Building the Engine While Flying the Plane: Launching the Figma MCP Server — Jesse Lumarie, Figma

Jesse Lumarie from Figma built the company's first MCP server (a standardized way for AI models to connect to tools) as a side project over approximately three months.

The team faced challenges including specification changes mid-development and uneven MCP standard support across different clients. They tested three ways to represent Figma's canvas for AI models and chose React and Tailwind, assuming AI had trained most on those. They quickly discovered that sending images in base64 format consumed too much of AI models' memory capacity. A bigger issue was that companies didn't want beautifully generated UI code but their own accessible and internationalized code, so they developed Code Connect which points to actual components instead. After doing hand-calculated evaluations in a spreadsheet once, they began running hundreds of automated tests per week.

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