Should designers hand over code instead of Figma files?

For years, what we handed over was one step before the product. Now it’s almost the product.

What gets lost in a Figma handoff?

When we delivered Figma files, things leaked out in two places.

The first was understanding. We wrote notes. We recorded videos for interactions Figma couldn’t show. Clients still got confused about how a feature or a flow was supposed to work. A static file shows how something looks. It doesn’t show how it behaves.

The second was the build. Figma has dev mode, inspect, all the tools, and something still came out different. Sometimes it was obvious: the wrong colour, a different padding, a missing gap. Sometimes it was subtle: the easing on an animation, or a small unique interaction that made the whole design work. Those were always the first things to go.

What changes when designers ship code?

Now we ship a working front end. The flow looks and works the way the end user will see it and use it.

That changed how we work with clients. We don’t explain anymore. No “when you click here, this appears there.” We just say: try it.

Founders and their teams click through it on day one. Either we nailed it, or we see the problem straight away. The feedback loop went from days to minutes.

What do engineers get?

The client’s engineers take our repo. It has the whole front end.

If they have a design system, we build on it, so there’s nothing to translate. Most early teams don’t have one yet, so we also give them a prompt that maps what we built onto the variables and components they already use.

What’s left for them is the backend: connect the API, populate the data, make sure it’s sent where it should go. Implementation time drops a lot.

The point

Designers used to hand over a picture of the product and hope it survived the build. Now the design is the build, minus the data.

Nothing leaks, because there’s nothing left to translate.