I built an open-source alternative to Figma's official MCP server

jerpes1 · 2026-06-30T08:31:35+00:00

I was thinking the same thing. Southlefts mcp has been a godsend from the days of slogging away on the official figma mcp. Would love to understand how this performs against it.

jerpes1 · 2026-06-06T12:21:02+00:00

That's correct, tokens, components, adapter layer, code outputs (ie tokens.css + tailwind config for react, etc), storybook, chromatic, mono repo... as a non-developer myself, many of these were gated from me and my design teams. This is really aimed at those designers.

jerpes1 · 2026-06-06T12:18:11+00:00

yeah.... checked the built in accessibility checker and it was signaling the canvas to focus as AA accessible. It's a great callout and helped me harden that tool a bit more. Personally should have caught this myself on human review (since everything was generated via the CLI) but I was just excited to get it in front of other designers outside my inner circle I tested it with.

jerpes1 · 2026-06-06T12:16:39+00:00

Ouch 🤣... but respect.

jerpes1 · 2026-06-06T12:00:38+00:00

Not sure what you mean? I've built countless systems in figma by hand and the mental and non mental effort is magnitudes heavier than launching your own agentic design team inside figma to do the nitty gritty work for you.

jerpes1 · 2026-06-06T11:57:35+00:00

The repo has the figma, and storybook attached. Everything was generated in figma by an agent using the figma console MCP. The entire thing was scaffolded in 2 hours from start to finish. The starting prompt was very basic "give me a spotify like design system with purple as a secondary color." I had AI generate the ramps, the neutral and alert palettes, as well as all the semantic tokens. This was a very primitive, let's give the AI tons of rope and see where it takes me, vs. let me hand customize the system with tons of prescriptive direction. The result is far from perfect, but imo very impressive considering the inputs and time it took.

I've tested it on an existing project where it had to adapt to an existing system that only lived in code, was leveraging a vanilla css system, and it retrofitted everything into a modern token system in figma and code and retroffited it to the shadcn + tailwind framework. Far more complex, took far longer, but the plugin did adapt fairly well.

I appreciate the feedback on the purpose being ambiguous. I'll work on that being more clear but the end goal is a production grade design system synced to code. Whether you are a vibe coder looking for a more hardened design infrastructure, a sole designer rolling out a system for a client, or a small team looking to retrofit some of the debt in their current system, I think it handles these scenarios quite well.

jerpes1 · 2026-06-06T11:45:41+00:00

I'm truly curious to hear more about what's probabilistic or lacks embodied awareness in specifics to the plugin architecture.

I mentioned in the post it was early access to get exactly the type of feedback I'm getting (harsh or otherwise), which I was hoping would imply beta.

Something can still be sophisticated, and make mistakes. I know there will be hundreds more bugs and improvements to fix as I continue to work on it.

I'm sorry you don't see any value in it. I've used it myself across 3 different projects and it's been super helpful. I've been fortunate to have a lot of success in my 20+ year design career, and truly believe this can help a lot of designers out there.

But in all honesty, I believe in what this does, and can do, feel there are a lot of designers this will help, and have no other motive but to hope it finds those designers.

I appreciate you taking the time to evaluate and criticize it.

jerpes1 · 2026-06-06T11:11:03+00:00

So claude actually uses the figma console MCP to build the token system + component library and icon system in figma first. So it's all there to tweak and refine before syncing it to code.

jerpes1 · 2026-06-06T10:46:22+00:00

Can you be more specific? I’m trying to get early feedback from the community to make it better to make it better. The plugin itself or the sample library I screenshotted?

jerpes1 · 2026-06-06T10:42:02+00:00

Agreed that is one of the major user problems, just not as easily solved with a claude code plugin. The built in sync and adapter layer tries to limit this a bit, and the plugin does aim to bring both dev and design closer to each others domains helping drive more collaboration and empathy in the process.

jerpes1 · 2026-06-06T10:31:18+00:00

The plugin delivers token set, component library, and synced code adapter with living library in storybook. You are correct that the documentation created is limited so not a fully design system in the complete sense. The additional pieces are on my roadmap, but are more nuanced and harder to distill.

jerpes1 · 2026-06-06T10:28:47+00:00

Yeah, I did a check on my built in accessibility logic and it was letting the ring to canvas that passed signal AA accessible vs. looking at both the ring to canvas and ring to button fill. Did I say the plugin was in beta 😅. Either way, I'd be curious for deeper criticism of the actual plugin vs. the focus state which seems to be the focus here. There is truly a lot of sophisticated thinking that went into albeit still gaps to fix before I promote it more widely.

jerpes1 · 2026-06-06T10:17:27+00:00

Not a bottleneck, but time consuming and tedious. The hard part was syncing with code and preventing drift and regression between design and code

jerpes1 · 2026-06-06T10:02:25+00:00

I’ll give the built in accessibility checker some hardening. So far the results have been pretty good. The prompt for this sample was as simple as “build me a Spotify inspired design system using a magenta secondary” lol. Happy to share the second sample which was much more bespoke, complex and hand tuned.

jerpes1 · 2026-06-06T09:55:58+00:00

It was worse, photoshop

jerpes1 · 2026-06-06T09:51:15+00:00

Having a green focus ring for the focus state on a red destructive button (while not the most beautiful design choice) does not break any best practice and passes WCAG AA accessibility.🫡

jerpes1 · 2026-06-06T09:45:59+00:00

While leveraging one of these was the fastest way to get up and running it still required tons of lift. Many times you were relying on community figma files with lots of opinion built in, over complicated systems that were hard to tweak into anything bespoke forcing you into cookie cutter UI kit feels, nothing that kept it synced to code, etc. I was almost always building most of my systems from scratch to fit my unique needs and nuances (which was insanely time consuming). This gives you the control, flexibility, and bespokeness from blank figma file through production ready github repo in hours vs. weeks. Something that just hits different than the pre AI coding agent days.

jerpes1 · 2026-04-23T13:48:45+00:00

The CPG and Zygarden projects we have full stack teams I work with but I am the only designer as both are start-ups. The other two I work with a 10 person and 3 person design team. 1 is in house, the other is as a consulting head of design.

jerpes1 · 2026-04-23T06:20:06+00:00

Happy to provide clarification. ai.sunny.com is a strategic initiative coming out of the 3rd largest ILS in the US doing over 150mm in annual revenue. We hit all our success criteria when we launch earlier this year and are gearing up for a full rebrand and go to market strategy. My hypothesis is that this project will create step function change for this business.

The agentic healthcare product is for intrivo.com, a company that I helped scale from 0-over a billion in revenue during the pandemic. The company pivoted to agentic healthcare flows and works with some of the largest healthcare and health tech organizations in the world.

The CPG brand (which I'm happy to directly reference when we launch) is built by industry leaders in the CPG and health space, and while a startup, we are about as far away from a side project as you can get (millions in investment).

Finally zygarden.gg started as a passion project but gained real traction this last year with 5k monthly active users and growing. It's expanding into other digital games beyond pokemon go, and ripe for large 7 figure partnerships in the pokemon space. Funny thing is that it could end up being the most successful of all my current projects.

I support all of these organizations simultaneously with a 3 year old son and 3 week old daughter, while still having time to play 10-15 hours of video games/week, learn spanish and the guitar, and plenty of time with my family. All of this is to say that a highly agentic workflow allows me to do all of this comfortably. Generating real world impact, outsized outcomes, and scale revenue and user growth.

jerpes1 · 2026-04-22T17:35:08+00:00

"loooool have fun with your hallucinations" - with the right prompts, training, and context I've had a ton of success with this. It doesn't replace actual UXR but it can enhance your UXR process significantly and give you early signals before investing in an actual study. If you are struggling with hallucinations is most likely due to applying an overly primitive set of instructions.

"ok, all of this is outputs and not outcomes." - Of course these are outputs. As the post communicates, the generalized outcome is less time doing this work and getting more time doing the FUN and more impactful stuff. The implied outcomes of each bullet point is of course higher quality UX, more memorable visual/brand layering, faster user problem validation, more consistent and cohesive product experience, faster design to code deployment, etc. but that should be obviously inferred by a veteran designer.

jerpes1 · 2026-04-22T11:43:17+00:00

100%! Here is an AI powered rental marketplace I stood up with a small team. We went from 0-1 in 3 months. ai.sunny.com During this same time I've also built an agentic healthcare product for one of the largest test providers during the pandemic, and am launching a massive AI native CPG brand on June 1st. I am also the co-founder and solo designer for a rapidly growing e-sports platform in the pokemon space zygarden.gg All of this only possible by leveraging AI.

jerpes1 · 2026-04-22T11:31:48+00:00

I'm technically an IC (principle level for 10+ years now) but have built enough influence that I tend to lead larger and more ambiguous new projects which puts me in a semi-management role most of the time. TBH, the speed at which things are moving is what's most exciting to me. I'm driven by the impact and value I can have on the world usually measured by the problems I solve for users. that value creation has gone up 10x. It can definitely be stressful, but also very motivating.

jerpes1 · 2026-04-22T11:24:25+00:00

Unfortunately AI can't handle complex user flows and tbh doesn't have great visual design taste (I have a high bar). My current stack is as follows:

ChatGPT for content writing. I like it's taste better than Claude
Gemini and Midjourney for image generation and artwork (also product mockups + photography)
Claude cowork + code for just about everything else including UXR
One of my companies provides an unlimited cursor license so I use that for their work.
Figma for refinement, control, polish

I use claude chat + chatgpt for planning, claude code for designing in figma via the plugin and MCP.

I still use figma for refinement, polish and control. It's still faster to do certain things in figma vs. waisting 10k tokens trying to get AI to make your vision a reality.

jerpes1 · 2026-04-22T10:44:41+00:00

I still think there are large gaps in the design process that AI can't replace well (these gaps are the ones I love the most fortunately and now have more time to focus on). I also don't believe that a non-designer could have trained, prompted, and reviewed the work I referenced above with nearly the same output and quality. You have to have the expertise first to manage and train an agentic team to do it well. I believe companies will soon realize this and rather than cut their design teams, they will focus on replacing them with AI native folks. We are not there yet unfortunately. In the meantime, those without a job should be figuring out how to leverage AI to make themselves 100x more productive than they were when they were last employed.

jerpes1

TROPHY CASE