# Building Custom Figma Plugins: How a Designer Codes with AI

> Designer Murphy O'Rourke on building a whole ecosystem of custom Figma plugins with AI to automate design system work, on Very Good Engineering.

- Source: https://verygood.ventures/podcasts/murphy-orourke-custom-figma-plugins/
- Published: 2026-06-24
- Speakers: Murphy O'Rourke
- Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaWBIKqE87g

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Jorge Coca sits down with Murphy O'Rourke, a designer at Very Good Ventures who taught himself to build custom Figma plugins with AI and has grown a whole ecosystem of them that the VGV design team now uses daily. Murphy describes himself as a more technical designer than most, with roots in front-end work and years spent sitting close to engineers on design systems, which gave him a clear view of the friction points around handoff and consistency.

He breaks down what a Figma plugin actually is, a few files of JavaScript or TypeScript plus a manifest that can read and write design data, and traces his path from his first plugin, Very Good Flutter Styles, which exports Figma theme colors and text styles as clean Dart code. From there he walks through the tools he built to tame VGV's variable-heavy template files: Locals Only for remapping duplicated templates, Variable Calculator for bulk math on variables, Contrast Audit for accessibility checks, and Control R for renaming variables before Figma shipped its own version.

The conversation returns to a theme VGV calls trust and taste. Murphy is candid that he leans on developers to judge whether his code belongs in an app, but AI lets ideas come from anywhere and get expressed in ways the whole team can build on. He details his shift from ChatGPT to Cursor and Claude Code, his use of plan mode with Opus and Sonnet, and how a proof of concept that once took a month now takes under an hour.