From Figma to Claude Code and back | Gui Seiz & Alex Kern (Figma)

Most teams are still passing static design files back and forth, and most Figma files are already out of date by the time they reach engineering. Gui Seiz (designer) and Alex Kern (engineer) from Figma walk through the exact workflow their team uses to bridge that gap with AI, live onscreen. They demo how to pull a running web app directly into Figma using the Figma MCP, edit it collaboratively, and push it back to code. The old linear waterfall workflow is gone. What replaces it is a fluid, bidirectional loop where design and code inform each other in real time. What you’ll learn: How to use Figma’s MCP to pull production code directly into Figma filesA workflow for pushing design changes from Figma back into your codebase using Claude Code without manual CSS adjustmentsHow to export multiple code states (like all five states of a signup flow) into Figma so designers can work with what actually exists in productionWhy AI has shifted design work upstream to planning and downstream to craft, eliminating the rushed middle phase of executionHow to create custom skills that automate pre-flight checks, lint fixes, and CI monitoring before pushing code to productionHow to structure your codebase so AI can write 90% of your code more effectively— Brought to you by: Optimizely https://www.optimizely.com/howIAI—Your AI agent orchestration platform for marketing and digital teams — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Gui and Alex from Figma (02:56) How AI has transformed Figma’s internal workflows (05:17) The collapse of linear design-to-code workflows (07:28) Demo: Pulling production code into Figma using MCPs (10:49) Using Figma for precise design manipulation and team collaboration (14:10) Demo: Pushing Figma designs back into code with Claude Code (16:06) How AI has changed the role of software engineers (18:43) The shift to upstream planning and downstream craft (22:31) Demo: Exporting multiple code states back into Figma (25:23) Synchronous vs. asynchronous collaboration with AI (28:00) Eliminating design and engineering toil with AI (29:03) Demo: Custom skills for automating pre-flight checks (34:06) Code first or design first? (35:24) Using AI to learn and explore codebases — Tools referenced: • Figma: https://www.figma.com/ • From Claude Code to Figma: Turning production code into editable Figma designs: https://www.figma.com/blog/introducing-claude-code-to-figma/ • Codex: https://codex.ai/ • Claude Code: https://claude.ai/code • Buildkite: https://buildkite.com/ — Other references: • Balsamiq: https://balsamiq.com/ — Where to find Gui Seiz: X: https://x.com/guiseiz LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guiseiz/ — Where to find Alex Kern: X: https://x.com/kernio LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderskern/ — Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ X: https://x.com/clairevo — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The energy that we've rediscovered around those spikes, where we're all just prototyping and throwing it all into the same place, momentum begets momentum. And so having the team together riffing and yes anding and trying this stuff out is really great.

• 0:13Claire Vo?

  This feels like pair programming for designers and engineers. And you can work very quickly back and forth using the MCP as a connector here.

• 0:22Speaker 02

  Oftentimes, codebase gets way ahead of where the actual design file is. And there are states or workflows that just don't exist at all within the design file. So what I can do is say, send all five states of the signup flow to Figma. Now the agent's going to do is read my codebase, understand what I'm referring to when I say those five states. And for each one of those, it's going to individually import that one by one into Figma, such that the Figma document will then have all of those states laid out all side by side, so that my design partner can work against it.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  It's definitely changed our workflows in a way that it's kind of really blown up what a workflow even is.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  I spend quite a lot of my time just sitting here inside of my terminal now. I often have two, three, up to five, maybe Claude code instances running all at the same time, working on different aspects of the work that I'm tracking.

• 1:15Claire Vo?

  Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Voe, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have Alex, an engineer, and Guy, a designer from Figma. And they're going to show us the new world and the new workflows of design, code, and back to design. I'm really excited about this one because it's going to show you how more forward-looking teams are thinking about the interplay between design and engineering teams, how designs don't have to be static artifacts, either in Figma or in code. And we're going to get some tips and tricks on how you can use skills in your repo to take away toil, both for engineers and for designers. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Optimizely.

• 1:58Claire Vo?

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• 2:43Claire Vo?

  Agentic A I workshop with Optimizely. Find out more at optimizely.com/HowIAI. Attend live and you'll get a free pair of Ray-Ban Meta A I glasses. Welcome to How I A I. Alex Ghee, I am so psyched for you all to be here because we get to finally answer definitively the question on everyone's mind, which is, which comes first, the design or the code? Is that right? Do we get to, do we get to finally decide that today? Or are you going to force us to watch both directions?

• 3:20Speaker 02

  I think the answer is it depends. So my, my favorite answer.

• 3:24Claire Vo?

  Your favorite answer. And what I love about what Figma is doing right now is it's building the product for every team that has realized, it just depends. What are we going to do here? And so I know that your business has to have changed a lot. Your product has to have changed a lot in the last couple of years because the way people design and build software now changes so much. And I'm sure that has impact both on how you think about what product you're building, but also how you yourself build products. So I'm curious, how has this shifted how Figma approaches the internal design and development process?

• 4:04Speaker 00

  I mean, it's definitely changed our workflows in a way that it's kind of really blown up what a workflow even is. Before, you know, for the the majority of our careers, we've had a very like linear, agreed upon workflow where you where you increase fidelity as you go on, right? Because it's really expensive to work in code and it's really cheap just to trade ideas and sketch them out. But AI basically collapsed that and it's just as cheap to riff in code as it is to riff in design. And so a lot of times where we used to like mock up these kind of grayscale wireframes to point at what things should be, we can get functional wireframes straight away. And a lot of times what we treat these kind of vibe coded outputs is like, let me get to something

• 4:48Speaker 00

  that I can just is more malleable, I can play with, and then let me kind of work into it, let me bring my team in. And we're still, like many companies right now, trying to figure out what is the best kind of step process? And to Alex's point, it depends, it really depends on the scale of the feature, whether it's a feature or bug or product, like what are we trying to get to? We find ourselves reinventing a workflow just every day, multiple times a day, depending on the case. You know, that we have to solve for.

• 5:18Claire Vo?

  What I like about what you said is is a couple of things. One, I do think up until this point, you know, both design and engineering felt very scarce and expensive resources. And so you were always trying to reduce effort in design by doing things like wireframes. And I I tell the young people today, they don't know how spoiled they are. You don't know what like balsamic is or like those old mockups used to be like, you don't know what we used to have to do with wireframes. So I think we were always trying to figure out that. And then we were always like scarcely protecting engineering resources. And part of that meant more work fell on the design team to make lots of very specific decisions about design implementation

• 6:03Claire Vo?

  so that you didn't waste engineering's time trying to figure out, is this supposed to be a rounded corner? What's the hover effect? What's the error state? All this kind of stuff. And what I do appreciate about AI is Now, the cost of generating really high-quality stuff has gone down, which means you can invest more in the pieces that really matter. And then more people can contribute to the ultimate experience in design. And, you know, Alex, I'm sure you feel like you can contribute more and, you know, and so I think that's an interesting change to how we had historically been doing more of a Waterfile-style product development process.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  And to add to that, you also have more exploration capacity, because you're not spending so long on one idea, de-risking that one idea through meetings and prototypes, et cetera. If you can shortcut to that, you can explore more ideas. You have more divergence potential. And I think that's really interesting as well. I think we got to, like, going deep on quality, but can actually go wide as well.

• 7:02Claire Vo?

  Yeah.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I find that I'm spending a lot less time doing like the mechanistic, even on the engineering side, the mechanistic, like, you know, changing of syntax and, you know, trying to thread data through different call sites and more focused on the problem-solving aspects. And I feel like that same, you know, focus on like problem-solving as opposed to the mechanical work is really what AI is enabling on engineering as well as like design teams.

• 7:27Claire Vo?

  Awesome. Well, we're going to actually dive in and show some of this, not in theory, but in practice. And we're going to see design starting in Codex, which is not what I, not what I expected when I dialed into this call today, that you all were going to say, hey, we're going to start over in Codex. But that's what we're going to do. So do you want to share your screen and show us what I'm going to call the sandwich of code, which is going to be code design code, I think, is the process.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  Love it. Yeah, let's do it. So, yeah, we thought we'd start with Codex because we've just recently launched this as well. We had a launch for Claude, we've just launched on Codex, and we're bringing this kind of MCP functionality to a bunch of stuff. Let me see if I can just go. Open my local host for this project. Something that happens a lot is the sources of truth diverge between design and code. So sometimes some things only really exist in a state in code. Or you start working with a developer and you really like elevate what the thing was, the artifact that you originally supplied. Or sometimes like that just doesn't exist in code. You've inherited someone else's project from forever, forever ago.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  And so what's really interesting here is that I can just open up a local page. So, so now we've been working on as a, as a demo app. Alex and I put something together just to show you the power of this. Let's imagine I am working on a thing that there isn't really a coherent source of truth for. It's just a financial tracking app. And I really want to do some editing in here. And the, the case that usually comes up is that, yes, I could prompt it for these things, but it's kind of a wish and a hope that it gets it. Or I have to be super specific or I have to do install a bunch of tools that help me kind of manipulate closer to the material. But what I really want to do here is just ask Codex to send the budget allocation page to Figma.

• 9:21Claire Vo?

  Got it. So what, what we're seeing here, and I think the problem we're setting up, which I can empathize with, which is no one ever keeps their Figma up to date with what's the latest in prod. And prod rarely has the hopes and dreams of what has been designed in Figma. And, you know, a lot of times, even I do this at ChatPurdy. We've created like a Figma page with a bunch of screenshots and they always go out of date. And so even for using recent designs in things like marketing assets, not even just the software development process. It's really hard to keep these things in sync because code and design are moving in parallel tracks and there's not a common substrate between them yet, I would say, that can keep them sort of up to date on both sides.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  That's exactly right.

• 10:09Claire Vo?

  Great. So then what you're using here, if I can, if I, tell me if I'm wrong, which is you have the Figma MCP connected to Codex. So that's a hosted MCP that you've connected. Do you have the Figma skill also installed here in Codex? Because I know Codex has made a big deal about skills. And so I'm wondering if you're using those two together?

• 10:30Speaker 00

  Honestly, at some point, I installed all the skills.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  I have no doubt that at some point I'm using it. We also have, you know, where, yeah, we're, we're exploring kind of how we improve those. Alex can talk more to those for sure.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can use the skills in order to do this, but you could also just ask the MCP directly and it seems to pretty reliably get you to.

• 10:52Claire Vo?

  Ooh, you got it, Claire. Ooh, this is really good.

• 10:57Speaker 00

  So if you actually, I mean, if you look at the, the page and you look at the comparison kind of side by side, now I have all of this in Figma. And so not only can I do more intense kind of direct manipulation, I can go in here and I can like move stuff around in a way that's much more free form that perhaps I would have had to like really express with words that it's been really burdensome and laborious to explain which bits I want to move where and etc. But my whole team can also jump in and now we can just exponentially scale this work versus me solo having to do everything. And when you work in a team, it's like really helpful to leverage that.

• 11:40Claire Vo?

  So for those that are listening and maybe not watching the screen share, what we just saw is taking a locally hosted web app and code base and then using the Figma MCP to then pull the whole design of a page or component into Figma into a frame. And then you can just edit that frame. And a benefit that I didn't really think about, which is really useful, is it's really, you know, Figma is really built for multi-person collaboration, multi.

• 12:07Claire Vo?

  Player collaboration, in a way that prompting code in something like a codex or a cursor or Claude code really isn't built for. And so that broad exploration is very, very hard to do. The other thing that I want to say for people is, look, I, I'm a true believer. Every designer should be in, in their IDE, playing with GitHub, all that kind of stuff. And also, there are some orgs that just like, aren't there yet. There are some designers that aren't there yet, that don't have the front end language, the prompting skills, whatever, that are super pros in Figma. And this is a nice stepping stone to say, okay, we can get you back into a place where

• 12:46Claire Vo?

  you're really comfortable with, but also use that as a way to educate, upskill them on how to use some of these more coding tools to also bring their design, design skills to bear. And so I think there's, there's a kind of halfway step here that is really useful for folks that are used to a, a design tool like Figma.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  For sure. And, and also to, to me, it's just the, I don't think where they are in general with these kinds of code tools in terms of the precision editing that you want to do. And trust me, I, I use the whole kind of landscape of tools to really see kind of where these workflows are going. And I think still the, the gold standard for me is just being able to drag stuff around. And you can do a lot with a click that would take you a hundred words to kind of write into like really precisely nail. Like no one wants to prompt for the exact hex code or the, the shade of yellow and, and that kind of stuff. That's just easier to just quickly do and directly manipulate.

• 13:46Claire Vo?

  Yeah. I, I just think like, what are humans, where are humans going to be in the loop? And it's going to be like fine motor skills. And honestly, being able to eyeball, is that yellow happy or not? Like, it's very hard to go through a, a design loop, a prompting loop of like, oh no, make that yellow just like a little bit more cheerful. But when you pull up the color picker and you start going like this, you can really find the one that, that works for you. So, once you've gotten this into Figma, you're collaborating with your team, you're, you're updating the design. What's the next step here? Because, you know, I can imagine you could pull this into another ticket and then send it, send it to an engineer and say, please, could you make these updates?

• 14:28Claire Vo?

  But what do you think about doing once you've pulled it into Figma?

• 14:32Speaker 00

  There's definitely a few ways that we can do this. I can keep working myself. Let's say I'm working a late night because I'm really kind of into this project and I can just use MCP to bring it back to my, to my local host. I could also just ping my engineer and say, hey, do you have an instance of this running? Do you want to like, just like upload it yourself and just work on it? So from here, we've created this kind of shared common ground where different people can plug in and just grab things out versus it living on my machine, having to branch it, having to get grapple with all that technical complexity. And actually, it's a good point. Alex, do you want to try and implement some of these other changes that we've kind of put together?

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So let's say I want to implement this particular variant. What I can do is I can copy the URL of that and go right back into my Claude code session. So I have the app also loaded here locally and I can say, bring the changes from this component into my code base. And which component is it? It's the, this is for the budget allocations page. And it's going to then use the Figma MCP server in a different way. This one allows it to take stuff that's currently within the Figma document and automatically

• 15:54Speaker 02

  transform that into code, which then gets reconciled with your local code base and automatically applies those changes for you automatically. So.

• 16:03Claire Vo?

  Again, I need to have like an old lady moment, which is, I tell people, you know, when I used to have to like walk uphill both ways for my CSS, thinking about what I used to have to do to get a close to, and I was on both sides of the table. I was a designer and then I was an engineer to get like a pixel perfect version of whatever somebody had mocked up. And I mean, we didn't even have Figma that I was doing thing. I was making Photoshop PSDs for the real olds out there. And just the ability to like pull in, what's the size of this? How's it supposed to look? What's the alignment?

• 16:40Claire Vo?

  All through just typing, still to this day, blows my mind. Alex, I'm curious how this has just changed your relationship with what your job is as a software engineer. I know you said like the mechanistic pieces have gone away, but what does this do for you for like a time, like how you spend your time perspective?

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I spend quite a lot of my time just sitting here inside of my terminal now. I do so much less. I think of the like what I used to have to do where I had to have a browser window open at the same time as having my code window open. There are times where I need to check those types of, you know, product oriented flows, but there's actually quite a few changes, especially when they're kind of mechanistic in nature like this, where I don't even necessarily have to have, you know, the visual in order to get the work done. So I often have two, three, up to five baby Claude code instances running all at the same time, working on different aspects of the work that I'm tracking. So some of them might be doing things that are just reconciling the design file with the code base,

• 17:41Speaker 02

  but other ones might be working on exploratory things, answering questions that I have about the code base, writing specs and documentation that we've talked about in a little bit and kind of my workflow around grounding technical specifications inside of code bases.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  I'm just going to allow Claude to progress here. So it was able to find what those differences were between the design file and the code base. And it's actually going ahead and applying them.

• 18:07Claire Vo?

  And what's amazing to me, and I think people don't, don't articulate enough about, let's call it a multimodal AI or, you know, computer vision, all this stuff is, it doesn't have to be you dragging a PNG of the file into Claude code, it reading that through a vision model and then making some inferences about it and designing it. You're actually doing this like sort of pseudo structured data to pseudo structured data translation through the MCP, which has to have much higher accuracy, but it's translating functionally visual information, which I think is just so nifty. I love it. Has, has this changed kind of your mental model of what does, I mean, I think Figma in general has pushed forward everybody's mental model of like how you encode

• 18:53Claire Vo?

  design into data, but I'm curious, how are you all evolving your thinking when you have all these multimodal models at your?

• 19:02Claire Vo?

  At your fingertips, when you can do structured data to other structured data translations, has that inspired any ideas internally about what the future of design looks like?

• 19:11Speaker 00

  What's really interesting about like our, our role with all of this is kind of really moved upstream. And we're in this really, I find almost decadent moment in time where before we had to be so conditioned on really sharp product decision-making skill that would have happened like almost immediately and being able to like quickly reason with stuff and quickly get to really good craft, because the bulk of the time was spent building. And so the longer you ate into that, the more P zeros became P ones and P twos. And so now we're kind of actually at this point where more of the priorities can make it above the cut line. And also, we can spend a lot more

• 19:52Speaker 00

  time in the planning stage. You asked me like, does it start with, with design or with code? Actually, I start a lot of it with planning and just like really riffing and allowing myself and indulging in the possibilities. And then kind of riffing in, in something that, you know, if, if I need it to be something that can only exist in code, it'll be code. If otherwise, I will diverge in design. But I see designers much more at this kind of like, what should we be building? A stage of the conversation, which we were before, but it was like a very rushed moment there. And now we can spend a lot more time in it because we know that actually the, the building will happen a lot quicker. And so we do that. And then on the other side, we spend a lot more time in the craft because we can, because we can reach higher for ideas.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  Because before we were like, well, I don't know, hope, hopefully an engineer will get my intention. Now I could spend a lot, a lot longer in that moment.

• 20:44Claire Vo?

  I love that you called this a decadent moment because it was two years ago at config, actually, I gave a talk on the future of product management. And I said, this is the era of yes, like this idea of the cut line has to disappear. And how many planning meetings have we all been in where we look at a design and an engineer goes, oh, well, that's just going to add scope, like we got to cut scope. Or we look at a priority planning meeting and we say, oh, with that, that, that little fix that everybody hates in our app. I know that everybody hates it, but it's not a P zero priority. So it's gotta, you know, go, go next year. And I do think this idea that you can really have an abundance, a feature level abundance mindset.

• 21:26Claire Vo?

  Is, is in the craft level abundance mindset where you can put the polish and all the things that make these experience tonight are one of the benefits of working with AI right now.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  So done here, it's applied the patch and now you can actually see that the app has been updated and it looked exactly like what the Figma design looked like, but has been applied entirely within code.

• 21:51Claire Vo?

  And so the benefit we got here, just to reiterate for folks that are not watching is to get an existing app that had drifted very far from the original file in Figma. Happens to the best of us. We programmatically pulled it into Figma. We used our beautiful, fine tuned opposable thumbs and fingers to actually drag and create the perfect design that we wanted in Figma. And then that's very easily pulled in by an engineer like Alex, Claude code, whatever your code is, built the code, didn't even look. I mean, you, you did look, but like, didn't have to look at the design and now it can be deployed pixel perfect. Everybody's happy. That's how it works.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  That's how it works.

• 22:31Claire Vo?

  Okay, now we're just hitting the rubber wall and we're going the other direction. So you're going to show me how we can start with no design, go from Claude code into a design, and then I'm presuming back to Codex and this episode is just going to be a ping pong back and forth. So Alex, how would you, as a engineer, no design setup, actually start designing something in Figma?

• 22:55Speaker 02

  Oftentimes, like the codebase gets way ahead of where the actual design file is and there are states or workflows that just don't exist at all within the design file. And I want to show you a little demo of like, how you can actually take all of those states that don't exist within your design file, but exist within your codebase, bring them into a Figma design file so that your design collaborators can work directly off of those. Here I've been working on a signup flow for a new app that I've been working on and there's a few different states of the signup flow, but not all of those states exist within my design file. And so what I can do is say, send all five states. Sign up flow to Figma. Now, the agent's going to do is read my codebase,

• 23:38Speaker 02

  understand what I'm referring to when I say those five states. And for each one of those, it's going to individually import that one by one into Figma, such that the Figma document will then have all of those states laid out all side by side, so that Guy, my design partner, can work against it.

• 23:56Claire Vo?

  Yeah, again, I'm just going to go back to how it was before, and I'm having flashbacks to these design packages that I used to send over to engineering, where every single error state, every bit of copy, every this flash is yellow, this flash is red, this has orange, this is the hover state, was documented, designed, lovingly crafted, pixel by pixel. And the ability here, again, I think for a designer even to say like, can you remind me what happens when you have a correct email, but an incorrect password on this sign in flow? And like, what is our error state without having to go into the code and without having to replicate that in production is pretty powerful?

• 24:39Claire Vo?

  And then you layer on top of that, oh, cool, it's actually in a Figma component, so I can go in and edit it, it's not just a screenshot, is quite nice. And so, right here, is this in Figma?

• 24:51Speaker 02

  These are all the browser windows that it opened up, but here is now the Figma document that has all of those states laid out side by side. And you can see that each one of them was imported as part of this like, exact flow all into the same Figma file. And I can now send this link over to my design partner, so that while I'm working on my side of the codebase, they can actually get started on riffing on this, experimenting with different colors, patterns, etc., all while I'm doing my normal development work.

• 25:22Claire Vo?

  This feels like pair programming for designers and engineers together. It's such an interesting new way, you know, Guy, as you said at the beginning, like a new workflow to think about, where you're both in different expressions of the same part of the app, and you can work very quickly back and forth using the MCP as a connector here.

• 25:46Claire Vo?

  Do you find yourself doing more synchronous work or more asynchronous work because of this?

• 25:50Speaker 02

  I find that asynchronous work tends to be like my default now. However, I do find that like there's something that's really special about synchronously working through things like with your collaborators, whether it's other engineers or designers, remote oriented environments, like, you know, you, you get a lot of benefits about being able to like work, you know, around the clock, basically, regardless of, you know, where everyone's located. But there's something that's still really special about putting everyone together in one place and having that collaborative canvas experience that really brings everyone together, I think is still something that you can't quite replace, even with pull requests, even with, you know, jumping on, you know, screen share. There's something that feels different when,

• 26:32Speaker 02

  you know, folks can freestyle over here and other folks can be working on something else totally unrelated, but in the same shared space and seeing each other like kind of work in real time.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  I think with this kind of tool, it really re-enabled a lot of the sync work. We went, it's funny you're talking about the handoffs of packages. It's, I often feel it's, it's like the Planet of the Apes analogy where we've gone so far into the future or in the past, where like technology is sci-fi, but we're back in this like thing of handing over USB sticks. Here's my version. Here's version controlling things. And, you know, now with this, I can like be working on an idea with my team together. And the energy that we've rediscovered around those spikes where we're all just prototyping and throwing it all into the same place. And it doesn't feel like, oh, I'm going to work into this and tomorrow I'll show you a version and then you'll show me a version.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Like momentum begets momentum. And so having the team together riffing and yes, ending and trying this stuff out is really great. There are going to be moments where I was like, all right, I think we've, we've had a good, good jam here. Now let's go deep and that's fine. Let's go converge. But there is something to be said about even in remote environments, how jumping into Euphemal and just seeing curses flying around and trying out stuff. I haven't found a better alternative for that. And I'm hoping if anybody does, it'll be us. To be honest.

• 28:00Claire Vo?

  One, one thing that I want to call out is we've talked a lot on this podcast about engineering toil and reducing engineering toil through AI. And Alex, we might see some of that in just a little bit of how do you structure your process and reduce the, you know, as you say, the mechanistic parts of your work or the kind of tactical parts of your work. There is design toil out there. There is copying and pasting files. There is this version, final, final, V2, V3, final, final, signed off by boss, just kidding, final again. Like there, you know, there's who's rounding these corners and checking that, you know, the fonts are matching or that the capitalizations, right? There's a lot of design

• 28:40Claire Vo?

  toil that goes into building a beautiful product. And the other thing that I see is AI can just strip a lot of that work away and again, leave you focusing on the higher leverage uses of your talent and contribute contributions to your product, which I think results in a higher engaged team.

• 29:02Claire Vo?

  Great. Okay, we're going to wrap with one last use case, which is not Figma related, but is has been really powerful in your workflow, Alex, which is everybody's favorite new primitive of the AI stack, the skill. So let's see a couple of skills that you found useful to install as an engineer and why you picked them, why you built them and how you use them.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  So I may actually be someone in the minority here where I actually just write a lot of the skills myself or ask the AI to write them for me. A lot of it is based on just consistently having, I kind of think of them as just like large, like macros, like prompts that I can invoke at any like point in my workflow. One of the ones that I've been using frequently is this slash ship skill that I wrote. I use it all the time in my workflow, often in order to get something into a large repo like the Figma repo. There's a lot of work that's involved in just making sure test pass, making sure all of the like pre-flight things are in order. And also then, once it's pushed to the repository,

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Checking on CI and making sure that it correctly built and is all green so that I can actually merge it. Previously, I would have to kind of babysit these, you know, kind of processes like all the way at every single step. And it just created a lot of friction for me. So I wrote this slash ship skill that I use all the time. So inside of Figma, we have these things called dev boxes, which are hosted development environments that we do most of our work in now. Part of that dev box environment is that we automatically insert like bootstrap scripts in order to make it so that when you boot your new dev environment, that any of your customizations that you specifically have for your dev environment also get put alongside it.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  So what you're looking at right here is my internal Git repository that stores all of my personal configuration for my dev box. And I have a couple of commands here, some of which are underneath the dev box command that I'll all talk about in a little bit. But this, uh, this is how I manage the dev box itself and create new skills via it. So I have a skill for creating more skills as well as a couple of just really popular ones that I use all the time, such as addressing PR feedback and the slash ship command that I just mentioned. So what does that do? It boots up a bunch of things and runs a bunch of checks against the repository. These are what I refer to as pre-flight checks.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  They check for things inside of the commit to make sure I didn't accidentally commit something that doesn't make sense in the context of this particular like commit, as well as running lint, querying for various packages to make sure that we're correctly running the Basel build commands. We use Basel for, um, Basel for, uh, build systems. And then finally, like pushing it to the Git repository. So monitoring the CI checks after push using GitHub pull request checks in order to do that. We use BuildKite for our CI loop and that also gets checked. So once the build either succeeds or fails, the script will then check BuildKite for whether or not the logs represented anything.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  And if there are minor fixes like lint issues or otherwise. It'll automatically push another commit in order to fix that particular like more minor issue and it'll do this up to five times with a one hour timeout waiting for CI. There's also a handful of things that are, you know, as things as I went through like encouraging and not to force push just in case.

• 32:38Claire Vo?

  That's the one I was looking at.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Overrides something inside of my repository or it commits credentials or things like that. But I use this skill pretty much all the time in my dev loop as a way, once I've like hit a good state where I think that this is ready to go and should be like, you know, pushed to our repository, I do slash ship and then walk away from my laptop and it usually takes it from there.

• 33:02Claire Vo?

  So one thing I want to call out, this is giving me such inspiration, which is every engineering org that I've ever run has an internal wiki that has that page, which is this is what you do before you push a PR and you get in everybody's way in the deploy pipeline and every engineering team should go through their onboarding wiki and pull every page out, every this is what you should do into a skill and then give, give access to that to their entire team. And so I think we're really shifted from this idea of like an SOP into a skill or a doc into a skill. And I know so many folks that have this buried in GitHub, in Confluence and you can just give somebody the job for a week to take

• 33:44Claire Vo?

  all that stuff and make it a skill, push it in your repo and then let everybody benefit from a systematic way to roll out those best practices.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yeah.

• 33:54Claire Vo?

  Awesome.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  It turns like a lot of these like processes that would otherwise just be, you know, based on best intentions and whenever people remember into something that can be fully automated and brought into people's workflows by default.

• 34:07Claire Vo?

  Amazing. Okay. Well, this has been great. Just to recap what we saw, we saw Codex to Figma to Claude Code to Claude Code to Figma, to Figma. Basically just calling out, you don't have to think about your designs as a static asset anymore. You don't have to think about building components in code only or in design only. These things can interact. Together, calling out the benefits of just being able to touch the design with your cursor and collaborate live with your colleagues and then encoding some of your best practices into things like skills, encoding some of your capabilities into things like MTPs so then everybody can can access stuff. So I'm going to ask you a couple lightning round questions.

• 34:50Claire Vo?

  You both have to answer. They're clear rules, so you cannot say it depends. I'm going to start with the one that I started this episode with, with which is Guy, code first or design first? If you had to pick one?

• 35:03Speaker 00

  Design first.

• 35:04Claire Vo?

  I love it. And Alex?

• 35:06Speaker 02

  I'd probably pick code first.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  Probably breaking the mold here.

• 35:11Claire Vo?

  And this is why Figma had to make this MTP because there will never be, never be agreement here. You know, my second question for you all, I mean, Guy, I'm interested in your opinion is, are there any things around AI, not let's put software and, you know, design systems, all this stuff aside, that you're really excited about as a creative, as a designer, that you hope people are going to start using more or talking about more?

• 35:37Speaker 00

  Honestly, it's just been a, like a platform for me to just learn more about something that I was always curious about. And I hope that people like see the educational and the upskilling aspect of it and not just outsourcing any potential capability because it happens across everything. Anything you wanted to get a little bit deeper on, you can now do it without having to troll through links. Like it just, it's just there at whatever moment you need it. And I think, I've been diving deep into getting deeper into shaders, which before was just pure mathematics that I had no business playing in. And now it's like, oh, wait, I can talk about it in natural language and I can learn more about the specifics that I want to learn about.

• 36:19Claire Vo?

  Alex, what about you?

• 36:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I love going really deep. We have a massive code base at Figma. And so I love asking all of the like crazy questions that I had always like wondered about. We have an internal service, for example, that I didn't know the origin of its name. And so I asked Claude to go and figure out based on the commit history, what the origin was and it came back. Back with a really good story about like how that came to be. It got renamed multiple times that, you know, contributor has since left the company many years ago. So this was kind of lost in the ether. But now, now all of this lore, honestly, from the company is actually like embedded inside of the code base. And I can, I can find it now.

• 36:59Claire Vo?

  I'm going to bridge both of your excitement, which is I think it's such a fun thing to learn by querying open source libraries. And so the example of this recently is, you know, OpenClaw, now named OpenClaw, came out. And everybody's like so mystified. They're like, it's working overnight and it's doing all this stuff for me. And I was like, I'm just going to go into this thing and figure out how it's architected and how it actually does the thing it does. And it was such an interesting learning experience just to decompose how you would design a, an agent. And what were some of the kind of new things that it had built? And so that's another thing that I recommend, either going deep in your own code base or going deep in an open source code base to learn something.

• 37:38Claire Vo?

  Is something that was so inaccessible before, and now you can do basically on any open source library out there, which I think is, is really cool. Okay, last question, Alex, I'm gonna start with you first, because you, you know, we had a tiny bit of friction with, with Claude code. I saw you sweat a little bit. When AI is not replying how you want, it's not doing what you want. What is your prompting technique? Do you, do you like just slash clear and kill it? Like, what do you do?

• 38:08Speaker 02

  That, that can work, but I find that the more successful one is, is it's either cursing a little bit in the prompt. I, I, you know, I am somewhat ashamed to admit that that's extremely effective. But the more common one I use now is that my boss is mad at me. And it seems to work pretty well. It, it kind of sympathizes with you and it's, it's kind of cute.

• 38:34Claire Vo?

  I, you know, I sometimes say about this, about parenting, I tell my kids, I only yell at you because it works. Look, I don't want to yell at you. But sometimes it's the only thing that you guys listen to. Guy, what about, what about you? Are you also, do you also?

• 38:49Speaker 00

  I have to take the gentle parenting route. I'm terrified of the robots taking over and reading through my prompt histories. I'm still on the make no mistakes camp.

• 38:58Claire Vo?

  Oh, make no mistakes. I am very polite. I kind of go with like, no, like I sound really like sad. I'm like, no. Or I do sort of growth mindset parenting where I say, I believe you can do it. And I believe you're capable of solving this problem. Just apply yourself. Okay.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  You can do whole things.

• 39:15Claire Vo?

  Alex, Guy, this was so great. Where can we find you both? And how can we be helpful to you?

• 39:21Speaker 02

  You can find me on X. I'm on X as Kernio.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  Amazing. And you can find me on any social media platform as Guy Seiz, G U I S E I Z. And just generally, if you at Figma, chances are I'll probably be reading it.

• 39:36Claire Vo?

  Amazing. Well, it was so great to have you. I am so excited. I have gotten, I've been very inspired about how we can manage our YouTube thumbnails through code and Figma. So I'm going to go experiment with that. And I appreciate you all joining How I AI.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  Thank you for having us.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  For having us, Claire.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  Great.

• 39:53Claire Vo?

  Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed the show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.