AI agents are great at producing designs quickly and terrible at remembering what your brand actually looks like. Figma’s answer, announced at its first Config event in India, is surprisingly low-tech: write the rules down in a Markdown document and make every agent read it first.
The short version
- Figma Specs is a new Markdown editor where teams define their design language for people and agents
- Code layers moved from private beta (announced in June) to open beta
- Figma’s MCP now supports over 20 new tools, including Open Code, Dia, Grok Bot and Sarvam
- The open source CMS Payload is now integrated with Figma Make
What Figma Specs actually does
Specs is a document type inside Figma. It can live as a standalone file or sit next to your designs on the canvas. You write in plain Markdown, but you can also reference other Figma elements and embed FigJam diagrams, code layers and designs directly in the text.
The real value is context. Teams can attach design libraries, code libraries and guidelines to a Spec, which gives both humans and agents one central place to check the rules. Figma says its own agents and third-party agents can refer to that system so output stays closer to a brand’s design rules.
Why this matters
AI output is non-deterministic, meaning the same prompt can give different results. A written spec does not remove that, but it narrows the range of acceptable answers. That is the whole pitch: steer the agent instead of fixing its work afterward.
Code layers reach open beta
Code layers let designers add real code to a design on the canvas, which makes prototypes interactive instead of static. Figma first showed the feature in private beta in June, and this week it opened to more users. You can also ask the agent to turn a design into code or to change part of the code while you iterate on a prototype.
This lands a few days after Figma widened access to its agent on canvas. Put together, the picture is a single workspace where you describe, design, tweak and prototype without leaving the file.
The number behind the strategy
Figma’s chief design officer, Loredana Crisan, gave the clearest explanation of why the company is pushing this way. “There are 17-times more lines of code being produced today than in the past,” she told TechCrunch. “But when you’re looking at releases, only 1.3-times more releases.” Her read: much of that code is not built to ship, it is built to discover what the product should be.
The gap is the argument for putting design, specs and code in one place. If most code is exploratory, the bottleneck is deciding what to build, and that is where Figma wants to sit.
A wider MCP, plus a CMS
Figma also expanded its MCP support to more than 20 new tools. The named ones are Open Code, Dia, Grok Bot and the Indian AI startup Sarvam. MCP is the protocol that lets outside agents plug into an app, and it is quickly becoming the default way tools talk to each other, a trend visible when Google opened its smart home to outside AI agents.
On the content side, Figma is integrating Payload, the open source headless CMS it acquired last year, into Figma Make. The idea is to generate dynamic websites and manage their content in the same flow. Figma says Payload downloads rose sixfold over the past 12 months.
| Feature | Status | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Figma Specs | Newly announced | Markdown design rules for people and agents |
| Code layers | Open beta | Adds code to canvas designs for interactive prototypes |
| Agent on canvas | Wider availability | Lets an agent work directly in the design file |
| MCP expansion | 20+ new tools | Connects outside agents such as Open Code, Dia and Sarvam |
| Payload in Figma Make | Integrated | Generate sites and manage content together |
Why India, and why now
The announcements were made at Figma’s first Config event in India, and the choice is deliberate. India is the company’s largest market by users outside the United States, and Figma says it works with 40% of the top 100 companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange. It opened its first Indian office late last year, covering sales, partnerships, go-to-market and product support.
Where this fits in the agent boom
Figma is not alone in realizing that agents need guardrails. Developer tools are heading the same way, such as when Cursor built a coordinator that never writes code and only directs other agents. The trust question sits underneath all of it, which is why Nadella argues you should trust the model the least. And the audience for these tools is widening, as Google Play now lets people run private, vibe-coded apps on their own phones.
What to watch next
- Adoption of Specs. A rules file only helps if teams keep it current, and stale specs could be worse than none
- How closely agents obey. Third-party agents choose how much weight to give the document, and Figma cannot force it
- Code layers out of beta. The open beta will show whether designers actually want code in their files
The takeaway is simple. As agents do more of the making, the scarce skill becomes writing down what good looks like. Figma is betting that a plain text document is the best place to do it.
Sources and further reading
- TechCrunch: Figma announces new features to define how agents work on its platform
- TechCrunch: Figma adds code layers support for animations, more AI features
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