Hi! I'm the developer of Vibma, an MCP plugin that was recently rejected from the community because it overlaps with Figma's official MCP write access. I understand the rationale — two plugins shouldn't compete on the same "bring your own AI into Figma" surface, and I agree with that decision.
But I want to propose a path forward, because I think the rejection conflated two different kinds of value:
1. AI access — letting external models (Claude, GPT, etc.) read and write Figma files. This is what the official MCP already solves, and I agree Figma should own it.
2. The harness — the structural guardrails that sit between any AI and the file. In Vibma, that's things like:
- Enforcing auto-layout instead of absolute positioning
- Rejecting hardcoded colors and nudging toward variables
- Linting for unbound tokens, missing text styles, component misuse
- Batching and validating mutations so agents can't leave the file in a broken state
- Warnings that teach the agent to produce well-structured output on the next turn
The harness is what makes AI-generated Figma files something designers actually want to inherit. Without it, agents produce technically-valid-but-structurally-awful files that designers have to clean up by hand. The official MCP gives agents the keys — the harness makes sure they don't crash the car.
The proposal
Add AI api to the Figma plugin sdk. Let approved plugins call Figma AI directly, billed against the user's Figma credits. If I could route Vibma's operations through Figma's own model instead of shipping an external MCP, I'd happily migrate. The plugin would then be purely a structural layer — no competing AI surface, no external API keys, no overlap with the official MCP. Users get one billing relationship (Figma), one trust boundary (Figma), and plugins get to focus on what they're actually good at: domain-specific guardrails and workflows.
This also opens the door to a broader ecosystem. Plenty of plugin ideas are "AI + domain expertise" (accessibility review, copy editing, design-system migration, localization QA). Today those either require users to paste an API key or route through a third-party backend. First-party Figma AI access would let plugin authors focus on the expertise and let Figma own the model layer.
I would like to thank the power users of Vibma who have been pushing me towards this proposal. Happy to discuss what approval/review criteria would look like if this is on the table. Thanks for considering.
