Why AI coding agents struggle with Figma (and what actually worked)

AI coding agents have become surprisingly capable at generating frontend code. In isolated tasks they often perform well, but once you try to plug them into a real design workflow — especially one based on Figma — the results tend to degrade. What I kept running into wasn’t really a limitation of the models themselves. It was the way design data is passed into them. A common instinct is to give the agent as much context as possible: the entire Figma file, or at least a large portion of it. On pa