Anima API: Bringing Figma to coding AI agents5 min read

Anima’s goal is front-end code automation. For the past 7 years, we’ve perfected the automation of design to code and the generation of UI code. Today, Anima is Figma’s #1 partner in codegen, with 1.5 million installs.

Anima’s main audience are professional teams building digital products, from websites to webapps. Teams use Anima to hand off code from design to engineering, as well as for realistic prototypes that are based on code, or deliver an MVP/POC at half the time. Anima produces multiple code types: React, HTML, with CSS or Tailwind, vanilla or on top of a design system such as ShadCN, AntD or MUI.

Coding AI and the design gap in vibe coding

These days, designers and product managers have AI to code for them. You could simply “vibe code”, asking AI to code for you. The potential of coding AI is huge—in some cases it’s 1000x faster. For product teams it’s a huge unlock for building the actual experience instead of describing it, and feeling it in a minute instead of waiting for months.

However, these are early days and AI coding does come with gaps. When asking AI to code, you can start with a prompt or bring a design into the prompt as an image. Behind the scenes, multi-modal LLMs can produce code that is inspired by the image, but lacks the fidelity of a pixel-perfect solution like Anima. Images in the prompt are useful for the pre-design ideation phase and for early user testing. However, it’s far from ideal for professional designers and product teams.

Anima API: Talk to my (coding) agent

Now that AI takes a major part in coding for us, Anima can help agents do a better job in building UI—just like we do for human engineers. We serve AI agents with an API, allowing them to take any Figma design as high-end code and go from there.

Anima’s API allows any team building agents or vibe coding platforms to utilize the same design-to-code engine that powers our popular plugin, as part of their product, service, or development cycle. Companies or individuals that need to generate high-quality code based on a Figma design can use our API, validate it, post-process it, and integrate it into their workflows using the language or framework of their choice.

Anima API showcase: Bolt.new

Bolt.new is the #1 in-browser AI coding agent, the fastest-growing vibe coding platform. It allows anyone to build software just by prompting in the browser, with zero setup needed.

Bolt embedded Anima’s API in a very slick flow, allowing users to paste a Figma link into Bolt. Behind the scenes, Anima converts Figma into a runnable, pixel-perfect React project. Then, by simply chatting to Bolt’s agent, users connect Supabase as backend, add logic, and deploy to Netlify.

Bolt’s CEO mentioned that Anima is the number one agent for going from design to code. The launch got lots of positive feedback online, and was discussed as “the best tool out there” to vibe code with a Figma design as a starting point.

Who is this for?

• Vibe coding platforms – Integrate Figma in a matter of hours or days, by getting a runnable code package that is 1:1 to any given Figma link.
• AI agents – Coding AI agents that are expected to generate UI code for professional teams can improve their code quality and fidelity by using the API and connecting to the client’s workflows.
• Website builder solutions – AI is coming to all website builders as a standard these days. Anima API can help you build faster for professionals by integrating Figma in no time.
• Prototyping solutions – The space of prototyping is now expected to have code-based disruptions, and Anima’s API can bring Figma into prototyping solutions.
• Agencies and consultancies – Service providers are often at the edge of innovation, building their own code automation tools. Integrating Anima’s best-of-class design-to-code API could improve performance and product quality, reduce resources, increase margins, and deliver faster.
• Enterprise code automation – Companies that have their own home-spun solutions for code automation can now automate Figma-to-GitHub flows with Anima as part of the chain or as a tool for the agent. (SOC2 compliant)

Anima API availability

Play with Anima today using Anima’s Playground—visit dev.animaapp.com and paste a Figma link. Anima will produce a high-fidelity code package that is runnable out of the box.

Request API access here.

Anima API: Features breakdown

Anima API is evolving fast as we are adding features to our core engine with an API-first approach, in order to give agents all the latest features from Anima. Here’s a quick breakdown of today’s offering:

• HTML: “High fidelity”, “Semantic”, or “Email compatible”
• React.js (TS/JS)
• Tailwind / CSS
• Plain React (no framework dependencies) with or without generation of base components
• ShadCN / MUI / AntD – Code based on a design system with mapped components
• Asset files retrieval
• Auto layout support
• Preview image retrieval
• Multiple screen support including prototyping interaction flows
• Breakpoint support – merging different DOM layouts into the same page

More features and sources are currently being considered and developed.

Consuming the API via SDK

Anima SDK is available on GitHub. It is the easiest way to consume Anima API. The SDK is intended for JS/TS-based server applications and wraps the API in simple-to-use code.

At this point, we’re onboarding a limited amount of partners – Request your API token here.