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Hey all! Emil here from the Figma team that brought you Dev Mode and Figma for VS Code today! Really interested to hear what you think and also here to answer your questions. We are super excited to invest more into developers in the future, today is just the start of that!

>>emilsj+(OP)
How has the release of giant LLMs and other LLM-powered design apps influenced your product roadmap in the last couple of months?

>>yewenj+g4
They bought an AI design tool company today https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1671561341893742592

>>emilsj+(OP)
This looks really awesome. Are there any plans to support teams that do not use VS Code or GitHub?

>>emilsj+(OP)
Great work!

>>raphae+Sh
Thanks Raphael <3

>>trafna+a5
I can't wait until that feature is available on a sites, so that I as a user can AI design my own interface and it hooks it all up to the API for me.

>>emilsj+(OP)
Is there some way to export Figma's local variables to a CSS custom properties?

>>emilsj+(OP)
Hi Emil. My question is about the prototyping. The proto tooling is improving but still pretty limited. Right now the approach seems somewhat disjointed, meaning some interactions utilize variants for state change, while others work across frames with the "onclick" interaction. But that could get really messy as this grows. Question: have you considered using a "dynamic panel" approach similar to what Axure does? That model was my favorite among the proto leaders.

>>emilsj+(OP)
Does figma have an external bug tracker. While developing a figma plugin I ran into a CSP issue for loading UI web workers as blobs. Not sure if I should go through standard figma support channels or is there a dedicated channel for plugin developers.

>>zyang+nx
Hey, Akbar here (Dev Advocate for Figma). We have the Friends of Figma discord that has dedicated channels for plugin developers - https://discord.gg/xzQhe2Vcvx. When you join - get the @Developers role in #interest-roles and @Developer Announcements in # general-roles if you want to talk plugin development!

>>emilsj+(OP)
How does this compare to Zeplin? We currently use this for both design commenting by clients but our devs love it too.

>>megama+pv
Hey, Akbar here (Dev Advocate for Figma) - variables are surfaced in CSS code snippets.

If you're looking for something more custom, you can take advantage of our new Variables Plugin API beta (https://www.figma.com/plugin-docs/working-with-variables) and export them with what you need!

>>emilsj+(OP)
Myself and a ton of other devs & designers need the ability to run plugins without having to select them from a menu first. For ex: Run a plugin when a design is opened, or when Figma launches.

>>emilsj+(OP)
As a developer consuming design files in Figma on a regular basis something that bugs me often is not being able to drop images into comments.

For a tool designed for visual collaboration it feels like a sizeable oversight that for me at least hinders workflow pushing me into other tools rather than keeping conversation contained alongside the files being discussed. Any plans in this area?

>>yewenj+g4
I've been experimenting with using LLMs to map Figma designs directly into a working production-level codebase. There's quite a bit of compression you need to do in order to convert the raw Figma JSON into a format that an LLM can understand, but overall it actually performs quite well. Here's a quick demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9JRBw7kR9g

>>emilsj+(OP)
Tip to future folks who jump on HN after releasing something: don't announce that you're here to answer questions and then answer only 2 questions (as of 5 hours after Emil's comment was posted).

>>megama+pv
Hi Megan, Louis co-founder of Specify here.

This is one of the reason we built Specify (specifyapp.com) which is a Design API that helps you sync design tokens and assets from Figma to any platforms and formats.

Specify helps you get automated pull requests containing your design tokens and assets defined in Figma.

You basically just have to configure Specify once, and every time designers update colors in Figma you'll get automated pull requests with colors transformed exactly how you want.