from Hacker News

Figma's not a design tool – it's a Rube Goldberg machine for avoiding code

by tannhaeuser on 3/24/25, 2:32 PM with 2 comments

• by someothherguyy on 3/24/25, 2:54 PM

  > They pat themselves on the back, believing they’ve mastered digital design. Meanwhile, a developer glances at the file, sighs, and codes the button in five minutes.

  No one is translating a thoroughly specified design into code from scratch in five minutes?

  > developers “never implement their vision correctly.”

  No surprise the author goes into this shortly after?

  Overall, it sounds like this author likes to downplay the expertise of others. Then places an expectation on them that they learn to develop software?

• by tannhaeuser on 3/24/25, 3:44 PM

  To be honest, CSS is hardly the pinnacle of expressing a design either, and can in fact be viewed as just another type of Rube Goldberg machine. The question is whether Figma gets something right that CSS doesn't, if only a model more amenable to tool-asisted visual modelling.