I found figma’s remote MCP to be a poor fit for iOS development (it sets tokens on fire and gives Claude the details as React+Tailwind) and got much better results by having Claude build a set of “lens” tools around their REST API (“give me all of the fonts”, “give me the layout dimensions”, “give me the colors”, etc).

The key to making it token efficient was allowing Claude to invent its own plaintext markup format for the lens output.

Is this the API surface you're referring to?

https://developers.figma.com/docs/rest-api/file-endpoints/#g...

https://developers.figma.com/docs/rest-api/file-node-types/

Seems read-only, which means we're stuck with the MCP for updating Figma files... unless you've found a workaround there too?