SAN FRANCISCO — Figma’s chief design officer, Loredana Crisan, says the world is writing 17 times more code than it used to and shipping only 1.3 times as many releases. Her company’s answer, announced at its first Config event in India, is a rulebook for AI agents.
The rulebook is Figma Specs, a Markdown editor where a team writes down its design language, either as a standalone Figma file or on the canvas. A spec can reference canvas elements, FigJam diagrams, code layers and finished designs, so people and agents work from the same page. Figma is also letting teams feed design libraries, code libraries and written guidelines into one design-system context that agents consult before they act.
The pitch is that the bottleneck is no longer producing output but constraining it. Much of the new code, Crisan said, is written to discover what a product should be, not to ship it. TechCrunch’s account gives no basis for the 17-to-1.3 comparison beyond her statement, so it should be read as Figma’s framing, not a measured industry figure.
The other announcements, TechCrunch reported, are more concrete. Code layers, which let designers add code to canvas designs for more interactive prototypes, move to public beta after a private beta that began in June. The agent on the canvas reached a wider set of users in the past week, with tools to make its output more predictable. Payload, the open-source headless CMS Figma acquired last year, is being connected to Figma Make for building dynamic websites and managing content. And Figma’s support for the Model Context Protocol expands to more than 20 new tools, including Open Code, Dia, Grok Bot and Sarvam.
Figma is not alone in giving agents more room to work. OpenAI opened its Codex harness to all developers in public beta in September.
India is Figma’s biggest market outside the United States by users, and the platform works with 40 percent of the country’s top 100 companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, according to the same report. Figma opened its first India office late last year, and Payload downloads have grown sixfold over the past 12 months.
What the announcement leaves out is as telling. No price was given. Only code layers has a stated stage, public beta, and there are no availability dates for Specs, the Payload connection or the MCP expansion.
