Variable Audit
Solo designer and builder, built with AI pair programming
2026
Find the design tokens your file forgot
A Figma plugin that scores how much of a file actually uses design tokens, lists every hardcoded value next to the token it should have been, and maps where each variable is used. It scans half a million layers in under four minutes, runs entirely offline, and never writes to your file.
- Role
- Solo designer and builder, built with AI pair programming
- Year
- 2026
- Built with
- Figma Plugin APIJavaScriptHTMLCSSZero dependenciesNo build step
The story
Design systems make it easy to answer 'where is this variable used?' The harder question is the opposite one: where should a variable have been used, and wasn't? Nobody had a number for that.
I ran the first working version against our own design system, 542,284 layers across more than 90 pages. It reported 27% coverage, which sounded survivable until the Usage tab showed zero variable bindings anywhere in the file. Every point of it came from colour and text styles. Real variable adoption was 0%.
That distinction is invisible inside Figma. Styles only exist for colour and text, so spacing, radius and stroke can only be tokenised with variables, and the file held 244,840 hardcoded spacing values. Three numbers, 8, 16 and 12, accounted for 133,488 of them. Three variables would fix more than half the category.
The first full scan took over ten minutes. Profiling showed the scene graph being read thirteen times per node. Reading each property once dropped that to three, and the scan to 3 minutes 54 seconds. It ships with 104 automated assertions against a mock Figma API, covering alias cycles, instance overrides and every empty state.
See it in action
A complete demo of Variable Audit.