I’ve created a detailed set of design guidelines for my product, covering layout structure, spacing, naming conventions, responsive behavior, component usage, interaction patterns, and platform-specific requirements.
However, I haven’t found a way to make these instructions part of the Figma Design Agent’s persistent default context.
Custom Skills are helpful because they can package reusable instructions and remain available across files. However, they still need to be explicitly invoked in each conversation. Libraries and attached guideline files also need to be added as context manually, while Figma Make’s guidelines.md is scoped to an individual Make file.
I’d love to see a persistent context system for the Figma Design Agent, with multiple levels such as:
- Personal context — preferences and conventions applied across all of my files
- Team or workspace context — shared standards automatically followed by everyone
- Project or file context — product-specific guidelines applied to every agent conversation in that file
- Chat context — temporary instructions for the current task
Users should be able to choose which contexts are enabled, inspect exactly what the agent is using, and override lower-level rules when necessary.
For example, I would like to define once that the agent should:
- Use Auto Layout instead of manually positioned layers
- Follow our spacing, typography, color, and radius variables
- Use semantic and hierarchical layer names
- Prefer existing components and variants
- Follow our navigation and responsive-layout conventions
- Add annotations for important behavior that cannot be expressed visually
The agent would then apply these rules automatically whenever it creates or modifies a design, without requiring me to attach a document or invoke a skill in every new conversation.
This would improve consistency, reduce repetitive prompting, and make the agent much more useful for long-running products. It would be especially valuable for solo developers, small teams, and organizations that need every generated design to follow the same standards.
Custom Skills are a strong foundation. I think an “always-on” context layer—or an option to enable selected skills by default at the personal, team, or file level—would make them significantly more powerful.
Is persistent default context for the Design Agent something Figma is considering?