Comparison
Windcraft vs Figma Dev Mode
Dev Mode is a handoff surface: inspect a design, read the spacing, copy a snippet, see the variables behind a frame. It helps a developer translate one screen. Windcraft is what keeps the whole codebase — including everything the AI writes — on the system after that translation.
Figma Dev Mode acts at handoff, for a human reading a design and transcribing it. Windcraft acts at generation and at check: it feeds your tokens and contracts to AI tools as they write, and runs an analyzer over the code in CI. Dev Mode gets one screen specced correctly; Windcraft keeps the next hundred AI-generated screens from drifting. One is a reading surface, the other an enforcement layer.
How they compare
| Aspect | Figma Dev Mode | Windcraft |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Inspect designs and copy specs | Keep generated code on the system |
| When it acts | At handoff, a human reading specs | At AI generation, and in CI |
| AI coding tools | Snippets a person copies by hand | Values served to AI directly over MCP |
| Enforcement | None on the resulting code | Analyzer flags drift before commit |
When Figma Dev Mode is the right call
Dev Mode wins whenever a developer needs to read a design accurately — pixel specs, redlines, the variables behind a component, a starting snippet. That is real value at the design-to-code seam. Windcraft picks up after: it makes sure the code that gets written, especially by AI, keeps matching the system instead of slowly leaving it. Use Dev Mode to read the design; use Windcraft to hold the code to it.
FAQ
- Is this a handoff tool?
- No. Windcraft does not replace inspecting designs in Figma. It operates on the code after handoff — feeding values to AI tools and checking the result — so the work stays on-system as the app grows.
- Can I use both?
- Yes. Dev Mode for reading the design, Windcraft for keeping the code aligned to it over time. They cover adjacent steps of the same workflow.
- Does Windcraft need Figma?
- No. Windcraft works entirely from your code-side tokens and contracts. If you design in Figma, the two complement each other, but Windcraft does not depend on it.