Can AI copy
Figma
A design tool that runs in a browser and lets a room full of people edit the same file at once.
Nice try
- Verdict
- Nice try
- Time to copy
- you won't
- Category
- ◳ Design tools
- Source
- Proprietary
The prompt
Written to be pasted straight into an agent with no editing. It describes the whole job, including the parts that will go wrong.
Build a browser-based vector editor. Canvas rendered with WebGL, a scene graph with nested frames and groups, vector pen tool with bezier editing, boolean operations, auto-layout with flexbox semantics, reusable components with overrides, and real-time multiplayer editing over CRDTs with presence cursors. Target 60fps on documents with 10,000 nodes. Budget several years.
What copies cleanly
- The layer panel, the toolbar, the inspector. The chrome around the canvas is ordinary UI work.
- A single-user vector editor with shapes, boolean ops and export. That is a real weekend project.
- Comments, sharing links, a component browser.
Where it stops
- The canvas is a custom rendering engine compiled to WebAssembly, not a div tree, and the moment you try to keep sixty frames per second on a file with ten thousand nodes you discover why.
- Multiplayer editing needs conflict-free replicated data types applied to a scene graph, which is a research problem before it is an engineering one.
- Fonts, text shaping and vector boolean operations are each their own multi-year speciality.
- Correctness compounds. A rounding error in a corner radius is a bug report from a designer who noticed.
What actually protects them
- Roughly a decade of engineering in the parts nobody sees.
- Every design system in your industry is a file in their format.
- It is where the handoff conversation happens, so leaving is a team decision, not a personal one.
Editor's note
An agent will happily produce something that looks like Figma in one session. Open a file with real content in it and the illusion lasts about four seconds.
Somebody already did it
Go and look at the original
We would rather you formed your own opinion than took ours. They built the thing; we only measured it.
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