Figma’s New Dev Mode MCP Ai - Big Deal for Design Systems (Resources Included)

Into Design Systems Team

Jun 9, 2025

Design Systems help teams create consistent, scalable products. But one big challenge remains: getting designs into code accurately and efficiently.

Until now, AI coding tools like GitHub Copilot often had to guess what your designs meant.

The result?

Code that didn’t match your components, tokens, or theming. You’d spend time fixing mismatches, duplications, or inconsistencies.

This is where Figma’s new Dev Mode MCP server changes the game.

What is it?

In simple terms:
👉 It’s a way for AI tools to read your exact Design System context directly from Figma.

Instead of guessing from a screenshot, they now understand:

which component you used
which Design Token (color, spacing, etc.) applies
what variants or responsive behavior is intended
how your system is structured

Why does this matter for you?

1️⃣ Smarter, faster developer handoff

Your developers (or AI tools helping them) can now pull the correct component and tokens right into code without guessing.

2️⃣ Preserve Design System integrity

If you’ve invested time aligning design and code with Tokens, Variables, and Components this ensures that structure is used correctly in code generation.

3️⃣ Reduce rework and bugs

No more “Why does this red button look different from the one in the library?”
By giving AI the right context, the output matches what you designed.

4️⃣ Scale design-to-code automation

As tools get better at automation, this foundation lets you scale without losing control or quality.

A simple example

Old way:

AI sees a red rectangle and guesses which red token to use → often wrong.

New way with MCP:

Figma tells the AI: “Use color-primary-500 token.”
Now, the AI outputs code with the right variable.

The big picture

For Design System designers, this means:
✅ Less manual checking of developer output
✅ More accurate use of your tokens and components
✅ Stronger alignment between Design and Code
✅ A more scalable and future-proof workflow

And this is just the beginning Figma plans deeper integrations to make this even more powerful.

👉 In short: If you want your Design System to truly scale from Figma into code, learning how MCP works is worth your time.

It’s a new opportunity to move from "handoff" to seamless "design-informed code generation.

If you’re curious to go deeper or want to try the MCP server yourself, here’s a list of useful resources, guides and tutorials to get you started!

Resources to Dive Deeper

Here are some great resources and tutorials to help you get started with Figma’s Dev Mode MCP server:

🚨 Important

To fully benefit from this new workflow, you should first have strong foundations in place: Design Tokens, Variables, documentation, accessibility, and developer handoff.

Without these, AI tools may use your components incorrectly or generate faulty implementations.

🙌 Great news: At Into Design Systems we offer 20+ hours of hands-on, practical content on exactly these topics.

Learn the foundations from practical examples, taught by leading Design System experts.
Master Design Tokens, Variables, Accessibility, Documentation, and Developer Handoff with 20+ hours of actionable content.

👉 Get access to all recordings now