What is Figma?

Design tools with custom rendering engines cost more tokens, run slower, and produce less accurate AI output than HTML/CSS-based tools, explaining why agent compatibility favors web-native design tools.

“Historically a lot of design tools have custom rendering engines and those are a lot harder for agents to use and so you'll see higher token spend slower times lower accuracy.”

At Blockworks, Figma usage by the design team fell to 5% of prior levels after AI design tools such as Claude Design became capable of producing production-ready assets.

“Everything used to be designed in Figma. It's now 5% of the usage that it used to be.”

Paper is the first design tool since Figma to gain meaningful market traction, now competing in the agentic design stack alongside Cursor and Claude Code.

“We're the first company since Figma's come out to like make a dent in that market at all.”

Figma introduced AI usage caps in early March and 75% of customers continued using AI features, either within the cap or by paying for additional use, showing no meaningful retention hit.

“They said that the change hasn't made a dent in retention, noting that 75% of customers are still using their AI features either sticking within the cap or paying for additional use.”

Claude Design's competitive threat to Figma will be invisible in near-term quarterly numbers but will compound over 4-8 quarters to materially impair Figma's growth trajectory.

“We won't see it in Figma's numbers next quarter and that over four 6 eight quarters it will maim its growth.”

AI agents will bypass consumer-facing design and creative tools entirely, including Canva, Figma, and Duolingo, because they generate or accomplish outputs directly without needing a visual interface.

“Would an AI agent use it? No. An AI agent is not going to go in and move assets around, vibe them, and it's just going to create the assets. So, an agent doesn't need Canva.”

Granola has moved away from comprehensive Figma schematics entirely, using the tool only for ad hoc ideation. Worth watching as a signal of how AI-era product teams are restructuring design workflows.

“I think the days of having full app schematics of everything all of the screens and all of the flows laid out in Figma are like totally gone for us.”

Kimmy (open source model) is attracting major enterprise defectors from Anthropic and OpenAI, with nine-figure annual spend reportedly moving to it and nine out of ten startups surveyed now building on open source.

“I'll make this prediction here, that you're going to see some of the major customers of Anthropic and major customers of OpenAI, I'm talking about the eight and nine figure customers, people spending 50 million, 100 million a year. They're leaving. They're going to be leaving because they don't trust those companies to not steal the application layer and to compete with them. 11 Labs, Figma, Lovable, they're all going to leave. And they're all going to take Kimmy.”

Jason Calacanis on major AI customers defecting from Anthropic and OpenAI to Kimmy over application-layer trust.

“I'll make this prediction here, that you're going to see some of the major customers of Anthropic and major customers of OpenAI, I'm talking about the eight and nine figure customers, people spending 50 million, 100 million a year. They're leaving. They're going to be leaving because they don't trust those companies to not steal the application layer and to compete with them. 11 Labs, Figma, Lovable, they're all going to leave. And they're all going to take Kimmy.”

Figma's absence of a native push-to-production feature represents an estimated $500 million revenue opportunity the company is leaving on the table.

“Why Figma doesn't have that natively is a loss of, you know, $500 million and going up.”