figmascope vs Locofy
Generated Code or Structured Context?

Locofy does the obvious thing: take a Figma file, produce React. It's the natural first instinct. Designs in, code out. Why think harder?

Here's the honest answer: for some workflows, you shouldn't think harder. Locofy is fast and real. But the model has limits that compound as your codebase grows. figmascope takes a different bet — ship structure, let the agent handle codegen. Whether that bet pays off depends on what you're building and who's building it.

What Locofy does

Locofy is a Figma plugin (also available as a standalone app) that converts Figma designs into production-ish React, Next.js, Vue, HTML/CSS, or Tailwind code. You install the plugin, tag your layers with Locofy annotations (mark what's an input, a button, a container), run the export, and get component files you can paste into a project.

It supports responsive breakpoints, basic interaction states, and some asset handling. The output is meant to be a starting point, not final code — but for simple marketing pages or landing sections, it can get you 60-80% there without touching a text editor.

Locofy has a free tier with limited exports and paid plans for higher volume and team features. The plugin itself requires installation via the Figma Community and runs inside Figma's sandboxed plugin runtime.

Where Locofy wins

No agent required. You don't need Claude, Cursor, or any AI coding assistant. The conversion is self-contained inside the Locofy plugin. For a designer who wants to ship a landing page without involving a developer at all, Locofy can close that gap.

Fast first output. For simple layouts with few components, Locofy produces usable code in minutes. If you're prototyping or producing throwaway marketing pages, the speed is real.

Opinionated structure. Locofy makes decisions for you: here's your component tree, here's how props are named. That opinionation is a feature when you don't want to make those decisions yourself.

Framework-aware output. The code targets your stack directly. You're not getting generic JSON you then need to interpret — you're getting a .tsx file with import statements, hooks scaffolded, and CSS modules or Tailwind classes already applied.

Where Locofy loses

One-shot, not iterative. Locofy produces a snapshot. When the design changes — and designs always change — you re-run the plugin and reconcile the new output with your existing codebase. There's no diff model. You're merging machine output against human output by hand, which gets expensive fast.

Locked to Locofy's opinions. The framework choice, the component naming conventions, the prop signatures — these come from Locofy's model, not from your codebase's conventions. If you have a design system with specific component APIs, Locofy doesn't know about them. It generates its own. You spend time reconciling Locofy-land with your-codebase-land.

Plugin dependency. Every developer who wants to run an export needs the plugin installed, a Locofy account, and access to the Figma file. It doesn't fit into a CLI workflow, a CI pipeline, or a non-Figma-user's environment.

Annotation overhead. Getting good output from Locofy requires designers to add Locofy-specific tags to layers. This is tooling debt: the annotations have to be maintained, they add noise to the Figma file, and they mean nothing outside of Locofy.

Black box. The codegen logic is proprietary. When the output is wrong — and sometimes it is wrong — you can't see why. You tweak layer names, re-run, hope. There's no intermediate representation you can inspect or audit.

figmascope's different angle

figmascope doesn't generate code. It generates context.

The bundle — CONTEXT.md, tokens.json, screens/*.json, components/inventory.json, strings.json — describes the design precisely and lets your agent of choice do the codegen. That agent knows your codebase, your component APIs, your naming conventions, your test patterns. Locofy doesn't know any of that. Your agent does, because it's been reading your code.

The intermediate representation in screens/*.json captures layout semantics: stack vs. absolute vs. overlay, component identity via componentId on INSTANCE nodes, and text strings via stringRef.key. When you tell Claude Code "implement this screen using our existing Button and Input components," it has the spatial structure, the component references, and the token names to do that correctly. It's not inferring from a screenshot — it's reading a spec.

Token sourcing cascades: Figma variables first (if the design system is wired up), inferred from frequency second (figmascope looks at what values repeat and promotes them), none if neither applies. The tokens.json output is typed and machine-readable. An agent can look up color.surface.brand directly rather than parsing a screenshot for a hex value.

This model is also iterative. When the design changes, you re-export the bundle and commit the new version. The diff in tokens.json or screens/login.json tells you exactly what changed. You hand the diff to the agent: "tokens.json changed — border-radius went from 8px to 6px across all interactive elements — update affected components." That's a targeted, diffable workflow. It doesn't require reconciling two sets of generated component files.

Why "structure for an agent" beats "code from a plugin" in 2026 for many teams

The premise behind Locofy — and tools like it — is that codegen from design is a solved or near-solved problem. Generate the code, fix it up, ship it. This worked better when the "fix it up" step was cheap.

The reality in 2026: your AI coding agent is very good at writing idiomatic code in your codebase if it has good context. It's bad at reconciling its own output with Locofy's output when they conflict. Giving your agent structured, inspectable context and letting it do the full codegen — in your conventions, against your components — produces less reconciliation work, not more.

Locofy's output is also framework-final. Once you have a JSX component from Locofy, you're editing JSX. figmascope's output is framework-neutral. The same bundle works with Claude Code writing React, Aider writing Vue, or Cursor writing Web Components. The agent chooses the idiom. The context stays constant.

Comparison

When Locofy is the right call

Be honest about this: Locofy earns its place for non-coding designers shipping marketing pages, landing sections, or throwaway prototypes. If you don't have an AI agent setup, don't want one, and just need a React file to hand to a contractor — Locofy does that job. The code is mediocre but it's there, and mediocre code you can ship beats perfect context your team can't act on.

It's also genuinely useful for rapid mockup validation: "does this layout produce sensible markup?" Run Locofy, look at the output, throw it away. Fast feedback without setting up a full agent workflow.

figmascope is the better choice when you're building production UI with an existing codebase, a design system with real tokens, and an AI coding agent in the loop. The bundle gives the agent the precision it needs to write code that fits your project — not generic boilerplate it needs to rewrite.