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Codex is unable to write to Figma

  • April 1, 2026
  • 9 replies
  • 744 views

Jon De Heus

I’ve been playing around with Codex & today I installed the Figma plugin in order to try out some of the new features & skills such as creating a file, creating a design system, etc. Everything went well, I was able to log into my company Figma account and verify that all the skills were present. However, when I attempted to use some of these skills, I was told that I only had read only access.

After this, I attempted to troubleshoot by quitting out of both Figma and Codex, uninstalling & reinstalling the plugin, turning on dev mode & enabling the local MCP server inside of Figma (I was using the remote server before), but nothing seems to work. Based on what I see in the instructions, it should theoretically work out of the box, so to speak.

Has anybody encountered this problem before, and if so, how did you fix it? Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, or if there’s a flag that needs to be enabled on the administrative side that will let me use these skills? If there isn’t anything that needs to be done from the admin side, has anybody been able to fix this from the user side, or is this a Figma issue?

Any clarification from the community would be quite helpful, thanks!

9 replies

Lev Woonder
  • New Member
  • April 2, 2026

Hi! I'm having the same problem. It looks like Figma removed the `generate_figma_design` function due to some issues and didn't announce it officially anywhere.


Lev Woonder
  • New Member
  • April 2, 2026

I found the problem. I had a local MCP server. Just type “codex mcp add figma --url https://mcp.figma.com/mcp” in Codex. It will start working after you restart.


Jon De Heus
  • Author
  • New Member
  • April 2, 2026

I’ll be honest, I was totally unprepared for this to work, but it did! Thanks so much!

For anybody who’s reading this later on, I use Codex both in the terminal and the app. When I ran the above command, I did it in the terminal, but now it seems to work both in the terminal and the app. I’m not sure why, but it works now. You’ll know it works if an authentication modal pops up talking about how you need to authenticate, and when you press the confirmation button it takes you to a page that talks about authenticating for the remote server.


Tsiko
  • New Member
  • April 3, 2026

I found the problem. I had a local MCP server. Just type “codex mcp add figma --url https://mcp.figma.com/mcp” in Codex. It will start working after you restart.

It didn't work for me. The Codex told me that this needs to be done in powershell or something, but it also doesn't work in it and says that this command is generally not working. I'm using CodexApp, could you guide me please?


adamsmasher
Figmate
  • Figmate
  • April 7, 2026

Hi ​@Tsiko, Thanks for your reply! 

I see you’re using the Codex desktop app, but are you using the local Figma MCP server with the Figma Desktop app or the remote MCP server? The solution you quoted will work with the remote server. It also requires having set up Codex CLI - without having set up the command line version of Codex your computer won’t recognize the codex command. You can find instructions on installing that here: https://developers.openai.com/codex/cli

Let me know if you still have trouble after installing Codex CLI and running the command again.


Dawn Biju
  • New Member
  • April 8, 2026

I was facing the same issue and i tried everything, I realized it was an easy fix, Just Check Allow overwriting…. hope this fixes it  

 


ALAA TITA
  • New Member
  • April 18, 2026

@Dawn Biju  is this option from figma if yes where can found it , or its in Codex 


BenH
  • New Member
  • April 20, 2026

I found the problem. I had a local MCP server. Just type “codex mcp add figma --url https://mcp.figma.com/mcp” in Codex. It will start working after you restart.

I can’t tell you how speechless I was to find out this was the solution. I spent hours trying to get Codex to work with Figma, uninstall, reinstall, wipe, re-enable, etc. and nothing worked. With this one command, everything works now. Thank you!!


Huy Hoang Nguyen

I tried the following after hours of frustration with Figma, and it worked:

  • I went into Dev Mode in the Figma Desktop app and disabled Figma’s default MCP.
  • I opened Codex, turned on its Terminal (Ctrl + J), and ran:
    "codex mcp add figma --url https://mcp.figma.com/mcp"
    — this seemed to re-enable connection permissions with Figma (not 100% sure why, but it worked).
  • I created a new project in Codex (didn’t use an old one), then asked it via chat to create text inside a frame (I pasted the frame link). It reported success.