Figma’s new skill-authoring feature is sold on a simple promise: encode your own judgment calls into a SKILL.md file and hand your taste to the next person who uses the agent. Three days before the launch, though, a study of 206 real coding-agent sessions found the opposite pattern — instructions shared across everyone beat instructions written for one person, and the personalized file lost more head-to-head matchups than it won.
This episode walks through the numbers behind that gap, why the study’s own authors say it doesn’t cleanly settle the question for design agents, and what a design-system lead or a developer maintaining a hand-tuned CLAUDE.md should actually take from evidence that undercuts the pitch without fully disproving it.