Friend of radical Martin Alderson is back with a deep analysis of why many conventional software systems are under attack by AI – exemplified by the example of Figma, the once-darling Adobe-killer (and failed acquisition target of said company). Anthropic launched their new Design tool, automating 80% of what Figma does – as part of their Claude app, no design skills required.
But the structural point is harder to wriggle out of. Figma has ~2,000 employees. Anthropic has ~2,500 total and I doubt Claude Design took more than a handful to build. Figma now needs to out-execute a competitor whose inference is ~free to them, whose marginal cost to ship is roughly zero, and who employs fewer people on the competing product than Figma has on a single pod. That’s a very hard position to pivot out of. This feels like a preview of where SaaS economics are heading. The companies that built big orgs on the assumption of steady seat expansion are going to find themselves competing with products built by tiny teams inside the frontier labs. Figma just happens to be the first big public name where one of their primary inference suppliers has started competing against them
