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Thoughts and Feelings around Claude Design
@samhenrigoldarticlethreadx
TL;DR. Figma's proprietary primitives locked it out of AI training data, so the source of truth is migrating back to code — and Claude Design is built for that world.
Takeaways
- LLMs trained on code, not Figma's undocumented format — making Figma "accidentally excluded" from the agentic era.
- Figma's own design system file is so deeply nested (variable aliased to variable, mode overrides, library swaps on nested instances) it makes debugging a color feel insane.
- Tooling forks two ways: Claude Design embraces "truth to materials" (HTML/JS as canonical); the other path is pure code-free exploration. Figma Make is stuck in the middle, still pretending the design file is canonical.
- "Why are we painting watercolors of the pot instead of just throwing the clay?"