Figma MCP get_design_context and get_screenshot fail with "invalid node ID" for valid nodes

Hey ​@Xiao Yang! Thanks so much for your post. I can see that you’ve done a lot of work to troubleshoot.

The message The node ID provided was invalid usually means that something changed in the file and the node ID no longer exists or has changed. Can you open your file again, select the layer you want to work with, then copy the node ID from that? This should give the MCP server a node ID for an existing layer. Let me know if you have other questions or get a different message back and we’ll figure out together what is happening.

No luck. I already reopened/refreshed the page several times. If I switch to figma-desktop, it seems to work (at least no invalid ID errors), but the call still failed with another error: “Error: An error occurred while using the tool get_design_context”. And then Claude switched to “get_screenshot” tool and this seems to work.

It just feels that it’s so hard to get Figma MCP to work correctly, dunno if engineers are actively monitoring and fixing those customer issues and improving the experience.

Yea, I can see how this is frustrating for you, ​@Xiao Yang.

Our team is acting on feedback like you’ve given and from others, so thank you again for posting. Do you have a link handy for the article where you copied the example prompt from? And just to clarify, you ran the prompt locally on your computer both times via an IDE like VS Code or Terminal/Shell? I want to follow the same steps as you and see if I can reproduce, and depending what happens go from there.

I have this problem on a near-continual basis also.

I’ve been seeing this using the Figma MCP in Cursor, and the “example prompt” the chap above refers to is given by Figma Desktop and the Figma web app when selecting particular elements, not an article.

Working around with screenshots or having Cursor pull the entire context and searching it causes the rate limit to be reached more quickly, which is somewhat unfair when we’re paying for this service. I’ve tried re-authenticating Cursor, refreshing the webapp, restarting Figma Desktop and such too, with no success.
 

Looks like Figma sees the request for the node was hit, but the returned message looks as follows (just one example of many):

The node ID provided was invalid. Please ensure the node ID was extracted correctly from the URL.For example, if given the URL https://figma.com/design/:fileKey/:fileName?node-id=1-2, the extracted nodeId would be `1:2`.If the node ID was extracted correctly, please ask the user to confirm the node is still in the file.Figma Debug UUID: adb500f5-8261-4bfb-9656-8d80ba560320

Hey ​@Grant Kelly 👋 This is good info. I appreciate the clarification and the screenshot. 

I want to make sure I reproduce your path before moving to support. Is this the simplest version of what you're doing?

1. New design file, add a frame
2. Select the frame → open Dev Mode → MCP panel
3. Click Copy example prompt
4. Paste into Cursor (MCP already set up + authed) and run

And to confirm: it fails on get_design_context first, and the node-id in the copied prompt URL is in dash form (node-id=1-2)?

Thanks! — Jaycee

Hey Jaycee,

No worries, thank you for the response, and apologies for the frustration. The request URLs are formatted correctly, as far as I can tell.

The document I’m working with is reasonably complex, with multiple sections, frames within them, and hierarchies of instance layers. The get_metadata, get_screenshot and get_design_contexts calls at the frame level generally do work. 

However, we’re mapping these through to our own web component library/design system, and often they don’t map cleanly and our frames can be quite similar, and so I’d like to be able to fetch the information for a specific component at a lower level of the layer hierarchy to carry out targeted work on that specific element - in this instance, jobList.

Here’s an example I tried this morning:
 

I also see that the direct link above the example prompt stops working from the first “Content” layer above, and gives a different link.

Example:
 

Here, the example prompt links to the “Dashboard” layer:

https://www.figma.com/design/x/x?node-id=4393-257150&m=dev

The link directly to the element (above the example prompt) gives a different URL, for which all calls fail:

https://www.figma.com/design/x/x?node-id=5178-9458&m=dev
 
However, at the lower level shown in the first screenshot, pageHeader containing jobList, for example, both the example prompt and the direct link point to the same place, where all three MCP calls fail.
 

Both links now return the same:

https://www.figma.com/design/x/x?node-id=5178-9526&m=dev

@https://www.figma.com/design/x/x?node-id=5178-9526&m=dev

Am I missing something, and these calls are only supposed to work at the frame level? Is it a problem in our document structure? There have been no changes to this file section for two weeks.

What can work is specifying the name of the component layer within the frame, but this means Cursor needs to make multiple other calls, and then it’s possible to hit the rate limit and have MCP calls never return.

For example, I just tried to reproduce the above again, and now get_design_context has been running for a few minutes for the frame that it previously worked for and won’t return.

Appreciate the help, hope I’m not only adding confusion.

I removed the paths from the document links, but if you need/want these, please let me know.

Thanks,
Grant

Hey hey ​@Grant Kelly No worries at all. You have been super helpful. I appreciate you! I feel like we should get this on to support.

To confirm, you have a link to a file, or copy of a file, that we can share in a support ticket that showcases the issue? This along with a screen recording, will be the best things to include at the start. I can get the ticket opened and add the ID back here. Thanks for confirming! — Jaycee