Designers who code will always win
When I moved my design work from Figma to code, every part of my workflow got better. Here is why.
First published on theuicodex.org in 2025. Edited for this site.
Design tools always lag behind
Every design tool is a wrapper around a technology. Building the wrapper takes time, so design tools trail the browser by years. Three features that web designers use every day arrived in Figma a decade or more after they shipped in CSS:
| Feature | In CSS | In Figma |
|---|---|---|
| flex-wrap | 2009 | 2023 |
| Media queries | 2010 | 2023 |
| Variables | 2012 | 2023 |
AI will not close this gap. Figma is a large company with a huge user base, and every change gets debated, tested and rolled out slowly. On the frontend side, a single developer can build a widely used library from scratch, and AI makes that faster still. The gap is widening, not closing.
You and the developers speak different languages
The lag creates a communication problem. Designers reinvent solutions that developers stopped using years ago, while developers work with libraries designers have never heard of. Designers say “auto layout” and “hug contents”; developers say flex container. Same thing, different words. When you know both, handoff stops being a translation exercise.
Vendor lock-in
Most design tools use proprietary file formats. You cannot easily move your work between tools, and sometimes you cannot even open your own files from a few years ago. Code is plain text in standard formats that stay readable and editable for decades. When Cursor came out, I opened my projects in it directly: no export, no conversion. Compare that with the Sketch to Figma migration.
Figma prototypes do not feel real
A Figma prototype is a slide deck with hotspots. Code gives you real drag and drop, real data and complex interactions, which Figma cannot do at all. And in Figma you prototype isolated flows; in code, a fully interactive prototype of the whole product is realistic.
Figma has no real version control
Code has Git: branch, merge, revert, review, tested for decades. Figma's versioning is a list of saved snapshots, and it falls apart on large projects.
What this means in practice
None of this makes Figma useless. It is still the fastest way to sketch a layout. But the moment a design has to behave, not just look, code wins, and the designer who can write it does not have to wait for anyone to find out whether the idea works.