DesignGuard Now Re-Scans Your Figma Files the Moment You Publish

Here's a scenario every design system owner knows: someone tweaks a component in the shared library, hits Publish, and moves on. It's a small, reasonable thing to do. But nothing else in the pipeline knows it happened — not until a person remembers to go re-import that file into whatever's checking it against your standards.

That's exactly how DesignGuard AI's Figma integration worked until now. It could read a file beautifully, find drift, explain it, even fix some of it — but only when you asked it to look. We called this "pull-based" sync, and it's a completely normal way to build this kind of integration. It's also the thing that quietly lets a design system go stale between checks.

What changed

DesignGuard can now watch a Figma file and hear about changes the moment they happen — no clicking, no remembering, no scheduled re-check. We call it live sync. Turn it on for a connection, and every time that file is published (or just saved), DesignGuard automatically pulls in the latest version and re-runs the audit against it, on its own.

How it actually works

Under the hood, this rides on Figma's own webhook API. When you turn on live sync for a connection, DesignGuard registers a webhook with Figma for that file. From then on, Figma calls DesignGuard directly the moment something happens — DesignGuard doesn't have to ask.

The one thing worth knowing: this only works for files you've already imported at least once. That's not a limitation so much as a natural consequence — DesignGuard can't meaningfully audit a library it's never seen, so "watch this file" only makes sense once there's something to watch. If you want to catch brand-new libraries before anyone's imported them, there's an advanced option to watch an entire Figma team instead of a single file — that one needs your team ID, since Figma's API has no way to look that up for you.

You'll actually see it happen

A background process that silently does things is only reassuring if you can tell it's working. So when a live sync re-scan completes, you get a toast notification right in the dashboard — wherever you happen to be, not just on the Figma import screen. It's the same notification system that already tells you when a GitHub sync finishes; Figma auto-syncs just show up in the same feed now.

That last part matters more than it sounds like it should. It's the difference between a feature you have to trust blindly and one you can actually watch working.

Turning it on

• Import a Figma file the normal way, if you haven't already.
• Open the Figma connection panel and flip on Live sync for that connection.
• That's it — publish a library update whenever you're ready, and watch the toast show up.

This is a small feature in terms of surface area, but it closes a real gap: the whole point of a design-system audit tool is catching drift early, and "early" isn't very meaningful if it depends on someone remembering to press a button. Now it doesn't.