Design platform Figma has announced a major push toward bringing better guardrails to artificial intelligence in design, introducing a new Markdown-based editor, expanding access to code-driven features, and deeply integrating its recent open-source acquisitions. The announcements were made during the company’s first-ever Config event held in India, marking a significant milestone for the platform in one of its fastest-growing and most critical international markets outside the United States.
At the heart of the new product updates is a feature called Figma Specs. Designed to help teams meticulously define their brand’s design language, Specs is a Markdown editor that allows organizations to establish clear rules, reference materials, and guidelines in a straightforward format. This document can then act as a centralized point of reference for both human design teams and automated AI agents operating within the platform.
According to Figma, Specs can exist either as a standalone file or co-exist directly within the workspace canvas. Beyond functioning as a traditional text editor, it allows users to reference other Figma elements scattered across the canvas, embed interactive FigJam diagrams, and integrate complex code layers and raw designs. By establishing this centralized repository of brand rules, design libraries, and code guidelines, the company aims to curb the unpredictable tendencies of artificial intelligence.
The introduction of Figma Specs comes on the heels of the company rolling out its on-canvas agent to a much wider user base over the past week. Because generative AI systems are inherently non-deterministic, providing tools to steer them toward predictable, brand-compliant outcomes has become an industry-wide priority. With Specs, organizations now have a structured way to enforce consistency, ensuring that both proprietary in-house agents and third-party tools strictly adhere to a company’s established visual and functional rules when generating new assets.
Alongside the Markdown editor, Figma is advancing its experimentation with code on the canvas. The company has officially moved its code layers feature into public beta, following an initial private beta phase that was first announced back in June. Code layers inject actual coding directly into visual designs on the canvas, paving the way for significantly more interactive and dynamic prototypes.
Using this functionality, designers and developers can ask the on-platform agent to automatically translate a static visual design into functional code, or conversely, prompt the system to modify specific segments of code to iterate rapidly on an existing prototype. This capability underscores a shifting paradigm in how digital products are conceptualized, built, and tested.
Elaborating on the philosophy behind these developer-centric updates, Figma’s chief design officer, Loredana Crisan, pointed to a profound shift in software creation brought on by automation.
"We see Figma as the place where software teams come to decide what they build and ship," Crisan noted. "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. 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."
To further extend its ecosystem, Figma announced that it is now supporting over 20 new tools through its Model Context Protocol (MCP). Among the newly supported integrations are Open Code, Dia, Grok Bot, and Sarvam, an emerging artificial intelligence startup based in India. These integrations are intended to make the platform more interoperable with the broader landscape of developer tools and AI models.
The company also highlighted deeper integration plans for Payload, the open-source headless content management system that Figma acquired last year. Payload is now being tightly integrated with Figma Make, a product geared toward generating dynamic websites and directly managing live content. Demonstrating the growing traction of the tool, Figma shared that Payload’s software downloads have surged sixfold over the last 12 months.
The choice of India for Figma’s landmark Config event reflects the region’s mounting importance to the San Francisco-headquartered company. Late last year, Figma established its first official corporate office in India, scaling up local operations across sales, strategic partnerships, go-to-market strategies, and product support.
Figma revealed that India currently stands as its largest user market outside of the United States. Furthermore, the platform’s footprint has grown substantially among corporate heavyweights in the region, with Figma now being utilized by 40% of the top 100 companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange.
