‹ Back to more cases

Open source + studio

Tools for the agentic design era

PluginOS and design-superpowers: open-source tooling that makes AI agents useful inside real design work, from Figma operations to the full design lifecycle.

Problem

AI agents are cheap to reason with and expensive to act with. Driving Figma through standard tooling burns tens of thousands of tokens on a single call, and most design knowledge lives in heads and documents an agent cannot execute. The gap that keeps agentic design work stuck at the demo stage is not model quality. It is tooling.

Outcome

PluginOS exposes 26 Figma operations through an agent-native MCP at roughly 230 tokens per call instead of ~28,000, and is live on the Figma Community. design-superpowers packages the design lifecycle into a Claude Code plugin: 6 commands and 27 sub-agents that adapt to a project's design-system maturity, from greenfield to enterprise. Both are open source and both feed directly back into how Vice Versa ships client work. Around them sits a wider toolchain: a family of custom Figma plugins, a Figma-to-CMS deployment pipeline, and Panopticon, the platform that runs Vice Versa's own delivery.

Snapshot

Client
Open source + studio
Years
2025-now
PluginOS
~230 vs ~28k tokens/call
design-superpowers
6 commands · 27 sub-agents
Figma plugins
5+ in production
Reach
Figma → CMS → ops

PluginOS

A Figma that agents can afford

PluginOS is a WebSocket bridge between an MCP server and a Figma plugin, purpose-built for agents. Instead of shipping an entire document tree to the model, each of its 26 operations (linting, accessibility checks, token work, layout, components, cleanup, export) returns just the result, at roughly 230 tokens per call instead of ~28,000. Across a typical multi-step workflow that is about a 94% saving, which is the difference between an agent that can touch Figma and an agent that can work in it all day. Check on GitHub

design-superpowers

The design lifecycle, as a plugin

design-superpowers turns design practice into something an agent can follow: 6 commands spanning creative direction, feature design, design review, and design-system management, backed by 27 specialised sub-agents and a curated knowledge base. A maturity-detection system reads whether a project is greenfield or running an enterprise design system, and adapts each command to match. Every release is held against hundreds of scenario evals, because tooling for judgment work needs its own quality bar. Check on GitHub

Plugin family

Plugins that close the loop

PluginOS is the flagship, not the whole family. Tone Lint lints live design files against a design system: detached components, off-token colours, off-grid spacing, before anything reaches a pull request. A three-layer documentation pipeline takes a component spec out of Figma, consolidates it with design-system knowledge, and opens a GitHub PR of publishable docs. And vv-sitepack's sync plugin watches a Figma library for token and component changes and turns them into reviewable PRs. Different jobs, one principle: the design file is a source of truth machines should be able to read and act on.

Pipelines & platform

From design file to production

VV-sitepack carries that principle all the way to deployment: a TYPO3 sitepackage where tokens, component styles, and typography arrive from Figma as a versioned YAML contract, validated and regenerated by CI, so a designer's change ships through the same pipeline as an engineer's, with idempotency checks instead of handoff meetings. VV-upgrader applies the agentic approach to the unglamorous end of the web: CMS major-version upgrades, run by agents against real production sites with migration scripts, checks, and rollback plans. And Panopticon is the studio's own operating platform: pipeline alerting, a daily brief of everything in flight, and human-in-the-loop approval gates living in Slack.

Why open

Built to be shared, not hoarded

PluginOS and design-superpowers are open source under MIT. The studio pipeline tools stay proprietary: open where it's infrastructure the whole field needs, owned where it's the studio's edge. Publishing them keeps the incentives honest: the tools have to be understandable, documented, and useful outside one studio. The bet is that the agentic design era arrives faster, and lands better, when its infrastructure is public.