I Thought Figma MCP Could Recreate Any Design. I Was Wrong.

Introduction Since I started publishing articles on Dev.to, I've been working on a personal project to transform my old blog website—which is no longer actively maintained—into a portfolio site ♻️ As part of that project, I recently started learning Figma and UI design🎨 When I discovered Figma MCP , I imagined a future where generative AI could automatically create polished, modern, and visually appealing designs for me with minimal effort 😎 Unfortunately, reality turned out to be quite different . This article is a reflection on that experience and a reminder to my future self about what I learned along the way📝 TL;DR I wanted to design a portfolio website in Figma , but quickly realized that UI design was more difficult than I expected. I wondered whether using Codex and Figma MCP would allow me to outsource the design process to AI , so I decided to try it. I couldn't magically generate the polished design I had imagined while also maintaining a well-structured Figma file with globally managed variants and reusable components. I learned that defining design rules first and building components step by step helped produce results that were much closer to my original vision. Even then, the process was not dramatically easier than expected, so I eventually decided to keep things simple and build my portfolio around the design principles already provided by shadcn/ui . What I Tried with Figma MCP🎨 While planning the UI design for my portfolio website , I initially created simple wireframe-like layouts in Figma to explore the overall page structure and component placement before working on detailed designs. At first, I wanted to keep things simple. However, as I continued working on the project, I found myself wanting something more polished, more modern, and ultimately more impressive . The problem was that I have very little confidence in my design skills. I'm an in-house IT engineer, not a professional developer or designer, so I often struggle to judge what makes a