TJ Pitre
@tpitre
Product Architect, Design Systems @ Figma | AI & Design Systems | Founder, Southleft. Likes New Orleans and design systems. I have 3 kids.
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I love slots. I don't think people use them enough.
If your design system feels rigid, this is probably why.
Slots make it flexible without you having to predict every future need.
More here:
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If your design system check is another language model, you don't have a check. You have a second opinion.
Authority belongs to whatever layer can refuse deterministically, not whatever instructs loudest.
New piece:
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Heads up if anyone's thinking about SmashingConf this year: I'll be speaking and running a workshop at the Freiburg edition, Sept 7 to 10. Always a good crowd if you haven't been!
15% off if you want to go (works on conference, workshop, or bundle tickets):
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Figma Motion puts keyframes on the canvas, tied to components and variables. Motion is now a design system material.
I demoed driving it with an MCP: prompt → animation → motion values saved as variables → DTCG tokens.
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The most useful prompt I use for AI design work:
"What are you least confident in right now?"
AI is your biggest hype man. That question makes it second-guess itself and surfaces what you'd catch in review 3 days too late.
Full piece 👇
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Everyone’s selling “agentic design systems” as the cheap way to skip the hard part.
The hard part is the whole point.
New piece on the one word in that term that should worry you, even if you love agents (I do).
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Slots are so much better for Figma performance
Here's my recommendation for the iOS 26 kit, reducing the Segmented Control down from a 14 component variant set, down to a single component with two sub components!
(Note: this is a breaking change)
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Chrome extension for website -> Figma Design!
Some news: I'm joining @figma to work on AI and design systems.
The work I've been doing on the outside is now the inside work. Still a little surreal, mostly just excited to get to work!
A dozen grounded reads on design systems + AI from the past couple of weeks. Specs, research, honest reckonings, a few tools worth using.
AI doesn't replace your design system. It raises the cost of not having a good one.
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Check Designs: Keep every file synced to your design system with
→ Variable & style suggestions
→ Color contrast suggestions
→ Library mismatch detection
→ Detached component detection
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The native Figma MCP stays open on purpose. The Console MCP goes deep.
So I turned the 22 most useful Console MCP tools into skills the native MCP can run.
Take what's useful. They're all yours:
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Your design system docs look great. But can an agent read them?
A canvas frame comes back as a node tree it has to reconstruct. A description field comes back as clean markdown.
One is gorgeous. The other is queryable.
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Most AI design system demos cheat a little. They start with an existing codebase doing half the work.
So I tried it from a completely empty folder. Just a directory and a Figma file.
Here's how it went (including where Opus got a little ahead of itself):
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wdym of course there’s an agent right on the design canvas that’s fluent in Figma and native to the way your team works
Big day! We're moving along on the AI & DS course!! 🎉
TL;DR: Chapters 1 and 2 are live, 16+ hours of video, and the $500 preorder price ends EOD Tuesday May 26th.
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