Design and code drift apart unless something keeps them together
The classic failure is two sources of truth: a design file that says one thing and a codebase that says another, with a pile of stale handoff documents in between. Treating Figma as a node in the build, readable and writable from code, collapses that gap. Design becomes something the delivery pipeline touches, not a separate artifact that ages on its own.
Read design into code
Pull the real design context, the spacing, the colours, the component structure, directly from the file rather than eyeballing a screenshot. The values that land in code are the values the designer set, not an approximation, so the implemented screen matches the intended one without a round of "the padding is off".
The highest leverage version of this is design tokens. Export the colour, type, and spacing variables from Figma and bind them as the theme in code, so a change to the palette in the design file flows into the application through the tokens rather than through a manual hunt for hex codes.
Write code into design
The link runs both ways. A component or a page that exists in code can be pushed back into Figma, so the design file reflects what actually shipped instead of an earlier idea of it. That keeps the design system honest: the canonical button in Figma is the button in production, because one was generated from the other.
Code Connect closes the loop
Mapping a Figma component to its code component means that when a designer inspects an element, they see the real component name and props from the codebase. The designer reaches for the same building blocks the engineer ships, which is what a design system is supposed to guarantee and rarely does.
Why this belongs in the delivery layer
Design wired into delivery is faster and more accurate, but the deeper reason is accountability. When the design source and the code source cannot silently disagree, the screen a buyer sees is the screen that was designed, and the gap where quality usually leaks, the translation from picture to product, is closed by tooling rather than by heroics.