Honest 3-Month Review of Using 3 Figma AI Features from a Cape Town Café

I was on my third americano refill at my regular café in Woodstock when Figma dropped an AI feature update. The notification popped up on my laptop screen and I fired it up immediately. I'm the type who has to click on any new tool the second it comes out. Over the next three months, I crammed these features into four actual client projects. Here's how that went.

Things that genuinely saved me time

Auto Layout suggestions. I'll give it credit. I used to build responsive layouts by manually setting up frame structures one by one, but now the AI reads my design patterns and suggests layout structures first. It's not perfect, but it's a solid starting point. It especially sped up the repetitive placement of card components when working on mobile dashboards. For that task alone, it felt like the time was cut nearly in half.

Text generation was pretty decent too. When I ask it to draft button labels or error messages during the UX writing stage, it offers three or four contextually appropriate options. I still have to refine them myself, but the time spent staring blankly at an empty text field is gone. This feature was most useful when I was mapping out the onboarding flow for a fintech startup project based in Johannesburg.

When the Wi-Fi wobbles, everything falls apart

Here's where I have to be real. Being a digital nomad working in Cape Town means dealing with café Wi-Fi cutting out randomly on a weekly basis. Figma's AI features are almost entirely cloud-based, so when the connection is unstable, suggestions either half-load and stall, or the spinner just goes round and round eating up your time. Even if you relocate to a café with backup power during Eskom load-shedding hours, it's useless if the internet speed itself tanks. The fact that AI features don't work at all in offline mode is a pretty serious limitation for anyone working in South Africa.

Once, right before a client call, I tried to quickly generate prototype variations with AI, but the connection dropped. I ended up manually duplicating and fixing everything by hand. Those 15 minutes felt like an eternity.

Flashy but lacking substance

The auto-generated design feature, honestly, was a letdown. When you type a prompt like "make me a landing page," it does produce something, but the output is painfully generic. A stock-template-looking layout that doesn't belong to any brand. Not anywhere near a level I could show an actual client. I ended up rebuilding from scratch and spent time deleting the AI-generated frames. More work, not less.

The automatic component name cleanup feature was similar. It ignored my naming conventions and renamed everything by its own standards, which caused confusion in the library shared with my team. I used it twice and turned it off.

Is it worth the money?

Given that I'm already paying for a Figma subscription every month, it's a relief that AI features are included at no extra cost. If they had charged an additional R300 or more per month separately, I probably wouldn't be using it right now. As it stands, just the Auto Layout suggestions and text generation blend naturally into my existing workflow. Everything else still feels demo-level.

What I want from an AI design tool isn't a flashy demo video. It's something that reduces the tedious, repetitive work my hands keep doing. Figma AI passes about halfway on that standard. The other half comes with a caveat: it requires stable internet as a prerequisite.

Three months in, it's not something you can completely ignore, but it's not something that transforms the way you work either. I'm wrapping up this piece at a café on Long Street in Cape Town, waiting for load-shedding to end. The Wi-Fi light just came back on. Time to open Figma.