Idea to Code: In an AI world, do we need Figma?

[Grant Hulbert]

The Ask

Our team was recently tasked with inventing a revolutionary new user interface, and exploring how that impacts user experience in an increasingly AI-first world.

Our first thought was to follow the traditional route: whiteboard some ideas, create a polished PowerPoint deck to get approval, then ask a graphic design team to mock it up in a clickthrough Figma demo, go through several rounds with our stakeholder, then finally start coding painstakingly to the spec we created. Typically this would take a couple months, and at the end we'd have a very limited working product that people could tinker with.

Scarcity Begets Creativity

It turns out our design team was very busy with other work, so we'd either have to wait, or figure out how to make a Figma demo ourselves. Given that we know nothing about Figma, and we had just gotten access to Windsurf, we thought, "What if we leapfrog all the intermediate steps, and go straight to code instead?"

Spoiler: it works surprisingly well! We had never used Windsurf before, and weren't sure how to configure it. The best part? We didn’t have to hunt through documentation. Windsurf literally explained how to configure itself, authenticated with GitHub, and scaffolded a working web app—all in a day. This was real live code running, not just simple HTML with minor clicks.

Over the next two weeks, we continued to converse with Windsurf, asking it to layer on more and more features. Three of us were sharing the same repo, so we merged with each others' code just like any standard dev pipeline.

What about the visuals? Doesn't Figma make them beautiful?

We were concerned at first that AI-generated code would look stale or robotic, or perhaps old-style, especially compared to our curated library of professionally-designed Figma pre-built widgets. Turns out, with clever prompting about the style we wanted, Windsurf did a great job of meeting or exceeding the corporate look we asked it to match. Everyone who saw it thought it looked gorgeous, and some even asked if we could adopt this look in other products. In fact, it looked so polished that the most difficult part of our demos was convincing people it was real running code!

Does this replace programmers?

As of this writing (October 2025), the answer is a big fat NOPE.

The "AI Hamster Wheel" is very real: LLMs easily get lost, throw away working code while making small changes, and completely misunderstand your intent. Every step required careful curation by someone experienced with writing code. Prompting is still a programming language; just one that happens to look like English. Non-programmers are not going to enjoy all the complex setup required, such as installing Visual Studio Code, getting Windsurf credentials, precise prompting, troubleshooting and debugging, etc. For non-programmers, Claude.ai does a great job with small hobby pages, but a big complex front- and back-end project like ours can't be done with Claude yet.

Conclusion: time to ditch Figma? No!

While programmers will get incredible value from our approach, graphic designers will not—there's still too much coding involved. We still need thoughtful UX design, and folks who design with Figma every day are producing beautiful UX. Plus, Figma's products are dipping their toes into code generation, so they're attacking this opportunity from the other side.

If you're an engineer who wants to tell a story quickly, consider leapfrogging past PowerPoint, Figma, or any other intermediate mockup tools: see where Windsurf can take you by going straight to running code.  The line between ‘mockup’ and ‘product’ is blurring fast. That’s good news for anyone who wants to ship ideas faster.

Next time you're tempted to create a mockup in a design tool, see how far AI can take you with real code!