3 min read
Three completely different setups get discussed as if they were one conversation, which is why so much advice lands wrong. Especially the just vibe it advice, which is fine in itself and no general answer. So what is your individual working situation and setup from solo to team, and what do you actually need? And why is all of this so confusing?
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Solo and small builders
Lovable, Bolt, v0, Figma Make. One copy of everything, living in one head, so no design system, no token mapping, no handoff, and barely any Figma. At that size it is the right call, and I use these tools myself for small one-off things and prototypes.
What I have a hard time with is the promise. Lovable has a security scan I liked, trusted and recommended to people, and a row level security finding still landed on generated apps, which they then fixed. The trouble with any scan is that it tells you a rule is there, not that the rule is right. What has not moved is the general answer in this area, that each customer accepts responsibility for protecting the data of their application. Standard, and normally fine, except this is the customer who was told no coding skills needed.
You cannot have it both ways, and that is not the tool's fault, the tools are good. Let us just stop pretending we can build empires with them.
The technical part worth considering: I went looking for a codebase size where these tools give up and there is no documented one. The limit is rather the day a second person has to work on it, because somebody now has to be told what is in there, and nobody ever wrote it down. You cannot hand over, or sensibly scale, what you cannot describe and do not know.
Enterprise
What they have is not a solved mapping but the awareness that drift exists, the budget to work on it, and evolving tooling to try. Code Connect now, component contracts next, which is the one I would bet on. Meanwhile it is plumbing and babysitting, and someone is paid to do it.
The middle
Twenty to two hundred people, which usually means three to ten designers and nobody whose job is the system.
They have the file, the MCP, the model, the codebase, maybe Storybook. That looks complete, and it is not.
Nothing in that stack says this Figma component is that code component. The MCP reads the file, the model writes code, and neither knows your Button already exists on the other side. So the agent does not maintain your design system, it re-derives it, which is drift with extra steps and a faster clock.
Build the wire then, Figma or Claude could ship one tomorrow. It is harder than that, because most of the wire is not generic. What has to travel is your naming, your structure, your component API, and which of your combinations are even legal. A vendor can ship pipes. Nobody can ship your agreements in the way we build now. And Figma was never built for this either.
Whoever works out how much of that can be generated rather than agreed takes the whole market.
If you sit in the middle and have found something that works, hit reply. That is the part I most want to hear about.
I will be running a free session where I go into more detail on different workflows for different teams and all the confusion around it. If you cannot make it, you will get a recording. Come along!
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