A machine-readable format for design system docs
It covers six entity types: components, design tokens (including nested token groups), themes, styles, and patterns.
All structured docs use a unified document block system. Each document block entry is a typed object with a type field. Document block types include guidelines, anatomy, API specs, variants, states, accessibility, purpose,…
a design system is an organizational artifact, not a design artifact.
After years of building, maintaining, and supporting in-house design systems with real tokens, governance, versioning, support, and contribution models, I recently found myself building with Tailwind and shadcn. Thanks, AI! I'm familiar but relatively newish to these tools, so take this for what it is. I'm not anti-AI. I use it every day. But I've...
I came across a Medium post titled "AI Will Replace 70% of Design System Work." The premise is that most design system work, documentation, component building, token management, accessibility audits, is "structurally automatable," and that the real value lies in governance. The author argues that teams need to move "upward from execution to orchestration" or...
I've been tinkering with something lately that I think more design system teams should pay attention to. I'm trying to teach AI how my design system works through Claude skills and Cursor rules. The problem AI has with your design system If you've used any AI coding tool to generate UI, you've seen this. You...
The UX developer role has always been hard to explain to everyday folks. “So you design stuff?” Not exactly. “So you code stuff?” Sort of. For years, people who sit between design and engineering have fought for a seat at a table that wasn’t really built for them. Then AI showed up and flipped the...
I keep seeing the same conversation play out online. AI is going to replace designers. AI is going to replace developers. AI is going to make everything faster and cheaper, and we should all be terrified or thrilled depending on who you follow on LinkedIn. But there's something I think people are sleeping on. AI...