I have seen a similar pattern with Canva’s MCP. I pay for Pro, but the one feature that would actually make MCP useful, Auto Fill, is gated behind an enterprise plan. So the surface is there, but the real power is locked away.
I get that this is still the wild west for MCP, and I agree with the OP’s general take. But right now there is a big gap between "integration exists" and "integration is actually useful." Personally, I am more excited about where something like WebMCP could go, where the default assumption is full capability rather than a restricted subset.
The result is less that I want to go to Figma directly and more that I just want to skip it entirely. So, assuming the power of these aggregator agents keeps growing, the onus is on these tools to create useful integrations or get subsumed by a model capability or another tool with a better integration. It sounds like your experience is similar - you bypassed the tools with bad integrations instead of going to them directly.
It makes sense they very slowly transitioned from read-only to limited write. You have to carefully beta test. Both figuring out the guardrails and finding usecases where it actually works well. The only way to do that (properly) is a slow drip release cycle.
Why bother with a drawing tool when you can literally mockup with real components and react etc.
They’ll always be visually consistent if you set things up that way. And the agents can help you with it.
Kind of crazy considering how while teams (even dev) were forced into using it be the designers.
I haven’t even seen it mentioned at work recently.
People who do that will do well.
This is an obvious direction that the industry is heading to. But what are the implications of this? I think the differentiating factor of having a good UI will reduce - productivity apps and SaaS will no longer have their aesthetic UI as a moat. I'm not sure whether this will tank their stocks or increase the valuation but what I'm sure of is that the productivity and usage will increase.
Re: the value of good UI/UX
I think short-term, the value of good interfaces will actually increase - if anyone can easily build out the same product in 10 different ways, the best designed one that people actually want to use will likely be the choice. But that’s holding constant lots of things like distribution, type of SaaS, its place in the transaction stack, etc. So either guess would make a lot of assumptions.
It also appears (so far at least) that these models really struggle with front-end design. Something like /frontend-design skill is good but only gets you so far. It still requires a ton of steering to get it to a sensical place. So for now, whoever can steer it is still valuable. But I’m sure more and more of that will get codified and internalized by the model and the harness. So the design steering will become more and more abstract.
Long-term, we’re likely moving towards dynamically generated interfaces. Claude is already doing it with diagrams and charts in the chat. This opens up so many fascinating questions. What happens when UI doesn’t have to be one-size-fits-all, where each person may get their GUI generated with their preferences and context in mind? What happens to the design process when your UI doesn’t have to scale to a ton of user types and use cases? Will we even be designing UIs or something else entirely? Will Jakob’s Law still apply or will our individual GUIs diverge so much that I won’t be able to navigate your smartphone if I pick it up?
Right on point. Prediction: we will have a new protocol like HTML but for LLMs so that SaaS can communicate on this language.
First, mcp, like cli, like api, is a kind of (user facing) interface, just not graphical. It still needs to be designed, just by different people with differing skills.
Second, textual interface can only go so far in terms of information ingestion. Trying to describe a complex relationship between entities can be extremely difficult with text. However, a good graphical interface will make complex information easier to digest.
So in my opinion, the moat will emphasize organization which knows how to plan good a custom experience, whether graphical or textual, and less where tables and forms are the main business
By making the tools compostable, the valuation from this ‘keeping within’ angle will slowly disappear, but maybe it can be replaced by increase usage as a source of valuation.
We'll see if this time, things end differently.
Figma offered the capabilities but not the data or context.
Everyone's building "the everything app". The end game is likely an entire OS shell that is AI-first.
While Figma advertises that their official MCP "can now write directly to your Figma files", in reality it is restricted to create and read (as in CRUD), but not update nor delete. Currently, there is only one option to edit/update using the Figma MCP and it requires going through a third-party service with its own subscription and tiny token allocations.
Meanwhile, several developers have figured out how to use Figma's plug-in system to work-around these limitations, for a more robust CRUD MCP solution.
Walls and moats are just not viable in the way it used to be: the market tightly demands agency, and it's not something your company can provide solo. The point is that users want to intermix their experiences.
Figma's been super super punished by the market (down from $80 ish ipo in August to $20-$30 since Jan). The faith that AI is somehow is going to build such a mass adopted product that works so relatively well; seems weird. Figma really made strong up front choices to make such strong bones for their work: it feels rare to see companies go for such deliberately chosen high technology web, and it feels like these choices (wasm, multiplayer, etc) have been so core to building such a great business.