Show HN: Opus 5.5 made a fully featured Figma clone in 3 hours / 8 prompts
I think a chasm has been crossed. Opus 5.5 few shotted a fully working Figma for me. In the past year I have been trying to benchmark vibe coded apps and see how good they get and this week it did it with very very little guidance from me. I basically just told it reach feature parity. Prior to this vibe coded apps would resemble the real software, this is not a resemblance it's the real thing. As a casual Figma user in the past, I can't really see a difference. And if there is one you have an LLM that can on the fly operate the app or use it. P.S. I did this is on Mana which is our startup making it easier for LLMs to do it (probably the code is half of what would have been and there are primitives it can use but ultimately it's a testament to how good models have gotten). I went on to make google meets, docs, telegram, linear, etc. All basically with single prompts. The biggest jump has been in the UX understanding of models and attention to detail.
Discussion Highlights (13 comments)
kumama
i wonder whether these were in the training set for the models
anonymous908213
Nice advertisement. Truth doesn't matter, just poop out something that visually looks like the correct thing and use it to shill your harness.
drewbitt
My agent did it in one prompt: it git cloned https://github.com/open-pencil/open-pencil
shayanp
feels like magic! photoshop is there too :))
smy20011
> Claude wrote about 8,200 lines of React for the editor's core logic, including rendering, hit testing and undo. I'm pretty sure figma clone cannot be done in 8k lines. Are you only cloned part of the logic?
ConceitedCode
I feel like I'm missing something. Every time I attempt something similar, I end up with something that looks reasonable but doesn't hold up to scrutiny. To me, it feels like the models have become great at making demos more so than "fully featured clones". Admittedly, these demos keep getting better. I wish there was a more standardized way of sharing these prompts, results and token usage.
xnx
> P.S. I did this is on Mana which is our startup making it easier for LLMs to do it Can Mana clone Mana yet?
jjcm
Ex-figma. Not surprising it can get it to parity for a casual user. One thing I find though is that a lot of the vibecloned apps miss or ignore power user features or implement edge case features incorrectly. This was very, very true of the artcraft clones - as soon as you get to the more advanced things, they start to fall apart. For a lot of the Figma code, there are SO many gotchyas in there, that while I'd be curious to try it, I don't think agents would be able to derive the why , and thus would attempt to optimize the implementation leading to incorrect usage. I led the variables workstream at Figma, and it still is the most complex thing I've worked on in my 20 years of tech. The amount of edge cases / conditionals / exceptions in it are staggering, just to get it to a point where it seems like it's "simple" (for a power users' definition of simple). One other thing to consider though is the value of something like Figma isn't the functionality so much as the multiplayer platform aspect. This is toats fine if you're just doing solo work, but the collab aspect means you have to fight against the social network dynamics, which also can't be vibe coded.
xn
Nice. How long does it take to generate a Mana clone? How about a Mana cloner clone?
xyzsparetimexyz
Who cares tbh. We know AI can do this stuff now. We should reserve posting for when people actually use these things at all or when it's actually relatively novel.
TYPE_FASTER
No Comic Sans font option? edit: or should I say, Comic Relief, as that is the open version of Comic Sans.
getcrunk
Surprised this made it to the front page. No git Repo
psygn89
Hmm, does it ingest the knowledge base as part of its planning? I feel like AI often starts with the picture and works backwards, or goes room by room which kinda ends up Frankenstein-like. I wonder if one of the secrets to yours would be to grab the entire knowledge base, top Figma articles and those "10 things I wish I knew" for the edge cases, and have it iterate on a plan, kinda like someone creating a browser based on the test cases in the sense of building more holistically and realistically to how users would interact with it.