Paper Design etc all have the same fundamental problem as Figma - they’re designed for a process that won’t exist as we know it within a few years (and arguably half way there already). All of these canvas-based design tools assume that people want / need to directly manipulate things on a canvas fist before building vs going straight to building it (and by building I also mean you can ask Claude to build you 10 prototypes for different directions so exploration is not dead, just starts elsewhere).

Paper is canvas-based but code-first. Subframe is not canvas based and is fully code based. And yes, designers will always need to be able to directly manipulate the canvas for some things.

I think that's an organizational muscle memory. Not a thing at startups anymore and to your point will dissipate in bigger companies quickly.

It is truly staggering to see a tool used by (almost) every large tech company in the world so quickly lose ground. I don't think they're done done, but their position in the value chain has shifted drastically.

Yep, my experience as well coming from Big Tech although they'll be buoyed by intertia for some time. And yes, source of truth just makes more sense in code, so I don't think there's much of a moat there either. I think there's still value in this collaboration layer, but collaboration will change substantially as well and take a different shape. The world where the design team spends weeks / months designing, refining, and doing crits on the same file just doesn't make sense now - it was driven by the high costs of implementation so the decisions had to be made upfront. That's going to change.

Long-term yes. Assuming we'll reach a world where an agent is your primary interface, has access to all you need, and will spin up dynamic UIs for you when needed.

I'd take a cash bet there is soon going to be an enterprise OpenClaw product and every major business is going to demand that their SaaS partners support it.

I'm sure that's part of it but I think it's a very small part of the story. They've been pushing hard on internal AI creation tools for a while, and those clearly didn't take hold.

IMHO MCP is the AppleScript/Shortcuts part of the internet. Never really took on Apple platforms (except for some hardcore fans); not sure it will ever actually take on the internet…

I don’t think so. Your product / tool has to be extremely specialized and deeply necessary to pull of a walled garden MCP. The more likely alternatives are that someone else comes along with a better (open) integration, the model internalizes your tool’s capabilities, or the AI labs themselves build 1st party competitors.

Figma has demonstrated that kind of aggressive lock-in many times. For example, they couldn't get enough companies to subscribe to FigJam and Slides, so they simply increased Figma's subscription price by that amount, and then said those apps are included for free.

BTW: that's usually illegal, but with the current administration, it's a Tuesday.

You need leverage to do that (I.e we don’t have alternatives), which they’re losing quickly.

I agree. I also tried Figma’s MCP tools (wrote about it here - https://metedata.substack.com/p/metedata-digest-003-where-do...) and found it very underwhelming.

The result is less that I want to go to Figma directly and more that I just want to skip it entirely. So, assuming the power of these aggregator agents keeps growing, the onus is on these tools to create useful integrations or get subsumed by a model capability or another tool with a better integration. It sounds like your experience is similar - you bypassed the tools with bad integrations instead of going to them directly.

Definitely don’t believe AI is going to “one-shot” Figma. But Figma was built for a world where product design is a stand-alone step in a series of discrete steps with hand-offs between them. It was a place where design started and ended, for a while at least. If people don’t see it as a starting point anymore, it becomes a very different business & product.

Agree. AI won’t „one-shot“ Figma. The whole part of the process where you need figma will disappear.

Well put.

I think that also explains why a bunch of companies are now all racing to build the same thing - the everything-in-one-place universal context store with their own agents on top of it. Linear, Notion, Salesforce, etc. Because the alternative is a much worse business to be in.

I noticed that too, but I wonder if what they are offering is just a proprietary formatting for context store, or is there something more operationally complex than that.

Whoever is able to act as the central store for all your context and be the integration point for all your agents running on top (including your proprietary ones) will have leverage in the ecosystem. Everyone else will be the supplier. The more context you have from different places (code, tickets, PRDs, markdown files, CRM, etc) and the deeper your agents plug into all of this, the harder it'll be to switch away to something else painlessly.