Hey folks,
This started as one of those late curiosity driven experiments and kind of snowballed, so I figured I’d share it here and see what people think.
I’ve been building and maintaining design systems for a long time, and at some point I noticed something that felt off. Not the complexity. The repetition. Every new product or team, I’d find myself rebuilding the same foundations again. Tokens, components, variants, states, docs scaffolding. Different names, different flavors, but structurally… almost identical.
At some point I asked myself why I was still assembling all of this by hand.
So I tried a small experiment. I built a Figma plugin that generates design system foundations directly on the canvas using the plugin API. Instead of drawing components first, the idea was to produce them programmatically and then iterate from there.
Nothing fancy visually yet. This is very much about structure and behavior, not eye candy.
In the short video below, the plugin creates a basic component, adds variants and states, and places everything straight into the file. It’s rough, a bit freestyle, but it shows the core idea pretty clearly.
Here’s the video:
What surprised me most wasn’t that it worked. It was how it changed my mindset. Once the foundations are generated, the work feels different. Less mechanical setup. Fewer repetitive decisions. More focus on the parts that actually need thinking.
This started as a personal experiment, and it’s still early, so I’m mostly posting to get perspective from others who live in this space.
Have any of you explored generating parts of a design system instead of building everything manually?
Does this feel like a natural direction for Figma, or like an unnecessary layer?
Happy to answer questions about how it works, and genuinely curious to hear thoughts from people who’ve built or maintained systems at scale.
Thanks for taking a look.