Claude and Figma: bulk edits that don't break your file

I asked an agent to swap one colour value across a file. It did. It also rewrote the line that defined the value in the first place, so the definition now pointed at itself. Nothing errored. Nothing warned. The instruction ran perfectly, which is the whole problem. Every one of these has the same shape A single condition matched more than I meant, and everything that matched got changed. The second one I still think about: hiding a set of shadow rectangles also hid a keyboard, because the keyboard's parts satisfied exactly the same single condition. Again no error, again a clean report of success. Once you see the pattern it's everywhere. It isn't a model being careless. It's an instruction that was less precise than it felt while writing it, executed with total literalness by something that has no idea what any of these objects are for. The rule: scope, and two conditions, never one Name the region it may touch. Not "the file" — this section, these frames, this layer group. Then give it two properties that must both be true. Not "everything with this colour" but "everything with this colour, inside this region, that is a fill rather than a definition". The second condition is doing the real work: it's what stops the match spreading into things that happen to share one attribute. It's a small amount of extra writing. It's the difference between a change and an incident. It cannot see the result — that's the fixed constraint An agent writes the change, the change renders somewhere it has no eyes on, and it reports success based on the instruction completing rather than the outcome being right. People treat that missing feedback loop as a tooling problem, something that will be solved in a future version. I don't think it is one. It's a sequencing problem, and sequencing is available today. The loop can't be closed by the agent. Fine. It can still be closed by a person — just not a hundred times. One, then all Run the operation on a single representative case. Render