Thread

Figma restricts MCP access to whitelisted clients, excluding Pi

187 points · 106 comments · thdr

miguel-muniz · 1790869419 · focus · HN ↗
For context: Figma has two MCPs. The local "dev" MCP that works through the Desktop app, and the remote MCP that requires a connection to Figma. Companies need to be whitelisted to use the remote MCP, which is the only one that allows agents edit access to Figma documents.
I only found out about Figma's limitation when I was trying to add the remote MCP server to GitHub Copilot Desktop and kept running into errors. Turns out they whitelisted GitHub Copilot CLI but not the Desktop app and had put a pause on enabling any more vendors. Eventually someone (not sure which side) got it working.
Kind of strange to limit edit access only to the Remote MCP when their competitors like Pen[1] and Paper[2] allow any local agent to edit.
[1] <a href="https://www.pen.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pen.dev/
[2] <a href="https://paper.design/" rel="nofollow">https://paper.design/
1. miguel-muniz · 1790872749 · focus · HN ↗
  To speak more broadly, Figma is in a really tough spot right now. I see more and more designers in my circle saying they are skipping design tools entirely to prototype in code or ship directly in their product's code base. Honestly I find myself doing the same.
  Figma's main value used to be in providing designers a canvas to iterate and explore ideas since the majority of designers did not code, but AI has completely changed that.
  I fear Figma's reluctance to integrate with all the popular AI tools might actually accelerate their decline. AI provides so much value, that I would rather base my software purchasing decisions around what is compatible with my AI of choice rather than pick an AI that is compatible with Figma.
  1. oh_no · 1790874237 · focus · HN ↗
    yeah it's 100% the wrong move for them to make, I think there is probably a lot of value in AI driving Figma, and if I can't do that, Figma will fall out of the ecosystem.
    miguel-muniz · 1790875401 · focus · HN ↗
    They have their own agent built into Figma, which of course uses credits which you must pay Figma for.
  2. locallost · 1790874447 · focus · HN ↗
    I think it's really interesting how these areas are merging, and I'm not sure who goes. Designers or "coders". Probably both depending on the context. The expectations though from every field seems to be that they'll be the last man standing. My best guess is, management has the worst cards.
    I am 100% in agreement that companies that try to shut down access to agents will be replaced. It's just the future for a lot of work and workflows. In a way it's an opportunity for someone.
    TeMPOraL · 1790875249 · focus · HN ↗
    > I think it's really interesting how these areas are merging, and I'm not sure who goes. Designers or "coders".
    Neither of them, not yet. What will go away is the products currently used by these groups.
    It's happening in software development, too. In the past 3 months, I used an IDE for maybe few hours total. 99% of my technical work is now easier and better done through agentic chat interface.
    miguel-muniz · 1790876438 · focus · HN ↗
    I struggled with this myself, the reality is that AI can automate the work of everyone in the traditional product team trio (pm, design, dev).
    The way I have made peace with it in my mind is at the end of the day, I am the expert in UI/UX. There are many product teams I've joined that have operated without a designer and you can tell (bless their souls). Component libraries, templates, articles, video courses, and etc. have all existed throughout this time so it's not like they've been operating completely blind to design and UX. I don't think AI would be different. Sure it may raise the floor a little, but in the end someone needs to evaluate the output and hold responsibility for the UI/UX.
    It was an uncomfortable idea to come to terms with though, I like many other designers spent a decade getting good at Figma. Figma and design almost felt intertwined for a moment, but designers have a long history of having their craft disrupted by new technology. Decades ago designers were cutting and pasting paper, then moved to digital publishing; and in product design we've gone through software such as Photoshop, Fireworks, Sketch, and Figma, just to name a few. Design has survived all this and will continue to survive in the future.
    I think the same applies to the other disciplines. Sure I could have AI spin up a backend, but I don't really have the expertise to understand whether what it is doing is good or full of security vulnerabilities.
    I don't know in the future if we will create a new path for product builders, individuals who are knowledgeable in all aspects of product management, software engineering, and product design. I also don't know if teams will have as much need for individuals with the efficiency gains from AI.
  3. varispeed · 1790876334 · focus · HN ↗
    The poor value proposition of Figma is that nobody even bothers to vibe code a competitor. It's useless.
    timcobb · 1790882975 · focus · HN ↗
    You just described Claude Design?
  4. dataviz1000 · 1790877444 · focus · HN ↗
    Everyone is in a really tough spot.
    The AI companies focused most their effort on writing software and continue to do so. Software, SaaS, and software engineers are the first to be disrupted.
    > but AI has completely changed that.
    Exactly. However, it is because AI is focused on solving writing software first which is the step to solving everything else.
    bmitc · 1790911948 · focus · HN ↗
    From what I can see, it's everyone else who is in trouble. Software engineers have years of skills of corralling complexity, navigating requirements, etc., and all of these things matter more and more in the age of LLM tooling. It seems to me that software engineers will be taking others' roles, because if you know how to wrangle LLMs, which is something software engineers do know how to do, then you can all of the sudden take over other domains.
    rpdillon · 1790940107 · focus · HN ↗
    This is closer to the reality I'm seeing. Software engineers are well positioned to understand and deploy LLMs to solve problems, even in adjacent domains. One of the engineers I work with gave a short presentation yesterday. It was quite simple. He'd just taken a series of screenshots from our product and put it into a Claude desktop session with some pretty significant prompt explaining how the screenshots related to a particular user flow and what the desired changes we were thinking about making were.
    Took about 45 minutes and produced a working mock that we could then play with and see if the UX felt right. It was surprisingly high fidelity, and while the code was entirely throw away, it helped a room full of people make decisions about how we wanted the tool to feel within the first couple of hours of thinking about the project. Designers bring a wealth of UX thinking to that discussion, but the process of creating the mock was done entirely by engineering.
    bmitc · 1790959606 · focus · HN ↗
    I think UX designers are also well-positioned, especially those that are more technical and can use LLMs.
    Basically anyone who understands systems will be fine and more and more important, even.
  5. sergiotapia · 1790883534 · focus · HN ↗
    I've had good success in my org with Paper. Non-technical people can just jam and explore ideas without worrying about Figma or whatever tools UI/UX tools. Vibes all the way down.
    evanjrowley · 1790883718 · focus · HN ↗
    Can you link us to Paper? I doubt I will find it by searching online for "Paper design tool"
    sergiotapia · 1790883834 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://paper.design/" rel="nofollow">https://paper.design/
  6. jeffybefffy519 · 1790887203 · focus · HN ↗
    I always thought it was weird that Figma didnt close the gap of taking a design and implementing it in code, that seems like what AI could enable too...
    14u2c · 1790888155 · focus · HN ↗
    They tried. Figma Make was at least useful for the free tokens.
    miguel-muniz · 1790889095 · focus · HN ↗
    Figma exists as an abstraction of code, which has always made it kind of difficult for them to implement code. For example, they have css snippets in dev mode when you have a frame selected, but those aren't really that useful since it doesn't know anything about your existing code base or frameworks.
    Code connect was supposed to bridge this gap, allowing users to define how Figma components should generate relevant code snippets, but it only worked with React and they had some janky string based templating language for everything else. And of course, it meant someone would have to go through the effort of creating mappings for every component in your system. It's like writing a component twice, the same pitfall we were trying to avoid in the first place.
    Now people will just ask their AI to pull the frames from Figma through the remote MCP and have the AI implement it that way. But to that end, why not just have designers make a branch in the codebase and have them implement the UI? This is the question many of us have been asking ourselves lately.
    They continue to iterate though. They've introduced Code Layers so real codebases can render on the canvas, but in infamous Figma fashion it only works with a limited set of React codebases. Figma Make (their Lovable, Bolt.new, Claude Design like product) can also pull in existing codebases, but again it is very limited in the types of code bases it can work on.
    These limitations are all so exhuasting. It's just so much easier to use Claude Code or Codex to do what I need. At this point Figma is more of a secondary tool for when I need to document a prototype or want a canvas for exploration purposes.
    jeffybefffy519 · 1790892424 · focus · HN ↗
    The smartest thing they could have done is a platform play which is to try make their own React that was Figma native. A hard thing to do, but certainly doable if you consider where React is now...

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