Figma's MCP Update Reflects a Larger Industry Shift | Hacker News Reader

Figma's MCP Update Reflects a Larger Industry Shift

metedata.substack.com

38 pointsyoung_mete48 comments

In a recent Claude Code session I tried using the Google Docs, Drive, and Sheets MCP and was honestly surprised at how limited it felt. It was hard to get anything meaningful done because it just did not expose enough capability to be useful in practice. In hindsight, that frustration was probably a good thing. I ended up skipping MCP entirely and using the LaTeX API plus its plugin ecosystem, and the result was far beyond anything I could have realistically produced through Docs anyway.

I have seen a similar pattern with Canva’s MCP. I pay for Pro, but the one feature that would actually make MCP useful, Auto Fill, is gated behind an enterprise plan. So the surface is there, but the real power is locked away.

I get that this is still the wild west for MCP, and I agree with the OP’s general take. But right now there is a big gap between "integration exists" and "integration is actually useful." Personally, I am more excited about where something like WebMCP could go, where the default assumption is full capability rather than a restricted subset.

I agree. I also tried Figma’s MCP tools (wrote about it here - https://metedata.substack.com/p/metedata-digest-003-where-do...) and found it very underwhelming.

The result is less that I want to go to Figma directly and more that I just want to skip it entirely. So, assuming the power of these aggregator agents keeps growing, the onus is on these tools to create useful integrations or get subsumed by a model capability or another tool with a better integration. It sounds like your experience is similar - you bypassed the tools with bad integrations instead of going to them directly.

You have to be very very careful with this stuff. These SaaS companies have tons of paying customers giving them thousands of dollars a month. If customers mess up with an officially supported MCP and delete their assets or break implementations or DDOS their own site it’d be nightmare for sales / support.

It makes sense they very slowly transitioned from read-only to limited write. You have to carefully beta test. Both figuring out the guardrails and finding usecases where it actually works well. The only way to do that (properly) is a slow drip release cycle.

I'm sure that's part of it but I think it's a very small part of the story. They've been pushing hard on internal AI creation tools for a while, and those clearly didn't take hold.

IMHO MCP is the AppleScript/Shortcuts part of the internet. Never really took on Apple platforms (except for some hardcore fans); not sure it will ever actually take on the internet…

I had same experience with Databricks. The built-in MCP offering is very limited (querying, etc.) but there are community-built projects that offer the full scope (creating ETL jobs, etc.). I would prefer not to have to go through the hassle of getting some random project on GitHub added as an artifact and deal with the updates.

All SaaS-built MCP servers should cover the entirety their existing API functionality. I know it sounds like a lot but I really don't think it is an unreasonable expectation.

I attended a design conference last week where Figma has been basically delegated as a design library tool, and that was it. They'd use it as a source of truth for components such as buttons, colors, typography, etc, but the actual design work that was being done was done through Claude Code. Multiple designers who had this stack said that they preferred it as their designs were now closer to what the end user would experience (i.e. code). One person actually eschewed Figma completely and used Storybook as the source of UI truth. I think that Figmas moat is a lot smaller than people think and that within a year or 2 there's going to be some very solid competitors out there.

The stock is tanking. Their moat is small to non-existent.

Kind of crazy considering how while teams (even dev) were forced into using it be the designers.

I haven’t even seen it mentioned at work recently.

It is truly staggering to see a tool used by (almost) every large tech company in the world so quickly lose ground. I don't think they're done done, but their position in the value chain has shifted drastically.

Yep, my experience as well coming from Big Tech although they'll be buoyed by intertia for some time. And yes, source of truth just makes more sense in code, so I don't think there's much of a moat there either. I think there's still value in this collaboration layer, but collaboration will change substantially as well and take a different shape. The world where the design team spends weeks / months designing, refining, and doing crits on the same file just doesn't make sense now - it was driven by the high costs of implementation so the decisions had to be made upfront. That's going to change.

Yep that’s my experience too.

Why bother with a drawing tool when you can literally mockup with real components and react etc.

They’ll always be visually consistent if you set things up that way. And the agents can help you with it.

>Why bother with a drawing tool when you can literally mockup with real components and react etc.

I think that there's still value for the canvas (I'm a UX designer). I like seeing changes in the vector tool first, and then pushing out any changes to a JSON file where it can be used by the AI tool. That being said, this is just my preferred way of working, so somebody else may not even want to use Figma.

I totally get that. But soon will it be your primary mode of output vs yet another way to try ideas? Like how we sketch on paper to get creative juices flowing.

There's already Paper Design and Subframe which handle design to code better because they're built for it. Figma is slow and not building what they need to build to keep up. Perhaps they'll make an Adobe and acquire one of these.

Paper Design etc all have the same fundamental problem as Figma - they’re designed for a process that won’t exist as we know it within a few years (and arguably half way there already). All of these canvas-based design tools assume that people want / need to directly manipulate things on a canvas fist before building vs going straight to building it (and by building I also mean you can ask Claude to build you 10 prototypes for different directions so exploration is not dead, just starts elsewhere).

Paper is canvas-based but code-first. Subframe is not canvas based and is fully code based. And yes, designers will always need to be able to directly manipulate the canvas for some things.

SaaS products are headed to where the UI isn't the undifferentiated factor. People have been so busy building a UI that works for everyone so it works for no one. The real value is the data and the workflow they provide. Make the data accessible to agents (MCP, OpenClaw skills, etc0.

People who do that will do well.

Long-term yes. Assuming we'll reach a world where an agent is your primary interface, has access to all you need, and will spin up dynamic UIs for you when needed.

I'd take a cash bet there is soon going to be an enterprise OpenClaw product and every major business is going to demand that their SaaS partners support it.

Completely agree. Every SaaS tool will come with an MCP or an API to leverage composability. We can unlock useful functionalities from Claude Code and other aggregators (terminology from the post) to be able to compose different MCP's from different SaaS. One can imagine composing the results from a google search and using it in for a Figma design attempt, as a simple example.

This is an obvious direction that the industry is heading to. But what are the implications of this? I think the differentiating factor of having a good UI will reduce - productivity apps and SaaS will no longer have their aesthetic UI as a moat. I'm not sure whether this will tank their stocks or increase the valuation but what I'm sure of is that the productivity and usage will increase.

The combinatorial utility of different MCPs / APIs inside an agent is an interesting angle. Figma can technically plug into the same MCPs and use all the same models, but if the software design process doesn’t start in Figma anymore, it does not matter. The value will accrue to the point of integration (the agent).

Re: the value of good UI/UX

I think short-term, the value of good interfaces will actually increase - if anyone can easily build out the same product in 10 different ways, the best designed one that people actually want to use will likely be the choice. But that’s holding constant lots of things like distribution, type of SaaS, its place in the transaction stack, etc. So either guess would make a lot of assumptions.

It also appears (so far at least) that these models really struggle with front-end design. Something like /frontend-design skill is good but only gets you so far. It still requires a ton of steering to get it to a sensical place. So for now, whoever can steer it is still valuable. But I’m sure more and more of that will get codified and internalized by the model and the harness. So the design steering will become more and more abstract.

Long-term, we’re likely moving towards dynamically generated interfaces. Claude is already doing it with diagrams and charts in the chat. This opens up so many fascinating questions. What happens when UI doesn’t have to be one-size-fits-all, where each person may get their GUI generated with their preferences and context in mind? What happens to the design process when your UI doesn’t have to scale to a ton of user types and use cases? Will we even be designing UIs or something else entirely? Will Jakob’s Law still apply or will our individual GUIs diverge so much that I won’t be able to navigate your smartphone if I pick it up?

>Long-term, we’re likely moving towards dynamically generated interfaces.

Right on point. Prediction: we will have a new protocol like HTML but for LLMs so that SaaS can communicate on this language.

Something like https://a2a-protocol.org/ ?

no, this: https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-a2ui-an-open-p...

Yes ^ thanks for the link

System design and interface design are the remaining hard parts of an application. To build the best interfaces you need to also understand system design. Smart teams that get these right will stand apart from the vibers.

Previously, a lot of SaaS’s valuation was dependent on it being a ‘platform’ where their customers ‘do almost everything only on their platform’, keeping them within that SaaS’s ecosystem.

By making the tools compostable, the valuation from this ‘keeping within’ angle will slowly disappear, but maybe it can be replaced by increase usage as a source of valuation.

I think that also explains why a bunch of companies are now all racing to build the same thing - the everything-in-one-place universal context store with their own agents on top of it. Linear, Notion, Salesforce, etc. Because the alternative is a much worse business to be in.

I noticed that too, but I wonder if what they are offering is just a proprietary formatting for context store, or is there something more operationally complex than that.

Whoever is able to act as the central store for all your context and be the integration point for all your agents running on top (including your proprietary ones) will have leverage in the ecosystem. Everyone else will be the supplier. The more context you have from different places (code, tickets, PRDs, markdown files, CRM, etc) and the deeper your agents plug into all of this, the harder it'll be to switch away to something else painlessly.

I mean, this was the web 2.0 dream. And then everyone realized that giving people an easy way out of your platform wasn't good for business. And all of the APIs dried up. Tremendously disappointing.

We'll see if this time, things end differently.

The potential productivity increase with composable MCP's is too high for walled gardens to still sustain

Several points -

First, mcp, like cli, like api, is a kind of (user facing) interface, just not graphical. It still needs to be designed, just by different people with differing skills.

Second, textual interface can only go so far in terms of information ingestion. Trying to describe a complex relationship between entities can be extremely difficult with text. However, a good graphical interface will make complex information easier to digest.

So in my opinion, the moat will emphasize organization which knows how to plan good a custom experience, whether graphical or textual, and less where tables and forms are the main business

100%. Have been saying for a long time that AI needs data, context and specific capabilities.

Figma offered the capabilities but not the data or context.

Everyone's building "the everything app". The end game is likely an entire OS shell that is AI-first.

Actually... their MCP reflects more than just supporting AI. It demonstrates the future of closed, walled garden MCPs.

While Figma advertises that their official MCP "can now write directly to your Figma files", in reality it is restricted to create and read (as in CRUD), but not update nor delete. Currently, there is only one option to edit/update using the Figma MCP and it requires going through a third-party service with its own subscription and tiny token allocations.

Meanwhile, several developers have figured out how to use Figma's plug-in system to work-around these limitations, for a more robust CRUD MCP solution.

I don’t think so. Your product / tool has to be extremely specialized and deeply necessary to pull of a walled garden MCP. The more likely alternatives are that someone else comes along with a better (open) integration, the model internalizes your tool’s capabilities, or the AI labs themselves build 1st party competitors.

Figma has demonstrated that kind of aggressive lock-in many times. For example, they couldn't get enough companies to subscribe to FigJam and Slides, so they simply increased Figma's subscription price by that amount, and then said those apps are included for free.

BTW: that's usually illegal, but with the current administration, it's a Tuesday.

You need leverage to do that (I.e we don’t have alternatives), which they’re losing quickly.

Inter-Op is back! (Limited to AI overlord access only, please don't make our business redundant)

Could the limited MCP support be due to security concerns?

I've seen a number of stories about LLMs going rogue and messing things up (dropping databases, making unwanted changes, etc). Also, apparently there are security concerns with the MCP protocol itself.

MCP is a stopgap measure. What we need is for files and applications to exist within the same environment. That ultimately means a new OS. So yes, for the first time in decades, there will be new OSes competing.

New operating systems or could it make micro kernels viable?

I think the blocker is that engineers do not want to take responsibility for the design, and the designer doesn't feel confortable with claude code. But this is a gap that will close soon.

I think that's an organizational muscle memory. Not a thing at startups anymore and to your point will dissipate in bigger companies quickly.

It's so excellent that the walls are coming tumbling down.

Walls and moats are just not viable in the way it used to be: the market tightly demands agency, and it's not something your company can provide solo. The point is that users want to intermix their experiences.

Figma's been super super punished by the market (down from $80 ish ipo in August to $20-$30 since Jan). The faith that AI is somehow is going to build such a mass adopted product that works so relatively well; seems weird. Figma really made strong up front choices to make such strong bones for their work: it feels rare to see companies go for such deliberately chosen high technology web, and it feels like these choices (wasm, multiplayer, etc) have been so core to building such a great business.

Definitely don’t believe AI is going to “one-shot” Figma. But Figma was built for a world where product design is a stand-alone step in a series of discrete steps with hand-offs between them. It was a place where design started and ended, for a while at least. If people don’t see it as a starting point anymore, it becomes a very different business & product.

Agree. AI won’t „one-shot“ Figma. The whole part of the process where you need figma will disappear.

Well put.

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