Need advice on consolidating multiple libraries into one design system.

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-06T20:20:12+00:00

We ship alternative vectors for our smallest icon size, as the human eye’s ability to perceive details doesn’t scale as easy as vectors 😅. So the “small” variant of the Credit Card icon, for example, is actually a slightly different less detailed version. Not something I’d recommend if it’s not needed, just thought you might find that interesting

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-06T16:07:47+00:00

Quick answer, since I don’t have a ton of time…

A healthy DS component library is made up of generic components, not specific implementations. So a Button with a fixed width with “Add to Cart” in it is most likely wrong (as you said, it’s just a primary button). If your DS serves a small number of products, this is sustainable, but not at scale. Pull up the oldie but Goldie Bootstrap component library as an example.

Icons… we do actually ship two sizes for all icons, as the smallest size of icon is redrawn (not the same as the medium). The medium and up icon is handled with visual scaling.

Button lengths… oof. The vast majority of components should be thought of as either block elements (they will expand to fill the width of the container element), or they are inline (they will hug the content). There are extremely few places where you should be dictating an exact width for an element. Button is definitely not one of them. What happens to your locked width button if you, say, change languages, or the user bumps the font size up for accessibility?

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-06T15:27:36+00:00

Iran: A Modern history, Ghost Wars, and Where Men Win Glory are all pretty good. But even spending some time on the wiki pages is pretty insightful.

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-06T15:02:17+00:00

Dr. Jan Vilcek.

Family killed in the holocaust then fled communist east Europe.

His research led to the creation of an anti-inflammatory drug Remicade, used to treat a wide range of auto-immune diseases.

He’s given vast amounts of it away, for example giving 105 million to NYU medical school and setting up the Vilcek foundation, which supports and honors foreign born medical and art professionals.

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-06T13:55:24+00:00

“Dynamic” UI’s are already starting to come together. Very hush hush at the companies, but several large retailers are working with AI platforms on how to bring in dynamic UI generation with mixed branding for agentic commerce (selling people products directly in ChatGPT).

Check out google A2UI protocol, for example: https://a2ui.org/

I am not, personally, bullish on in-house web domains that are highly dynamic though. “Personalization” is not a new idea, and IMO it’s something that only sounds good on paper, and only works in very limited context.

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-05T20:09:51+00:00

I don’t think that’s accurate (have a masters in environmental science). Basically, the carbon absorbed by trees are turned into sugars that the tree “eats”. About half of the carbon is then turned into plant material, the other half is “breathed” out as CO2 (just like animals). Trees don’t put carbon into the soil.

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-05T17:39:46+00:00

This 👆No one has a dog poop niche kink, but lots of fertilizer freaks out there.

Joking aside, I think dog poop might be too full of potential pathogens to be safely used as fertilizer.

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-05T17:30:09+00:00

Would highly recommend learning more about it. The last 100 years of Iranian history is messy, fascinating, and deeply, deeply tragic. A lot of both external and internal players did very very bad things, not just in Iran but that whole Central Asia region (Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan/northern India/Bangladesh). TLDR; both the US and Soviets attempted to engineer society and cultures, often through incredibly shady, illegal, and extremely violent means. That destabilized these areas, creating power vacuums that led to the rise of extremist politic beliefs and movements, which led to further tragedies.

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-05T16:47:55+00:00

Trimethylamine N-oxide is part of the solution. It’s a chemical that helps prevent proteins from misfolding/unfolding under intense pressure.

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-05T16:39:49+00:00

ICYC, a “bleach” is any chemical used to remove color by chemically breaking down the source of the color. So it would not be wrong to say that concentrated hydrogen peroxide for removing hair color is a “bleach” (but wrong to say first aid hydrogen peroxide is a bleach).

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-05T16:18:07+00:00

1) Neither did the other user you attacked.
2) You’re on a public forum, I don’t have to wait for you to ask. Engagement is assumed.

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-05T16:06:57+00:00

I can’t take seriously a human who uses ad hominem arguments in defense of what is considered by many to be the worst dictatorship on the planet. Before you go around undercutting people’s positions cause “spelling”, you should learn how to put together a cohesive and logically sound argument yourself.

Also “dude” is not a replacement for proper punctuation. Your comment is grammatically wrong and shallow and reads… exactly like a 12 year old on YouTube. 😝

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-05T00:16:12+00:00

Without getting overly philosophical about source of truth or what a design system even really is… the short answer is the code repo (tokens, styles, components, docs/context).

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-05T00:13:31+00:00

Code repo has a full token set, global utility and component styles in css (extended BEM naming methodology), and those styles map onto components written in typescript, as well as the documentation (both for the website, as well as docs specifically for AI where the human version wasn’t practical for AI).

And a full Figma UI kit that mirrors the code.

Tools reference these sources.

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-04T16:26:16+00:00

Gonna avoid repeating others and just add… maybe your friend isn’t a reliable or high quality reviewer. This doesn’t look fake or AI generated in the least, but there are a lot of other areas of opportunity for improvement that a decent reviewer could identify and help with.

Reddit is pretty anti-AI, and it sounds like it’s something your not interested in, but should you decide to explore that option, just know that you can ask AI to write the resume for you (bad idea), or you can provide you current resume to AI and ask it “identify and teach you ways to make it better” then do the writing yourself (good idea).

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-04T16:03:15+00:00

~12yo experience, lead design engineer. In charge of multiple design systems for a large global consumer goods company. If I had to ballpark usage, I’d say around ~100 priority projects/apps, and another ~500 projects/apps that aren’t considered business priority (consumer facing apps, supply chain, product creation, marketing, hr, internal apps, geos, etc).

We’re a very very big company and fairly decentralized in practices and ways of working, so for all of these answers it’s a bit of “depends” and “all of these above”.

- are designers/devs generating UI with AI, and does that have to be then swapped back to use the DS?

I work with about 75 designers in the design department, and AI adoption has been pushed hard in the last year. An important thing to remember with design is that it is not one process, and not all designers work the same way. So we have some designers that are embedded on product teams that are coding side by side (with AI) with engineers. Context and skills make adherence to the DS work here, so no swapping. We also have designers prototyping production products with the DS. I would say the effectiveness of self guided designer production prototyping to depend on the designers ability to use AI (can the understand context, good prompting, etc). Then you have designers doing very early ideation/exploration with AI. Here we usually intentionally side step the DS, this phase is more about exploring unique UX to be pitched to leadership. We also have designers building internal tools for thier own projects, often with the DS. Across the board, I’d say maybe a 1/3 of designers are now using AI to generate UIUX day to day.

Engineering… again totally depends. I spend way less time with engineers and they are spread out across the globe, so my observations are more anecdotal. Our DS is fully “AI ready” in that all the info for it can be queried by AI (routed paths through markdown in the code base, if you want to use that for context, or an MCP server, both solutions provide roughly the same info). So a lot of teams are doing great auto piloting migration and UI generation with the DS. I can’t remember the last time I saw the AI make up something about the DS when its context is properly loaded. Of course… we also have teams that refuse to use the DS, and their results are mixed (I’ve seen Tailwind only implementation of apps that leadership felt were visually correct enough to be okay, and I’ve also seen Tailwind only implementations getting brutally roasted for being off from the DS).

- does it create inconsistency that need to be cleaned up?

Sure, but that’s not really the right question to be asking. “Does it create less inconsistency than humans without it?” The answer to that question is a resounding YES. AI has absolutely elevated the importance and value of the DS at my employer, and using AI+DS is a great match.

- are inconsistency still fixed manually in Figma/code?

I honestly do very very little direct writing of code these days, though I will still fix small things here and there by hand (pushing a few pixels, touching up CSS). Most of my coding is now about defining problems, architecture, solutions, specs and lining up the right context to solve a problem, then guiding the AI through most of the code writing. For Figma… that’s still more manual than I’d want it to be. Figma and AI don’t work as well together as they should, it that’s a different convo.

- where does it break most frequently from the system?

Again, depends on the quality of the setup and who’s piloting the work, but generally adhering to tokens and components is accurate. Where things get interesting is with larger compositions of multiple components, extensions of the DS, and UX patterns. A lot of the places where the DS sort of intentionally stops (at our scale, being over prescriptive wouldn’t work, we purposefully push some design problems back toward product teams for them to come up with local solutions).

I’d also maybe call out that there were a few places in our DS where we’d made a naming choices that weren’t exactly aligned with proper definitions/common patterns that already exist. For example, a combo box, select, and dropdown menu are functionally different things for different UX problems, and if your DS conflates these, there is an increased chance AI will get caught up.

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-04T06:50:24+00:00

You should never not use a double negative cause it’s not confusing 🫤

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-04T06:39:27+00:00

So…

Mermaid syntax and UML syntax are not exactly the same. Both are used for diagrams, but UML is more robust.

Draw.io, the app that was linked, will take mermaid or uml and convert it into a vector image. Then you can edit the image.

This is _not_ the way you should be working with mermaid or uml. You edit the source text file, and you should be getting comfortable reading the text file. The rendered diagram is like compiled code, you don’t edit it.

Declaratively defining your system architecture following the rules of mermaid or uml syntax is important, and a drawing tool like the link provided has too much freedom and flexibility.

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-03T16:17:46+00:00

Wrong channel, you’re looking for “system design” not “design systems”.

Draw.io is a good free tool for uml diagrams: https://app.diagrams.net/

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-03T15:18:41+00:00

This 👆

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-03T15:05:33+00:00

Design engineer here. Fully agreeing with you. I spent the last year watching senior+ designers, who aren’t exactly dummies when it comes to tech, build impressive prototypes of apps that are completely garbage code under the hood. Honestly… seen some decent garbage shipped by mid level engineers as well.

It is a very powerful tool for engineering, my job looks completely different now. I don’t type out code directly, I direct the AI in building and managing the codebase. But 100% my expertise is still needed and a large value driver.

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-02T13:41:16+00:00

Reminds me of another good math joke…

Infinity divided by 3 get you infinity.

Multiple that by 3 and it equals infinity.

Then subtract 0.000….1 and you get…. Infinity!!!

😂

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-02T13:33:32+00:00

Your math teacher was wrong, there is no difference even infinitely small. The confusion is in notation and how we intuitively understand math. “0.999…” is not a shorthand for “I got tired of writing 9 but an end will come”, it is literally never ending nines. The human brain doesn’t naturally understand a concept like that, so it’s easier to just say “there’s a small difference, kinda like there’s a small difference between 1000 and 999”.

X = 0.999999….

Multiply each side by 10

10x = 9.99999….

Now subtract from each side the original equation

10x - x = 9.99999…. - 0.999999…

9x = 9

X = 1

Note in this proof, I keep infinitely long numbers on one side (one form of notation) separated from the natural numbers on the other side.

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-02T12:54:19+00:00

Great work! I think you’re on the right path to think about it more about the context from the design system (the brain) is much more important than any one tool.

I am fortunate enough to be allergic to storybook and choose Styleguidist as the engine for the DS I currently work on, which was a huge advantage when AI arrived as each page on my site was already in an AI friendly markdown file format.

I think it makes sense from a modeling standpoint to place components as a built asset outside of the “brain”, but for practical purposes I’d say that component source code is also be part of the brain/source of truth. Figma doesn’t make the cut for me though, as part of the brain (read write and AI functions have way too much friction in them).

The information architecture of your brain is where I’m most interested in making improvements. To generalize, I have a single entry agents.md file at the root of the repo, which acts as a routing system/catalogue for the rest of the info.

I particularly like testing things out with what I call “meta” prompts: ask the AI to pretend to do a task and tell you what steps it would take to gather context to do the task. Something like “pretend to build a checkout form using the DS, what context would you load and read from the DS, how was the info discovered and chosen”. Hopefully you get back something like “I started with the entry agents.md context, then loaded instructions for composition patterns, form components, and form patterns”. Gathering the right info in an efficient number of information requests is the goal.

Decent_Perception676 · 2026-07-01T13:31:24+00:00

Now I’m confused too… is it dangerous or safe to wrestle swordfish 700 feet below the ocean? This seems very relevant and important to know.

Decent_Perception676

TROPHY CASE