Figma just launched a set of tools that tell AI agents how to behave on its platform. The headline feature is Figma Specs, a new Markdown-based editor where teams define their design language so both people and agents can follow it. According to TechCrunch AI, the company announced it at its first Config event in India, along with a public beta for code layers, more MCP integrations and a Payload CMS tie-in for Figma Make.
The timing makes sense. Figma recently opened its on-canvas agent to more users, and AI output is non-deterministic, so the same prompt can give you different results each time. Specs is Figma’s attempt to make those results more predictable and keep them on-brand.
5 Things Figma Shipped
- Figma Specs: a style guide that agents can actually read Specs is a Markdown editor for writing down your design rules in plain language. It can be a standalone file or sit right on the canvas. It’s more than a text doc, too: you can reference canvas elements and embed FigJam diagrams, code layers and designs. Teams can also pull in design libraries, code libraries and guidelines, which gives Figma’s agents and third-party agents one central source of truth to check against.
- Code layers move to public beta Code layers add real code to designs on the canvas, so prototypes can be more interactive. Figma first announced the feature in private beta in June, and now anyone in the public beta can try it. You can ask the agent to turn a design into code, or to change part of the code while you iterate on a prototype.
- More than 20 new tools connect through MCP Figma’s MCP (Model Context Protocol, the open standard that lets AI tools talk to outside apps) now supports over 20 new tools. TechCrunch AI names Open Code, Dia, Grok Bot and Indian AI startup Sarvam among them. That’s a clear signal that Figma wants to be the design layer for whatever agent you’re already using, not only its own.
- Payload CMS comes to Figma Make Figma bought the open-source headless CMS Payload last year. A headless CMS stores and manages content separately from the front end that displays it. Payload now plugs into Figma Make, so you can build dynamic websites and manage their content directly. Figma says Payload’s downloads have grown sixfold over the past 12 months.
- A bigger bet on India Figma opened its first Indian office late last year, covering sales, partnerships, go-to-market and product support. The company says India is its biggest user market outside the US, and that it works with 40% of the top 100 companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange. Launching these features in India, and naming Sarvam as an MCP partner, fits that strategy.
Why This Matters
What stands out here is the problem Figma chose to solve. Generating designs and code isn’t the hard part anymore. The hard part is getting AI to respect the brand rules a company already has. Every design team has seen an AI tool produce something technically fine but obviously off-brand. Specs turns those unwritten rules into context an agent can read.
Figma’s chief design officer Loredana Crisan explained the thinking to TechCrunch.
“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. “A lot of that code actually is not necessarily built to ship, but really built to discover what the product is. It’s built to design.”
That framing matters. If most AI-generated code is exploration rather than production, then the design tool becomes the place where that exploration happens. Figma is placing itself, in Crisan’s words, as “the place where software teams come to decide what they build and ship.”
Caveats Worth Noting
- Code layers are still in beta, so expect rough edges.
- The article doesn’t give pricing or plan tiers for Specs or the new MCP integrations.
- Specs makes agents more predictable but doesn’t remove the randomness completely. How well agents actually follow these rules still needs testing in real use.
What Comes Next
The Markdown-for-agents idea is spreading across the industry. Coding tools already use rules files to steer AI assistants, and Figma is bringing the same pattern to design. If Specs catches on, a design system could stop being a reference doc people skim and become something every agent on the team reads. Full details are in the original TechCrunch AI report.