Modern Figma design libraries are one of the best things to happen to product teams in the last 20 years.

Reusable components. Shared styles. Auto layout. Variants. Design tokens. So many useful plugins! Interactive prototypes. Dev mode handoff. Versioned libraries. A single source of truth keeping designers, engineers, and PMs speaking the same language.

It's fucking bliss when you use it right. And best of all, anyone on the team can build with the legos the designers gave us!

Teams finally started treating the design system like infrastructure instead of decoration.

Then Figma Make showed up.

It generates pages that ignore your components, skip your tokens, and treat every screen like a fresh snowflake. Looks fine in the mockup. Lands like a brick on the dev team. Now every page is bespoke and every handoff is a rebuild. Fucking sucks.

We had it all figured out, then we fucked it up.

AI was supposed to accelerate momentum. But it just so completely lacks maturity. AI Tools are dragging teams back to 2010, when every page was a Photoshop file (with way too many layers and shitty names for them) and none of the designers can agree on what radius to assign to their buttons.

Good design systems are a discipline. If your AI tool doesn't respect the library, it's not a designer. It's an intern with a Molotov cocktail waiting to destroy your productivity.

I haven't used Claude Design yet, I'll try it, but I LOVE Figma, and I hate Figma Make. I don't have high hopes for Claude here.