people who aren't designers and don't understand design should not be writing about Figma being dead - they don't even understand that design is NOT outputs.
I am a developer. I recently requested to cancel my "full" Figma license (allows editing/sharing) in the organization because I no longer need it. I used to create prototypes with it and and use them to discuss designs with the team.
You are (were) only a relatively small portion of their user base. Of course they'll lose people like you, but there are many more people with different use cases that will not leave. They'll be fine, and they'll probably even innovate more because of the competition.
> Looking at Figma's S1 (which is somewhat out of date by now, but is the only reported breakdown I can find) corroborates this potential weakness. Only 33% of Figma's userbase in Q1 2025 was designers, with developers making up 30% and other non-design roles making up 37%.
But then that furthers the argument that Figma is dead-in-the-water
These are a design communication tools, in the same way FrontPage and Dreamweaver back in the day - they enable a designer to communicate intent to create solutions to UX design problems in a way that can be understood by downstream production.
Using Figma doesn't immediately make something aesthetic or useful, its just a tool. Claude Design enables the same thing, it enables someone to communicate design intent, with a much lower bar.
These AI tools like Loveable just do more of the groundwork than Figma does
Not the OP, but here are my 2 CT’s on what is design:
Design is the process to you follow to solve a given problem/need/desire balancing the user needs with the business/tech constraints. The output could be a a digital UI, a physical object or an intangible process. But often people think about design just as the aesthetics of a product.
A common pattern is the Empathize (Research, Diverge), Define (Converge), Ideate (Diverge), Prototype (Converge), Test (and then iterate).
The main benefits come from the divergent phases: empathize and ideate. But it’s far too common already that some executive has an “illumination” of how something should be and just wants to build as is, without any research or validation.
They can use Claude Design (and similar) to just build a prototype of their first idea, skipping all the design process and end with something that looks good but doesn’t solve the problem adequately or fits the actual user needs/context.
Of course, LLMs are useful tools that can be used in the right way: to build better prototypes in less time, to synthesize research insights, to explore ideas…
Design is its own thing. Fundamentally it's problem solving, but design is thinking about the user of the 'designed' thing and how will they use it, what will they do with it, what will it enable them to do, how will they learn how to use it, how can it be ergonomic to the environment it will be used in and the user.
A lot of people can conceptualise a factory making widgets or a programmer writing code, but drastically few people really see the design process: sketches on paper, wireframes in figma, design as a solution to a problem, design as story telling, or aesthetics. But those outputs are not the point.
The output of a few hours in figma is not really the images of a website made, it's more about communication or articulation of the the problem being solved and the solution that will solve it.
Which is why it doesn't really matter about the tool, design is an expression, the medium whether it's a sketch or a figma mock up or a vibe-designed UI in claude design is less critical than the thought that went into it.
Correct, design is really about understanding something and curating a solution for it. In tech, that just happens to mostly be distilled as mockups.
That being said, my team is increasingly not needing Figma itself for many features:
* The first pass is often a lovable prototype or some low-fidelity mockup. These are enough to get us all aligned on what's being built.
* Engineering takes a first pass. Gets a UI base in place.
* Designer (who can vibe code) or UI engineer comes in to put the high fidelity touches on things.
Basically, the product itself becomes the mockup.