Design platform Figma used its inaugural Config event in India to announce a series of significant updates aimed at bridging the gap between design and code. The headline release is a new Markdown-based editor designed to help organizations define their design systems, integrate essential code and design libraries, and seamlessly connect with the Payload headless content management system. By introducing these features, the company hopes to provide a reliable framework that both its own native tools and third-party AI agents can adhere to more strictly when generating brand-compliant assets.
The company formally debuted Figma Specs, a streamlined markdown editor enabling users to articulate their core design language with minimal friction. This dynamic document functions as a centralized source of truth and reference point for human design teams and automated agents alike as they build within Figma. Specs files can be deployed as standalone documents or integrated directly alongside designs on the canvas. Beyond text-editing capabilities, the tool allows users to effortlessly reference other Figma elements on the canvas, embed FigJam diagrams, and link directly to complex code layers and design assets.
Furthermore, these systems allow development and product teams to centralize a wealth of contextual information regarding their design ecosystems. By incorporating comprehensive design libraries, code repositories, and style guidelines into one unified space, organizations can better manage context for their broader design frameworks. Centralized AI agents can then query this single source of truth to ensure that automated outputs strictly adhere to established brand and design rules.
These releases arrive just as Figma works to broaden access to its on-canvas agent, which was made available to a much wider user base over the past week. Because generative artificial intelligence is inherently non-deterministic, the company is actively supplying creators with specialized tools to steer AI behavior toward more predictable, consistent outcomes.
Alongside the Specs editor, Figma has advanced its code layers feature into a public beta. The functionality, which introduces direct coding capabilities to designs on the canvas to facilitate richer and more interactive prototypes, was initially launched in private beta back in June. During the event in India, Figma highlighted how users can leverage the agent to automatically convert a static design into functional code or modify existing code snippets to rapidly iterate on active prototypes.
Reflecting on the evolving landscape of software creation, Figma’s chief design officer, Loredana Crisan, pointed out the unique role that prototyping and design play in the modern development lifecycle.
“We see Figma as the place where software teams come to decide what they build and ship. And so for that, I think one of the key things to keep in mind about what AI has changed and what it made available is the ability to build,” Crisan told TechCrunch. “There are 17-times more lines of code being produced today than in the past. But when you’re looking at releases, only 1.3-times more releases. A lot of that code actually is not necessarily built to ship, but really built to discover what the product is. It’s built to design.”
In tandem with these core product rollouts, Figma announced that its Model Context Protocol (MCP) now supports over 20 new tools. This expanded ecosystem includes integrations with Open Code, Dia, Grok Bot, and Sarvam, an emerging artificial intelligence startup based in India.
The company is also deepening the integration of Payload, the open-source headless CMS it acquired last year. Payload is now being integrated directly into Figma Make, a product geared toward generating dynamic websites and managing content natively. Figma reported that Payload’s software downloads have experienced a sixfold increase over the preceding 12 months, highlighting growing developer interest in the platform.
The choice of India for this major series of product unveilings underscores the region’s mounting importance to the design giant. Figma established its first physical office in India late last year, housing dedicated functions for sales, strategic partnerships, go-to-market operations, and product support. According to the company, India currently stands as its largest user market outside of the United States, with the platform already embedded within the workflows of 40% of India’s top 100 companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange.
