As product design teams grew, Figma answered the call with components, styles, variables and props borrowed partly from programming. That patchwork approach helped design scale inside engineering organizations, but it also created a tangled web of migrations, plugins and specialist roles just to keep the system running. Figma’s proprietary, undocumented file format locked out LLMs during training, so when large models learned to write code but never picked up Figma’s primitives, the balance of power shifted. Now that designers can write code more easily and AI agents handle more of the heavy lifting, keeping design locked in a Figma file looks like painting watercolors of a pot instead of throwing clay on the wheel. Claude Design bets on taking HTML and JavaScript as its foundation rather than wrapping a rigid schema in a “just vibes” interface. It plugs directly into Claude Code, and you can import your Git repos straight into the design tool. In practice, this means design and implementation live in a single conversational loop. If you tweak a button or adjust a grid, the code updates itself. And vice versa: code changes can be reflected immediately in your layout. That cuts out the painful back-porting work we’ve all done trying to sync Figma files with production code. On the other side of the fork sits a pure exploration environment. Think of a tool where you drop rectangles, blend modes and gradients without any system constraints. It could run on an iPad with Pencil support or look and act more like Photoshop, finally tapping into compositing and metal-level shaders. No CSS ceilings, no variable aliases to chase down—just straight-up artistic freedom. While Claude Design goes hard on code as the source of truth, this other path goes equally hard in the opposite direction. If you’re at Figma, you might read this and recognize your own locked-in system. If you’re at Sketch, it’s an open call to add particle effects, mesh transforms or metal shaders and stop coasting on native macOS appeal. Either way, designers face a choice: stay inside the Figma ecosystem or explore a split future where code-first and pure-play creativity each get their own tailored tools.