Senior engineer, 6 years in. I can read a codebase faster than I can read a Figma file.
Every Design - Dev handoff is a different puzzle and you're the one solving it on the clock. Here's what's started bothering me more recently — it's not just a me problem anymore.
My AI agent can't read Figma either.
I've been using Claude for few months. It's fast, it's good, and it's completely blind to design intent. I paste in a component description and it hallucinates spacing. I give it a screenshot and it gets the layout roughly right but the tokens wrong. There's no file format that bridges "what the designer built" and "what the agent needs to implement it."
What I actually want when I pick up a ticket:
— A file that tells me the flex direction, gap, padding, and alignment of every layer. Not a screenshot. A structured file.
— Token names, not hex values. color/background/primary not #6750A4. My codebase uses tokens. My agent should use tokens.
— A u/theme{} block for Tailwind v4 I can drop straight into my stylesheet.
— Something my MCP-connected agent can consume directly and start building from. We're talking about vibe coding entire features now — felt why is design-to-code still a manual copy-paste exercise?
I looked around for solution, but couldn't find one robust solution that could meet my needs & that's where me and my brother built a figma plugin called FigSpecs.
Yes it took a month for us to build it, but now it saves most of my time.
But genuinely, Is this a tooling problem? A process problem? A culture problem between design and engineering?
Or have we just collectively decided this friction is acceptable?
Curious how other teams are handling this in 2026 — especially those running AI-assisted workflows. Has anything actually changed for you at handoff, or is Figma still a black box your agents can't touch?