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I would love to see this as well! The APIs are live so give it a shot and tell us about any API feedback you have


Kinda! It will auto-detect icons in a design, highlight them at the top level, and allow you to import it into your VS Code workspace :)


The team is aware and looking into it, thanks for letting us know!


Emil from Figma here! We have made a ton of improvements to the generated CSS code, and while we still sometimes provide absolute positioning we now separate it from the styling & flexbox code that you might actually want to pull into your codebase.

We've also introduced an API extension point so third parties can now provide their own implementation of code snippers (code generation) in Figma's Dev Mode which Anima and a few other partners have already released plugins for :)


An option for TailwindCSS classes would be really clean too.


Hello,

We developed an open source plugin that let you go from Figma to tailwindcss + react. Feel free to check it out

https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1178847414663679049/B...


Yes! Absolutely. I've been looking for best practices around Figma + Tailwind.


Hey all! Emil here from the Figma team that brought you Dev Mode and Figma for VS Code today! Really interested to hear what you think and also here to answer your questions. We are super excited to invest more into developers in the future, today is just the start of that!


As a developer consuming design files in Figma on a regular basis something that bugs me often is not being able to drop images into comments.

For a tool designed for visual collaboration it feels like a sizeable oversight that for me at least hinders workflow pushing me into other tools rather than keeping conversation contained alongside the files being discussed. Any plans in this area?


Tip to future folks who jump on HN after releasing something: don't announce that you're here to answer questions and then answer only 2 questions (as of 5 hours after Emil's comment was posted).


Does figma have an external bug tracker. While developing a figma plugin I ran into a CSP issue for loading UI web workers as blobs. Not sure if I should go through standard figma support channels or is there a dedicated channel for plugin developers.


Hey, Akbar here (Dev Advocate for Figma). We have the Friends of Figma discord that has dedicated channels for plugin developers - https://discord.gg/xzQhe2Vcvx. When you join - get the @Developers role in #interest-roles and @Developer Announcements in # general-roles if you want to talk plugin development!


Hi Emil. My question is about the prototyping. The proto tooling is improving but still pretty limited. Right now the approach seems somewhat disjointed, meaning some interactions utilize variants for state change, while others work across frames with the "onclick" interaction. But that could get really messy as this grows. Question: have you considered using a "dynamic panel" approach similar to what Axure does? That model was my favorite among the proto leaders.


Is there some way to export Figma's local variables to a CSS custom properties?


Hey, Akbar here (Dev Advocate for Figma) - variables are surfaced in CSS code snippets.

If you're looking for something more custom, you can take advantage of our new Variables Plugin API beta (https://www.figma.com/plugin-docs/working-with-variables) and export them with what you need!


Hi Megan, Louis co-founder of Specify here.

This is one of the reason we built Specify (specifyapp.com) which is a Design API that helps you sync design tokens and assets from Figma to any platforms and formats.

Specify helps you get automated pull requests containing your design tokens and assets defined in Figma.

You basically just have to configure Specify once, and every time designers update colors in Figma you'll get automated pull requests with colors transformed exactly how you want.


Myself and a ton of other devs & designers need the ability to run plugins without having to select them from a menu first. For ex: Run a plugin when a design is opened, or when Figma launches.


How has the release of giant LLMs and other LLM-powered design apps influenced your product roadmap in the last couple of months?


They bought an AI design tool company today https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1671561341893742592


I can't wait until that feature is available on a sites, so that I as a user can AI design my own interface and it hooks it all up to the API for me.


I've been experimenting with using LLMs to map Figma designs directly into a working production-level codebase. There's quite a bit of compression you need to do in order to convert the raw Figma JSON into a format that an LLM can understand, but overall it actually performs quite well. Here's a quick demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9JRBw7kR9g


How does this compare to Zeplin? We currently use this for both design commenting by clients but our devs love it too.


This looks really awesome. Are there any plans to support teams that do not use VS Code or GitHub?


Great work!


Thanks Raphael <3


OP here. Totally agree passing arbitrary styles down in props is not a great solution and makes to incredibly hard to reason about components. We defined explicitly using typescript the styles which can be set from the parent which makes it much easier to reason about and we can even use the "find all references" feature of VSCode to identify usages.


Correct :) But it generally is and I didn't wan't to go all too deep


Not much need to go in a lot of depth, box-sizing:border-box simply makes it so.


Hey! I'm actually in the process of writing up a high level overview of Flexbox and how it works. Won't cover all aspects but would make it easier to understand hopefully. Can't promise when I'll post it but hopefully soon at medium.com/visly.


cool! I look forward your write up :-)


Somethings become very complicated in constraint based systems and they are often much slower in my experience than more special purpose layout systems. That said i'm not against constraint systems either, they just both have their place.


Stretch doesn't really enable any new kind of layouts that yoga doesn't but it fixes some fundamental problems in Yoga where Yoga was not compatible with the web implementations.

Long term goal of Stretch is to support multiple layout systems including Grid layout I just started with Flexbox because I know that so well :) Look forward to tackling grid layout soonish (contributions / help very welcome).


Super-excited to hear that Grid layout will be coming soonish. Yoga has been fantastic in making Flexbox available "everywhere", but Grid is wonderful for UI layout in a way that Flexbox isn't.


Just to be clear, we are not working on it. However it is something I would like to start looking into sometime soon :) This is a huge area for contributions as I myself am not a grid expert (as apposed to having worked on flexbox engines past 3 years).


> Just to be clear, we are not working on it. However it is something I would like to start looking into sometime soon :)

I hear you, but this is very different to "we're never going to implement this". I might look into contributing, but I've never implemented any layout engine, so I'm not sure how much help I would be!


I would love to help talk through how to start and the process i used for the flexbox implementation :) start a PR / Issue and we can discuss :)


As someone else who knows nothing about how layout engines work, kudos to this response. I understand time and attention don’t scale well and I hope you don’t get overwhelmed but this kind of attitude in open source is the greatest.


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