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Extracting React apps from Figma Make's undocumented binary format

Details

External ID
46728659
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Extracting React apps from Figma Make's undocumented binary format
Website domain
albertsikkema.com
Launched
Jan. 23, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
55
Upvotes percentile
0.8155467720685112
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Enrichment

Theme
document processing and generation tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Dev tools
Audience
Developer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
convert figma designs to react
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

No Reverse-engineering proprietary undocumented binary formats involving custom schema decoders (Kiwi), decompression algorithms, and AST reconstruction requires specialized reverse engineering and binary analysis expertise.

What it would actually take: This project requires binary disassembly, protocol reverse engineering, inspecting in-memory heap structures, and reconstructing serialization schemas (like Figma's proprietary Kiwi format and zstandard/brotli compression layers). The resulting tool must parse raw byte streams, map them to an internal component tree, and generate idiomatic React JSX code. This requires senior reverse engineers and compiler/AST specialists who understand binary file structures.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: lovable.dev - AI code generation with cleaner output, Figma Make - prototyping tool, binwalk - file analysis tool

Concerns raised: LLM-generated work presented without disclosure undermines credibility, AI authorship obscures human judgment and decision-making, Lack of transparency about tool usage in technical articles, Difficulty understanding AI-generated code without detailed review, AI tools produce code rather than design artifacts like illustrations

Feature requests: Automatic identification of file chunk types (deflate, zstd), Cleaner code output across multiple iterations, Extract design tokens for design systems

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 262 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #42 of 263 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 84 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

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