Skip to content
experience

Tried an AI 'Figma to Flutter' tool on a client project. Machane, the widget tree ๐Ÿ˜‚

Anoop Menon@anoop_flutter

August 17, 2026 ยท 2 min read

#4 in Thumb Zone

Contents(4)

So a Gulf client (pays in dirhams, wants everything yesterday, you know the type) saw an ad for an AI tool that converts Figma designs straight to Flutter code. "Anoop, why are we paying for 3 weeks if AI can do it in 3 minutes?" Fair question alle? So I tried it on their real design. 14 screens. Here's what happened ๐Ÿ˜…

The good

  • It really did produce 14 screens in about 10 minutes. On the emulator, screenshot to screenshot, they looked 90% like the design. Client was very impressed.
  • Colours and text styles were pulled into a theme file. Not bad at all.

The ayyo

  • Everything was a Stack with Positioned. Absolute positions in logical pixels from the Figma frame. On a small phone, buttons went off screen. On a tablet, everything sat in the top-left corner like a scared cat.
  • Containers inside Containers inside Containers. I counted 14 levels deep for one card. Padding done by a Container with margin inside another Container with padding.
  • No const anywhere, so every rebuild rebuilt everything. Scrolling the product list on a 3GB RAM test phone was janky.
  • Text in fixed-height boxes. Switch the phone to Arabic (the client's main users!) or bump the font size in accessibility settings, and text was cut off. RTL was not handled at all.
  • Zero state management. Buttons had empty onPressed. Of course. It's a picture of an app, not an app.

What I did

I kept the theme file it generated (actually useful) and threw away the widgets. Rebuilt with Column, Row and Expanded, proper padding, directionality coming from the app locale, and text that is allowed to wrap. It took 2.5 weeks, not 3, so the AI saved me maybe 2 days. I told the client exactly that.

The real lesson

The tool is a very good screenshot generator. The client was paying for the part you can't see: layouts that survive different screens, Arabic, big fonts, slow phones, and the actual logic. Sheri, maybe next year's tool will do it. Today, no.

Anyone else tried these tools on real projects? Or am I just an old man at 28 ๐Ÿ˜‚

#flutter#ai#mobile#design

Get the best of #thumb_zone weekly

One email each Monday with the most useful posts. No spam; unsubscribe in one click.

Comments

11

Sign in to join the conversation.

Sign in to comment
Karthikeyan S@karthik_embedded1 rep in Thumb Zone
Machane 'like a scared cat' ๐Ÿ˜‚ same thing with firmware code gen tools da, looks like code, compiles, then you put it on the real board and it dies in field only.
2 net votes
Anoop Menon@anoop_flutter#4 in Thumb Zone
At least my scared cat doesn't burn a motor ๐Ÿ˜‚ your field failures are scarier
1 net votes
Hamza Butt@hamza_flutter#3 in Thumb Zone
yaar the RTL part is what gets me. Every Gulf and Pakistan client needs Arabic or Urdu and every tool demo is in English, left to right. Stack + Positioned in RTL is pure chaos ๐Ÿคฆโ€โ™‚๏ธ
1 net votes
Ryan Goh@ai_maxi_ryan#8 in Thumb Zone
skill issue tbh. just prompt it better, tell it to use responsive layouts and const. took me 4 seconds ๐Ÿš€
4 net votes
Anoop Menon@anoop_flutter#4 in Thumb Zone
Bro I did. It used LayoutBuilder and then put a Stack with Positioned inside the LayoutBuilder ๐Ÿ˜‚ show me your 4 seconds on 14 real screens with Arabic, I will buy you biriyani
0 net votes
Ryan Goh@ai_maxi_ryan#8 in Thumb Zone
not my job to do your client work for free lah
3 net votes
Tunde Adebayo@tunde_ade#2 in Thumb Zone
translation: there are no 4 seconds ๐Ÿ˜‚
1 net votes
Mariana Costa@mari_costa#7 in Thumb Zone
The Arabic and big font test is exactly what every design to code demo skips. Thank you for testing it in real users conditions, this is the most useful review of these tools I have read.
2 net votes
Dita Anggraini@dita_kotlin#1 in Thumb Zone
Good post. Funny to watch Flutter people discover what Compose people already know: layout is the hard part, not the pixels.
2 net votes
Anoop Menon@anoop_flutter#4 in Thumb Zone
Ah, here she comes ๐Ÿ˜‚ Compose AI tools generate the same Box-inside-Box mess, I have seen it. We are all suffering equally, Dita.
1 net votes
Dita Anggraini@dita_kotlin#1 in Thumb Zone
Equal suffering. But at least ours is native.
1 net votes