Speaker A argues AI-native coding agents make Figma's developer seats and design handoffs obsolete, pointing to a 50% year-to-date stock decline. Speaker B counters that Figma's stock is performing well and the tool won't die quickly, but the exchange reveals tension between traditional design workflows and new AI-driven development pipelines.
The days of going back and forth in Figma are over. And Figma dev seats, it's like, what the fuck is the point of a Figma dev seat anymore? I actually don't know if they still charge developer accounts, but they used to have this when I was using Figma before the birth of all these coding tools and AI-native ways to bring design into coding or closer to coding. They would sell developer accounts so that you could go from design quickly to code and do that handoff cleaner. And they would actually price the seats higher for developer accounts. So now it's just like, okay, just like have the coding agent make it in HTML and it just blows away all of that. It's like, why do you need any of this? I would bet that many companies have design and research departments or product departments where they're really heavy on Figma use and then maybe wanting to protect that capability and like not want to move to an agent or something like that. Like if you have so much invested in a design system, like I've seen this, then People get really protective of that instead of like just embracing what new tools could do where it's like, hey, we don't have to do that entire process anymore. We just go straight to codebase, like design system HTML. Is Figma gonna die? Like, what are they gonna do? I actually haven't kept up with that. Let's go look at their market cap.
I think their stock price is doing pretty good. I don't think it's a tool that's gonna die quickly.
Year to date down 50%. Oh yeah.
So it sort of made a comeback and then it took another dive down. They released a new plugin today where you can use a Chrome extension and then like copy a website into Figma. All original design is officially dead. If you're a designer, I think Figma is still like a necessary tool. Like let's say you take that design pattern that you just created, the component set, you want to do something like move it a couple pixels, put some particular visual design onto it, tweak the fonts in ways that are specialized. You take it into Figma, you do that, and you bring it back over to your AI system as a way to communicate with it. So we're still going to need tools like that, but it's probably not as dominant a position that Figma might have been in.
