User mentions that iterating colors through hex values in code is painfully slow and suggests that Figma needs a visual canvas to quickly explore palettes, contrast, and combinations.
I know that headline might upset the Figma cult a little. But here is what actually happened. As I started working as an AI native builder, I realised I needed Figma less and less. Not because design became less important, but because the place where design happens has shifted. Most of my ideation and wireframing now happens directly inside the IDE. I think through flows, components, and layouts in the chat interface inside Windsurf. Instead of drawing screens, I ask the system to generate them. Then I immediately see the design in its real form. Running on localhost. The UI is already coded. Components exist. Interactions behave exactly as they would in production. The gap between design and implementation is almost gone. Working this way also unlocked something that was always missing for me in the traditional Figma workflow. I can now design **behaviour**, not just interfaces. Micro interactions for example. The softness with which a dropdown panel should open or close. The timing of ease in and ease out transitions. Conditional UI logic where one element changes state based on another. The exact feel of interaction as the system responds to the user. These dimensions of design were always difficult to truly explore inside static design tools. They had to be imagined and later interpreted by engineering. Inside the IDE, they are simply part of the design process itself. But there was still one thing missing. Color. Iterating colours through hex values in code is painfully slow. You need a visual canvas to quickly explore palettes, contrast, and combinations. For that one task, Canva turned out to be more than enough. I use it to experiment with color palettes and occasionally do very light visual edits like cropping images or removing backgrounds. Nothing more. So my design stack today looks surprisingly simple: IDE for thinking and building. Localhost for design preview. Canva for color exploration. And that is it. Figma is completely out of my flow right now. This is not a criticism of Figma. It is still an incredible product. But when design and implementation collapse into the same environment, the role of traditional design tools naturally changes. The centre of gravity shifts from the design file to the running product. And once you start working that way, it is surprisingly hard to go back.