Using agents with a design system

Most of the progress comes from just trying things.

Being able to spot and follow an idea without asking for permission. If something can be improved, you just go, try it, then show the result.

For the past few months I've been working on a project where I designed the whole design system, but production was still very manual. That felt like something worth exploring further. So I started looking into Figma Console MCP. It began as simple exploration, then turned into building a workflow with an agent inside Figma.

The process became more about iterating side by side with the agent, guiding it, feeding it the right knowledge, and building up a better base of context. Once that started working, I packaged it into a custom skill so it could be reused across projects like this.

It allows the agent to assemble designs using our actual components, all within Figma and grounded in the system we built. Now while the agent assembles layouts, I can focus on other work. It speeds things up, and shifts my time away from repetitive production toward thinking about the system itself.

"I'm not explaining things to people anymore. I'm explaining things to agents. If you can explain it to an agent, the agent is the distribution layer." - Andrej Karpathy