Sam Henri Gold spent some time with Claude Design this week and came away with a prediction: the "source of truth" for design is heading back to code, and Figma's decade of building proprietary primitives is about to look like a costly detour. The argument is straightforward. LLMs learned from code, not from Figma's components, styles, variables, and props. As agents get better and code gets easier for designers to write, working in HTML and JS directly will make more sense than fussing with a "lossy approximation" of the final product. Gold puts it plainly: "If we want to make pottery, why are we painting watercolors of the pot instead of just throwing the clay?"
The numbers tell part of the story. Figma's own design system file contains 946 color variables organized into nested groups, with components that have 12 or more variants and props like "DS Library Swap" and "QA Plugin." Debugging a color means tracing through aliases, modes, overrides, library swaps, and nested components until you're either reaching for code or "considering moving to the countryside and becoming a sheep farmer," as Gold puts it. Gold's team at work has been manually back-porting design changes made in code back into Figma. It is not fun.
Gold thinks design tooling splits into two directions from here. One is code-first tools like Claude Design, which uses HTML and JS all the way down and integrates with Claude Code. Gold calls this a "truth to materials" approach, borrowing from the Arts and Crafts movement: be honest about what you're making and how you're making it. The other direction is pure exploration environments with no expectation of code at all, somewhere to sketch freely without being constrained by systems. Figma Make, by contrast, still reads from Figma's proprietary styles and component libraries. It's for people who can't leave the system.
HN commenters pushed back. One pointed out that Claude Design quickly hit usage limits when working with existing design systems, suggesting it's not production-ready yet. Another argued that the perceived simplicity of code is an illusion: complexity comes with the territory when you have multiple modes and products, regardless of medium. And code is less malleable for creative exploration than visual tools. Fair points. But the core tension is real. The feedback loop between design and implementation has been a source of friction forever, and Claude Design's integration with Claude Code at least attempts to collapse that loop into a single conversation. Whether that's enough to dethrone Figma is another question entirely.