Figma just made a move that changes who gets hired in tech | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

Figma‘s (FIG) new partnership with Anthropic looks like a productivity upgrade on the surface. Look closer, and it starts to feel like something else entirely.

The two companies announced Tuesday a feature called Code to Canvas, which takes interface code generated by Anthropic’s Claude and converts it into fully editable design components directly inside Figma. No manual rebuilding. No back-and-forth between engineers and designers. The AI produces a starting point, and Figma makes it instantly usable.

For senior staff, that sounds like a dream. For junior designers and entry-level front-end developers, it raises harder questions about where the first rungs of the career ladder are going.

What Code to Canvas actually does

The feature works by connecting Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic coding tool, to Figma through what is known as a Model Context Protocol server.

When Claude generates a working interface, teams can bring it straight into the Figma canvas and keep refining it there.

For product teams, the immediate benefits are hard to argue with:

Designers can compare layout variations side by side without manually rebuilding each one from scratch.
Developers spend more time on performance, logic and integration work instead of basic page scaffolding.
Stakeholders can comment on actual built interfaces rather than rough approximations, speeding up approvals.

Figma’s bet is that agentic coding tools have not killed the need for design. They have made it more central. The question is who gets to do that design work going forward, and at what level of experience.

The work that quietly disappears

In most product teams, entry-level designers spend a significant chunk of their time turning rough code or wireframes into polished Figma components.

Junior front-end developers handle the first pass at translating design systems into working code, especially for marketing pages, settings screens and internal tools.

Code to Canvas compresses that loop considerably. When AI can generate a passable layout and Figma can ingest the output directly, junior workers are no longer handed a blank canvas. They are handed something that already exists and told to clean it up.

That shift sounds subtle. But it matters for careers.

Early in a job, those repetitive, lower-risk tasks are exactly where people learn the craft and demonstrate they can own more complex work.

According to IEEE Spectrum, overall programmer employment in the US fell 27.5% between 2023 and 2025. Entry-level hiring has dropped nearly 50% in the same period.

Tools like Code to Canvas accelerate that trend by moving the starting point further along, leaving less surface area for new entrants to learn by doing.

What it means for hiring and wages

For employers, this kind of automation creates options that are hard to ignore in a tight budget environment.

A team that once needed two junior hires to handle production design and basic UI can now lean on AI and fewer experienced staff to supervise the output.

That pressure tends to show up in predictable ways:

Slower hiring for entry-level design and front-end roles as teams find they can do more with fewer people.
A rise in short-term contract work, replacing what were once full-time junior positions.
Downward pressure on starting salaries, with median software role pay already down nearly 9% year-over-year in the US and UK.

A Resume.org survey of 1,000 US business leaders found that 6 in 10 companies are likely to lay off employees in 2026, with four in 10 planning to replace workers with AI.

More Employment:

Senior designers and engineers who can direct AI tools and set quality standards remain in demand. The squeeze falls hardest on those who would have previously been asked to build the fourth or fifth variation of a screen that now arrives from a prompt.

The bigger picture for Figma and investors

Figma needs this partnership to work. The company’s stock has fallen roughly 85% from its post-IPO peak of $142.92 reached in August 2025, wiping out more than $50 billion in market value. The stock now trades near $21, just below its $33 IPO price.

The sell-off reflects a real fear on Wall Street that AI tools will make Figma’s core product less necessary, not more.

Anthropic’s products have been at the center of what traders are calling the “SaaSpocalypse,” a broad sell-off in software stocks driven by fears that AI is eating the workflows these companies were built around.

By partnering with Anthropic rather than competing against it, Figma is making the argument that the design layer stays essential even as AI generates more of the underlying code.

Whether that argument holds depends on how quickly AI tools keep improving and how many teams decide they can skip the design refinement step altogether.

Code to Canvas does not remove designers or front-end engineers from the loop. It narrows the space where new entrants can learn by doing, especially on projects that do not justify a large human team. For Figma and Anthropic, that is a footnote. For the junior workers watching from the outside, it is the whole story.