much worse than any vibe coding product I've ever used. Figma Make, it was terrible. It was undesigned. And even worse, all these products have advanced. It didn't even, I asked, so I do this test and a lot of people make fun of me. So when I want to test a new vibe coding site. I do something very simple which didn't work 6 months ago and works well today. Go to Saastr.ai and make me a better version. Scrape it, use your AI, and come up with a better idea. And I'll tell you, Replit and Lovable and, and even v0 can do a pretty good job of it. This is what the AIs are supposed to do. Make didn't even know it was on my website. It didn't even try. It was the worst thing I'd ever seen. Nor did it— was it designed— it's not supposed to do that. But if Figma Make can't even pick up the context from a website to redesign it, what hope is there for Squarespace and, and all other guys, right? They can't even, even Figma can't do it. Worst vibe coding experience I've had in 6 months is Figma Bake. It shows that the team's not— I think it's worse than Base44. It's, it's, it's, it's rough. It's rough. That's death today. That world does not exist any longer. Best efforts quarterly. Let's get around the table and decide what we're going to ship this quarter, guys. Okay. Don't work today.
I think this speaks to the challenge. Anyone faces in a larger company with an existing product architecture, finding a way to adopt the new technology, the new architecture, and the new way of doing both the way of building and then what you actually have to build in such a way as you can make a big enough impact to change the trajectory of your existing company. And it's just really damn hard. But the funny thing is there are literally two $1 point something trillion worth of public companies and another trillion worth of private companies for whom this is the existential crisis. How do you make sure you matter, right? And how do you cut through the internal noise and how do you staff your teams and how do you create the urgency and how do you create a sense of what's possible, right? To see what you can do and, you know, do some Y Combinator, acquihires of failed teams and say, how do you turn around, your R&D development, which takes, as Jason says, 3, 6, 9 months to deliver something when the team down the road are delivering a new version every week. Because if you don't figure this out, you're going to trade at 8 times EBITDA, which at best is 2 or 3 times revenues. And it's going to be pretty fricking unsatisfactory for the people who paid 30 times.
