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- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 12
- Latest publication
- Sep 28, 2026
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- Jul 27, 2026
Latest issues
When More Context Makes the Agent Worse (opens the original)
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When an AI agent gets something wrong in a design system, the usual fix is to give it more to read. More rules, more documentation, another file in the repo. It feels like the responsible thing to do.It doesn’t always work. One designer tested his agents with extra guidance loaded and without it, and in some runs they did better with nothing. Another team deliberately keeps what the agent sees small and makes it ask for the rest. In a third case, an agent built a page that looked right and got t
Congratulations on the Component Library. Now Look Up. (opens the original)
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Building a component library is not hard any more. It is still a lot of work, and it still takes most of the budget, but it is known work. Nobody is solving new problems at that level.The interesting problems have moved up a level. How a whole page gets structured, so designers are not rebuilding the same one every sprint. How rules get enforced automatically, so the mess does not creep back in a month later. How the system gets packaged for whoever, or whatever, is picking it up. And who is act
The Hours Came Back. Nobody Asked Where They Went. (opens the original)
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This issue is full of numbers that would look good in a board pack. A sixteen-hour feature build collapsed to roughly one. Ninety seconds of clicking through filters answered out loud in twelve. A brand change that used to mean hunting colour values across repositories, now a single edit that propagates everywhere. The field has become genuinely good at making things faster, and increasingly good at proving it.One of this week’s writers asks the question the rest of us skip. Not how many hours t
Who Checks the Thing That Checks? (opens the original)
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<img alt="" class="sizing-large" height="675" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AUmz!,w_2400,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fafd34448-6ee6-4263-8b43-132e12e44539_1920x1080.png
The Most Important Line Is Where It Stops (opens the original)
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What is your design system allowed to decide on its own, and what does it have to come back and ask about? Most teams have never had to answer that, because for most of the past decade nothing in a design system decided anything. It described. People decided.That is changing from two directions at once. Upstream, a single token file can now settle a question that every theme, every consuming repo and every contrast check inherits without a conversation happening anywhere. Inside a component, the
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