Figma killed his project, so he cloned Figma in 3 days

All right, people. The era of personalized software. Let me show you this tweet here that this user from two days ago posted. Figma shipped a silent patch specifically to kill Figma use my opensource tool that did what they wouldn't. An MCP server that creates and modifies designs, etc., etc. And so I spent the weekend recreating Figma from scratch. Mind you, the weekend. Open pencil. It reads and writes Figma files, AI chat with full design tools, P2P collaboration with zero servers, 7 megabytes app, no account, no subscription, 3 days, one developer, MIT license, openpencil. dev. So I DM' this person and I just had to ask, you know, Figma pissed you off. You decided to make your own Figma. What did that process look like? I heavily used PI coding agent with my own set of extensions and mostly claude code opus 4. 6. The workflow is quite simple. I start one sometimes up to three work trees. And by the way, work trees are kind of like uh something that's becoming real popular with modern agentic coding because it allows multiple sub agents to work on your project in different areas simultaneously and sit monitoring them doing mostly real-time code review and I often interrupt and add steering. I started by implementing the core which is a scene graph the then the binary format and then the features. First, I wanted to make a snappy, pannable, zoomable UI and then cover all the mandatory basics like primitives like frames and auto layouts. After that, as an experienced designer, I was guided by intuition and tried to do something useful. And when I got stuck, I added a new feature to the road map. What is this? Am I talking to a bot or what? Anyhow, you can actually go to openpencil. dev, this project that somebody created in 3 days, and click try online, and you can actually see what the editor looks like. So just a few months ago at the tail end of last year, this is November 25th of 2025, Claude released Opus 4. 5. Now if you ask most developers who are working with AI, that is the first model that is really solid in terms of being able to accomplish most things and it's also the model that most developers say is better than your average developer. And since then, we've had a better model even with 4. 6. We also have codeex and all these other models that just keep on getting better and better. Now I've seen it with my own project at designcourse. com. I spent two months completely refactoring it within cursor and then claude code 4. 6 and I replaced a SAS of my own with literally within a couple days. Live chat. com I made my own live chat and guess what? I got to get rid of a SAS that was costing me $500 per year. So this raises a very important question. What is going to happen to the value of software when a single person within 3 days can recreate something that is quite complex? Well, this is a econ 101 type of situation. The less scarce something is, the less valuable something is. I mean, just look at the US dollar for instance, fiat currency. They can print that stuff at will. They can introduce more of it into the supply. And guess what happens? The prices of things start to go up. It's not because of greedy corporations. It's simply because the dollar is now worth less because people could just print it at will. What do you think is going to happen with software or what is happening with software when people could just create it at will? The one thing that has made software so expensive and difficult in the past is because humans had to create it and humans are inefficient. They're slower compared to AI by many factors and they're costly. It took many years to become like a top-of-the-line coder, right? So now that everybody has access to these really intelligent coding models for like 20 bucks a month, 100 bucks a month, etc. Software is now easier to produce. Therefore, it is less scarce. And when it's less scarce and we have more competition from everybody being able to create this stuff, the value comes down massively. If you're a software developer, this might scare you, right? Especially one working for one of these big companies, understandably so. But if you're a consumer, this is a 100% win. This is actually forward progress overall. Even though there's going to be short-term disruption, it is objectively a good thing that anybody can create great software. Bottom line. So on one hand, you have to understand that if people can easily recreate your project, then that's going to be a big problem. The biggest differentiating factor is going to be, I would say, two different things. That's going to be your ability to market and actually get users. That's going to be the most valuable thing. And then also your implementation, you know, that comes down to your UI and your UX. Most people still even in the future, they're not going to want to spin up and try to reimagine their own app or their own version. There's still going to be a market for SASS. It's just going to be a lot more competitive. So that means your ability to define taste, your ability to market and reach users is going to be that much more important. Now going

forward 5 10 years down the road. Yeah, perhaps we reach AGI and ASI and everybody. Your average Joe has access to the best marketer or whatever. Now that would suck. That's just going to disrupt everything. We're all in the same freaking basket essentially once that happens. But for now, this is the time. This is your time to really gear down. Try to refine your skills. Try to learn how to build. Try to integrate taste. Try to understand UX and also marketing. Massively important. So very soon I'm going to be releasing my own course here within about a week or two where we use Cloud Code to build an AI powered app. And we're going to do it from start to finish. So, I hope that you all follow along with this because it's going to be so super cool. I'm excited about it. So, hopefully you keep on checking out the channel. Make sure to subscribe. I thought this story was freaking interesting because it's aligning with what I'm seeing personally. I've already done it myself. People are replacing SASS and they're building their own personalized software. But again, it's just the developers at this point. So, let me know what you think in the comments. Have you replaced any SASS or anything like that? Are you building your own personalized software? Many of you probably are. Most of you probably aren't. I'll see you soon.