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Comment by jjcm | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Figma.

For context, this blog was released the same day Canva made their announcement for Brush, which looks to be further along in this area: https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/canva-brush/

I'm glad Figma is pushing in this area. I do think that Figma has one of the best UI datasets out there in the world, and for the most part they've been sitting on it letting it get unused. Excited to see where they take this, but I do think they should be looking at image models in addition to LLM-based edit models (I'm biased as I left figma to start a image-mode-based UI design tool) as I find they're more capable in this area.

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Is there a way I can tell figma what to do in natural language?

Bring that layer up, move this box, etc

Theoretically that's what the Figma agent is for, but I'll be honest in that it released after I left and I haven't tried it enough to tell whether or not it's effective.

Had launched this plugin earlier this year to do exactly that: https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1589249271423490087/b...

> Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance, stop. Move in, stop. Pull out, track right, stop. Center in, pull back. Stop. Track 45 right. Stop. Center and stop. Enhance 34 to 36. Pan right and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46. Pull back. Wait a minute, go right, stop. Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. Enhance 15 to 23. Give me a hard copy right there.

https://youtu.be/hHwjceFcF2Q?is=GWE74YfHzoEDaiWL

Ed: arguably there's some interesting bits in that scene beyond foreshadowing dejected designers slumped in a recliner, sipping cheap whiskey in front of a screen, adjusting pixel perfect layout across multiple devices using only a rasping monotone voice...

https://blog.kenperlin.com/?p=16063

I love that Bladerunner scene and often show it to people when explaining how I work with AI.

At the same time I mention that the "I am not a Robot" widget on some websites is the same as a Voight-Kampff-test.

Btw, the scene has an absolutely cringeworthy German translation where Deckard says at the end "Gib mir davon eine feste Kopie" with a literal translation of "hard copy" that nobody would ever use.

Install Codex and the Figma plugin.

I haven't edited anything manually in Figma for a while now other than small tweaks.

I'm doing this via claude desktop actually. A bit weird that claude uses html for that mainly, but it works well.

Canva designers tend to overcook everything, they lack taste. Easy win for Figma in the long run. That said, the open source Artcraft suite of apps (Figcraft is one of them) have a headless command layer that maps 1:1 to the UI, you can run the entire suite headless on a VPS and use your existing AI subs..

> Artcraft suite of apps (Figcraft is one of them)

This will be pushed to feature and UI/UX parity. The community has spun up an open source Raft/Paxos collaboration server, and are working to connect it with open source cloud and local compute.

Same thing for Canva.

The community is jumping onto this motion quickly. Just look at how well SolidCraft is progressing.

Companies are not going to be able to lock you into tools anymore.

Ah, of course all the UI designs in figma belong to figma. Why would anyone think anything else?

In Figma's defense here, they gave what was almost a 1 year heads up where you could turn off ai training on your data, before they ever touched their first file. It was very generous.

it's been literally years and the best figma has to show is an announcement of an upcoming announcement

meanwhile, another commenter was right, the figma mcp is dogshit

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