During my time at Google, Figma became the bridge between designers and engineers (RIP Sketch era). We built a few internal Figma plugins along the way—time-consuming enough to earn a spot on our weekly roadmaps.
I never really got to enjoy plugin development myself. I don’t write TypeScript often, even though I’ve dabbled in frontend work here and there. Never found the time to properly dive in. Plus, my personal Figma projects never hit the scale where design-engineering collaboration became a real pain point—until recently.
I was refreshing the brand for a side project and asked Claude to generate a design system. It came back with some solid options. I wanted to fine-tune things in Figma, knowing that once I nailed the designs, I could pull them directly via Figma MCP (sadly, write support isn’t there yet). To close the loop between engineering and design, I had Claude export the system in the DTCG design token format—figured I’d find a Figma plugin to import it.
I hate reinventing the wheel, so I searched for existing solutions. Tried the usual suspects: Token Studio (it’s a whole company?) and Design Token. They all want you to use specific formats—Amazon’s, or their own proprietary flavor. Token Studio claims DTCG support, but their plugin just… didn’t work. Normally I’d keep digging through search results. But with tools like Claude, I’ve started building my own when the first couple tries don’t land.
30 minutes later (plus some waiting for plugin approval), DTCG Design Token Manager was live and open sourced here. Clean implementation, simple user flow—like Claude Code in the early days, before the feature bloat set in :)
This whole experience echoes the SaaS debt conversation happening right now. As security and compliance tooling matures, I suspect a lot of operating margin will shift away from in-house builds and smaller players.