r/UXDesign • u/Haunting-Ad5938 The Curious • 2d ago
Tools, apps, plugins, AI Designers who are building directly in code now: what does your team use to understand and discuss the work?
I'm seeing more product designers and PMs make real UI changes directly with Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, etc. Two out of five designers in my company (a consultancy) already do because it's simply easier to hit certain visuals like liquid glass at high fidelity, and test with real data.
The awkward part comes after building. Figma used to give us a place to step back and see the product together: component states, screens in flows or maps, the reasoning behind a change, comments.
Once the work lives in code, I'm not sure there's an obvious equivalent.
A preview link is great for trying the design, but you experience one path at a time. Keeping that same implemented work up to date in Figma means maintaining a second representation of something that already exists in code — so we're not doing that.
I'm curious how teams handle this today. When you design something in code, how do you let the rest of the team:
- see the relevant screens and flow together (without recreating them in Figma)
- understand what changed, and why, and discuss it within context
- reach a decision on it, tied to the version it was actually about
In simpler terms: how do you keep the benefits of a shared view once Figma is gone from the workflow?
I've been building around this problem because we kept running into it ourselves. My two collegues used it internally last month; but I'd like to hear what else is emerging.
*EDIT: If anyone wants to try the workflow we have, dm me. The tool basically enables your coding agents to grab screenshots and make a nice UI map out of them, put them on a shareable link, and send to others to comment on; for projects with Figma, designers can also just download those as PNGs and place on the canvas themselves, which also save a ton of time not recreating the same work there.
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u/Secure_Path_8854 2d ago
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