AI tool comparison
Figma for Agents vs trellis-mac
Which one should you ship with? Here is the side-by-side panel verdict, pricing read, reviewer split, and community vote comparison.
Design Tools
Figma for Agents
AI agents can write directly to your Figma canvas — design system aware, brand-safe
75%
Panel ship
—
Community
Free
Entry
Figma has opened its canvas to AI agents via a new MCP server, moving from read-only design context to full write access. Through the use_figma MCP tool, agents running in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other MCP clients can now create and modify real Figma design assets anchored to your actual design system — using your components, variables, and tokens rather than hallucinating generic ones. A 'Skills' feature lets teams define agent behavior in plain markdown files — no plugin development required. Launched #1 on Product Hunt on April 14 with 263 followers. The beta is free; Figma hasn't figured out how to price agentic seat usage yet. The key design choice: agents are constrained to your actual design system tokens and components, so output is actually usable rather than a vibe-coded mockup you have to rebuild from scratch.
Creative Tools
trellis-mac
Run Microsoft's image-to-3D model natively on Apple Silicon — no NVIDIA needed
75%
Panel ship
—
Community
Free
Entry
trellis-mac is a community port of Microsoft's TRELLIS.2 image-to-3D model that runs entirely on Apple Silicon via PyTorch MPS — no NVIDIA GPU required. A single photo goes in, a 400,000-vertex mesh comes out in roughly 3.5 minutes on an M4 Pro, with no cloud dependencies. TRELLIS.2 is one of the strongest open-weights models for single-image 3D reconstruction, producing mesh quality that previously required either expensive NVIDIA hardware or cloud API calls. This port handles the MPS-specific tensor quirks and memory management that make running the model locally on Apple hardware nontrivial. The HN Show HN thread hit 84 points and generated active testing discussion, with multiple users confirming it runs as advertised on M1 Max and M2 Ultra hardware. For 3D artists, indie game developers, and VR/AR creators, the ability to generate production-quality meshes from reference photos on a MacBook is a meaningful workflow unlock. The bottleneck shifts from hardware access to the quality of your reference photography.
Reviewer scorecard
“Read-only design context was useful; write access is transformative. Agents constrained to your actual design system tokens means the output is actually usable. The Skills markdown API is elegant — no plugin overhead. Works with all major MCP clients out of the box. The free beta window is a good time to build institutional muscle.”
“Solid port work — handling MPS tensor compatibility for a model this complex isn't trivial. The 3.5-minute generation time on M4 Pro is competitive and the 400K vertex output is actually usable for game assets without heavy retopology.”
“Agents writing to your production design system is a liability without a robust approval layer. The review UX for design diffs is nowhere near as mature as code review. Design systems carry brand, accessibility, and legal implications. And 'free during beta' with warnings they haven't figured out pricing means workflows you build could get expensive fast.”
“The original TRELLIS.2 still runs faster and with higher fidelity on a dedicated NVIDIA GPU. 3.5 minutes is fine for experimentation but too slow for iterative production workflows. Also, single-image 3D reconstruction still has consistency issues with complex objects.”
“The design-to-code pipeline just collapsed. When agents can read your codebase, write to your Figma design system, and generate code from those designs in one loop — the distinction between design work and engineering work starts to blur. The Skills feature is forward-looking: it's essentially defining agent personas for different design contexts.”
“This is Apple Silicon democratization in action. The fact that state-of-the-art 3D generation now runs on laptop hardware means 3D assets will be generated ad-hoc at every creative workflow stage within two years.”
“For content creators who live in Figma but aren't engineers, this finally makes AI-assisted design feel native. Describing a layout and having the agent use my actual brand components — not generic boxes — is the thing I've been waiting for. Start with a non-production project until you understand how the agent behaves with your design system.”
“As a 3D artist, being able to photo-scan real objects on my Mac without a render farm or API is a genuine workflow breakthrough. The mesh quality from TRELLIS.2 is good enough to use as a base for sculpting and texturing.”
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