I was working on a complex webpage for an Angular design harness/sandbox I'm testing as a new way to share designs with devs (see previous post) using actual Storybook components. I fired up Kiro, connected the Figma MCP, and expected magic. Instead, I got a chokehold.
The Agent was gasping for air, unable to ingest the full page context. I was stuck spoon-feeding it sections of the design. It was tedious.
The Pivot (The Model Swap) 🔄
I turned to Reddit (the real documentation — lol) and was told to swap the brain. I switched the Agent to Claude Opus 4.6 and forced Kiro to use the Figma Desktop Server (Local) instead of the cloud. Result: The floodgates opened. The design context poured in.
The Trap (The Death Loop) ☠️
But then, a new problem. The data was too big. It blew out the context window, causing Kiro to enter a loop:
- Context full.
- Open new window.
- Re-call the design tool.
- Context full again.
- Repeat.
I was watching my credits burn in an infinite loop.
The Fix (The "Manual Override") 🛠️
I realized I had to stop the Agent from using its own tools.
- Stop: I killed the loop.
- Scrape: I copied the raw design context from a previous chat.
- Freeze: I pasted that blob into a design-context.txt file in the project folder.
- Command: I told Kiro: "Do NOT call the Figma tool. Read design-context.txt as your source of truth."
The Outcome ✅
It worked perfectly. Kiro read the text file instantly (no API overhead), didn't burn tokens re-fetching, and generated the best code I've seen yet. I hear this is also called "context freezing" — and I inadvertently discovered it.
The Takeaway
As a UX designer armed with AI, having the Figma MCP connection MUST work, especially on long complicated forms. I realized that sometimes, the job isn't just prompting the AI — it's recognizing when the tool is stuck and manually building the bridge it needs. It wasn't the elegant, automated future I was promised, but a simple text file got the build done.
#UXEngineering #Kiro #Figma #Claude #AIWorkflow #DebugLog #WebDev