Figma adds markdown tool to keep AI agents inside brand design rules

Figma announced a set of features this week designed to let AI agents work more predictably inside its design platform, unveiled at the company’s first Config event in India.

The centerpiece is Figma Specs, a new editor built on markdown, a lightweight text-formatting syntax, that lets teams write out their design language in plain language. The specs file can stand alone or sit alongside the design canvas, and it can pull in other Figma elements, including FigJam diagrams, code layers, and existing designs. Figma says the document is meant to work as a reference for both human teams and AI agents, giving both a shared set of rules to follow while building. Alongside Specs, Figma is letting teams bring in design libraries, code libraries, and guidelines that make up a design system, then point agents at that centralized context. The company frames this as a way to keep AI-generated work closer to a brand’s existing rules, addressing what it calls the unpredictable, non-deterministic nature of AI output. Figma widened access to its agent-on-canvas tool to a broader set of users in the past week, which the company says made these guardrails more necessary.

Figma also moved its code layers feature out of private beta, where it had sat since June, and into public beta. The feature adds working code to canvas designs, producing more interactive prototypes, and lets users ask an agent to turn a design into code or edit a piece of existing code to iterate on a prototype. Figma’s chief design officer, Loredana Crisan, told TechCrunch that AI has changed what gets built inside the platform. “There are 17-times more lines of code being produced today than in the past. But when you’re looking at releases, only 1.3-times more releases,” she said, adding that much of that code is written to explore what a product should be rather than to ship directly.

The company said it now supports more than 20 tools through its MCP, a protocol that links AI tools, including Open Code, Dia, Grok Bot, and Indian startup Sarvam. Figma is also integrating Payload, the open-source headless content management system it acquired last year, into Figma Make, its tool for generating websites and managing their content. Figma says Payload’s downloads have grown sixfold over the past 12 months, though it did not share absolute download figures.

The India event reflects the market’s weight for Figma. The company opened its first India office late last year, covering sales, partnerships, and product support, and says India is its largest market by users outside the United States. Figma says 40% of the top 100 companies on the Bombay Stock Exchange use the platform.

Figma did not say when Figma Specs will reach general availability, or whether code layers will exit public beta on a set timeline. Those rollout details, along with how third-party agents beyond Figma’s own actually adopt the Specs format, are worth watching as the features move beyond this week’s announcement.