Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?

I used to teach at a UX grad program where students were required to learn both design and development. But doing both on the same project was almost always a mistake -- the designer has to deeply understand and advocate for the end-user's mental model while the developer has to deeply understand the technical model and constraints. Attempting to do both often end up conflating them or compromising on at least one of them.

Sort of like how many lawyers are skilled enough to handle either prosecution or defense but few do both on the same case.

I think there's a Nielsen/Norman article on this but can't find it at the moment.

vs Worrying about creating some figmentary Figma imaginarium that wont translate well into the actual app

I do think there is a risk, it's just not of throwaway code (the effort of that throwaway is vastly smaller than what this path replaces). The risk is more how & where the future could be constrained. If the prototype starts becoming the app, there's some risk the prototype imposes poor app architecture. If the prototype starts becoming the app the effort to mock/prototype new ideas risks becomes higher.

I strongly agree with the parent about getting in there & trying things semi live, not being afraid to wade in. The component offerings are excellent today, don't wire most of them up, just throw them on the screen as best you can & put in minimal stitching or hardcode a forward/back through states.

The fear of this going bad is way outsized. The design industry needs to get where the puck is going & stop playing around with fancy abstract design tools.

A lot of commenters here are lamenting the practicality of modern design culture (which is often centered around figma) for smaller teams / earlier projects where collaboration may not be as much the bottleneck. The tool itself is still very useful for small team collaboration though, and for folks thinking through ideas without having to code them up.

Figma also pioneered putting complex tools into the browser. Today people take multiplayer and 60fps canvas for granted but Figma basically created the space. It was a humongous technical achievement and continues to be a very difficult thing to copy, though folks are obviously trying (e.g. Penpot).

AI conversion of components to code is WIP for all toolmakers but obviously on the roadmap. Another hard problem you're kind of trivializing here.

> why would I want to use figma when I could use a non-laggy product that can convert my designs to code?

Can you list some examples?

I'm not saying that I'm a unicorn and that my idea-to-code-to-design execution is flawless, but I certainly believe that in this situation, if I hadn't done it this way, I wouldn't have done it all. However, doing this would be wasteful or dumb in almost every other situation that requires my design output.

People pay for Figma precisely because it's a middle ground. It was a middle ground before, and it will continue to be unless something fundamental changes.