Extracting Your Design System with AI

This is the advanced series - Part 1 of 5.
Still no code required, but this is not a half-hour setup you run on your lunch break. This is the foundation of a five-part system, and Part 1 only makes sense if you know what you're building toward.

The full picture:

• Part 1 extracts your complete DS from Figma into a validated inventory.

• Part 2 writes it to Notion as machine-readable documentation.

• Part 3 upgrades the audit workflow to read from Notion instead of hardcoded rules.

• Part 4 detects DS changes and writes approved updates to Notion with a change log.

• Part 5 is a Slack bot that answers design and implementation questions straight from that documentation.

Part 1 is a one-time extraction run.
Everything else in this series builds on what you produce here.

The reason this guide uses different tooling than the audit guides: the official Figma Dev Mode MCP returns a flat, partial variable list with no collection structure, no mode data, and no alias relationships. Enough for QA work, not enough for documentation.
Figma Console MCP in Local mode, connected via a Desktop Bridge plugin, reads the full structure. That's the entire reason for the switch.

The extraction covers variables, styles, and components, section by section, with approval gates at each step.
Time depends on DS size, anywhere from 20 minutes for a lean system to over an hour for a complex multi-product DS.
That time is built into the process intentionally. This is the foundation.