Home field advantage while working with Claude code

Fix something in Figma, switch to the terminal, describe the same fix to Claude, wait, check, go back to Figma. Again. And again. Working with AI should feel like working with a teammate that lives where designers already work together, in Figma comments.

I am making my portfolio (big whoop). After a year of mostly making physical things @ CIID, I was going back to the digital realm, for myself. Before CIID, I was a product designer @ Fynd, where Figma was my bread and butter.

While I was at CIID I watched workflows change at the pace of Lightning McQueen. Now people prompt design systems, designers work directly in code, and posts everywhere say Figma is dead.

Figma (or Paper, whatever you prefer), for me, is not dead, at least not for now. Craft needs control, and Figma gives me that. If your (insert favourite AI service here) takes three prompts and 15 minutes to change something you could do by hand in 2 minutes, then I think you are doing something wrong.

“Find solutions, not problems.”

Back to my portfolio. I started in Figma (quickly realised I needed AI to speed it up), connected the Figma MCP and prompted designs into Figma as the reference for the local HTML. That’s where the loop started.

Claude is like your design teammate (or your assistant, whichever you prefer), and this felt broken. I don’t walk to a designer’s desk for a change, then walk back to see the changes, then go back and talk about making it in HTML or pushing it to prod. WE do it IN Figma (in various ways). In the comments.

Developers already work this way. They tag @claude on a GitHub pull request, and it makes the change and replies in the thread. I wanted that loop on the canvas, where I work.

So I said to Claude - I am tired of this back-and-forth. Look at my Figma comments, see if I have tagged you (some are just for me, like “you are amazing” and “you’re doing great”), and do the task right there, and reply with what you have done.

Some comments I leave -

@claude I have improved the visual of this section. Can you replicate it wherever we have used this pattern?
@claude I have updated the text here. I want you to check for any grammar and spelling mistakes, correct them and push the changes to the live site.
@claude Can you get this in line with the design system we have been using?
@claude PLEASE clean up this file. It’s gotten too messy for me to look at.
@claude Are you okay? Are you getting tired?

Asking @claude to replicate a section everywhere and push it to HTML

On Curio, asking @claude in Hindi if it’s tired. It looked for a “get tired” setting and couldn’t find one.

Claude runs a cron that checks for @claude comments every 2, 5 (usually) or 10 minutes (depending on how actively I am working). For each one, it does the needful and replies in the thread with what it did. I have set it so that after three empty runs (no new comments mentioning it) it pauses itself, since it kept running when I wasn’t working (not many tokens, but still).

Not all of it works yet, and there are some other problems I might run into over time -

Claude can reply to a Figma comment but not resolve it, so I tick every thread off myself.
It polls, so it runs a few minutes behind. Not live, just close enough.
It needs a personal access token, which should never leave the session.

This gives me full creative control over the tiny, tiny, tiny details we love to obsess over as designers, with the power of Opus and Fable on the canvas I am most comfortable on.

It’s like playing a match at home instead of away.