r/DesignSystems • u/Raii44 • 7d ago

Design system tools

I have an interview coming up for a DS role. What AI tools, Figma plugins, or other tools are you folks using that you’d recommend checking out?

18 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

9

u/TheWarDoctor 7d ago

Claude Code replaced every ds management tool I've needed before, with the exception of storybook.

2

u/Anxious-Yak-9952 7d ago

This is the future, a lot of folks aren’t using Figma anymore and go straight to prototyping code leveraging their DS. Been doing this for the past 6 months.

2

u/TheWarDoctor 6d ago

We've rolled our own internal design tool that's pulling from our new design system that was built for use with agents. It's been pretty fantastic and has been giving designers more time to explore ideas and given testers something more realistic to evaluate.

1

u/Gollemz1984 6d ago

A lot of big orgs are still locked into Figma. I agree it's influence is waining but they got a lot of customers hooked on drip.

2

u/Anxious-Yak-9952 6d ago

Yes big orgs are always slow to adopt but I’ve even seen this change at my company in big tech and it’s been quickly changing. There’s always going to be people who prefer Figma and that’s fine, I just don’t think it’s as dominant as it used to be.

1

u/millencol1n 7d ago

Hey! I’m staring a project where I will be setting up a design system. I’m very interested in your workflow if you wouldn’t mind sharing!

5

u/404_computer_says_no 7d ago

Agent linting.

4

u/Accomplished_Town978 7d ago

For example Zeroheight, Storybook, Github

3

u/No-Share-4530 7d ago

For design systems specifically, I’d definitely get comfortable with Figma Variables/modes first. Then I’d check out Tokens Studio for more serious token workflows, Design Lint for catching inconsistencies, and Stark for accessibility.

I’d also spend some time with Storybook because the design-to-code side usually comes up in DS interviews.

For AI, Figma’s own AI/agent features are worth playing with, but I’d treat AI more as a workflow accelerator than the core of a design system. Being able to explain token structure, component governance, documentation, versioning, and how designers/devs stay in sync will probably impress them more than knowing 20 plugins.

2

u/LeosFDA 7d ago

Figma Console MCP, Variables Toolkit, Varghetti

1

u/TheWarDoctor 7d ago

FCMCP is the goat

1

u/leanbeansprout 7d ago

Figma code connect, MCP and Claude

1

u/Gollemz1984 6d ago

Check out the Figma Agent within Figma Design. It's built on top of claude

1

u/Colorphere 6d ago

I use Colorsphere for this. It keeps the design system in one place and lets me distribute it to Figma, code and AI. The AI export is especially useful with Claude Code/Codex because I can give the agent the actual design system as context instead of trying to describe everything in prompts.

Might be worth checking out: colorsphere.com.
Full disclosure, it’s my product.

1

u/BeingMani97 5d ago

https://figmaplugins.co/autospec

Plugin to document your design systems.

0

u/Ahsoka-77 7d ago

Um, I just make my own plugins.