What's better than one steal?

Agents are the most honest reviewers your design system will ever have The most useful feedback your system has ever produced is on a thirty-day timer

🚨🚨🚨 New post!

blog.murphytrueman.com/agents-are-t...

What your components look like as data Why every layer name, variant, and token reference is an architectural decision

New post!

blog.murphytrueman.com/what-your-co...

🎶 It's the most wonderful tiiiiime of the yeaaaar

The prompt you never wrote How your design system vocabulary becomes AI context

New article!
blog.murphytrueman.com/the-prompt-y...

#designsystems

The 5th edition of the Design Systems Report is here 📔

Design systems are now critical infrastructure—but they’re getting harder to sustain.

Buy-in is dropping. Teams are stretched. Adoption is still the biggest challenge.

Explore the report → hubs.li/Q04774jK0

In the open: What the modal reveals Four open-source systems. One component. What the implementation choices actually say.

Calling a component Modal instead of Dialog feels like a stylistic preference. But the consequences are more technical than that.

I've completed a full breakdown of four open-source systems and what their implementations reveal 👇

blog.murphytrueman.com/in-the-open-...

Thank you for the kind words! And absolutely, it’s the right thing to do.

I’ll keep writing, and hopefully things will keep growing, regardless of platform! If not, I’ll just have to try harder 😂

Design System Ops – Claude Code Skills for Design Systems Practitioners The first Claude Code skill pack built for the people who run design systems – not just the people who use them.

AI tooling for design systems has matured. The operational work hasn't kept up.

Token audits. Deprecation plans. Drift detection. Stakeholder briefs.

I tidied up the Claude Code skills I've used for that work, and put them somewhere public.

designsystemops.com

Genuinely appreciate you caring enough to say something 💜

Sometimes all it takes is someone caring enough to say something. I'm glad to be off Substack.

Loving my experience with @ghost.org so far.

❤️❤️

This is the kind of game that reminds you why baseball is the best sport on the planet. ⚾🇰🇷🇯🇵

Highly recommend reaching out to @oliverlindberg.com!

Working with him and the @zeroheight.com team is a tonne of fun. 💌

Your design system might be AI-ready. Your organisation probably isn't. The technical preparation is well underway. The organisational questions it creates are a different problem entirely.

New article on the blog! 📚

Most design systems teams are deep in the technical work of AI readiness.

Cleaner tokens, better documentation, semantic component naming. That work matters.

What's less discussed is what happens when it actually works.

blog.murphytrueman.com/p/your-desig...

I gave UI components D&D Challenge Ratings based on how dangerous they become when misused.

The Data Table is CR 8. Legendary. It has consumed entire sprints.

The summoner bears responsibility for what they've conjured.

thecomponentbestiary.com

Building for coherence, not compliance Lessons from Baldurs Gate 3 on contracts, governance, and judgment at the edges

I've been playing Baldur's Gate 3 most evenings this week, and somewhere between character creation and my third failed persuasion roll, I stopped thinking about the game and started thinking about design systems.

blog.murphytrueman.com/p/building-f...

PRAYING my coilovers arrive this week 😩

Thanks so much @samiamdesigns.bsky.social! 🫶 Glad you enjoyed it!

We're getting better at the workaround On Figma's code-to-canvas announcement, and why smoother translation might be making the structural problem harder to fix

We built Figma to solve the problem of sharing component code. It worked.

Then the tooling became the deliverable and we stopped asking what it was for.

Agentic tools are doing the same thing.

blog.murphytrueman.com/p/were-getti...

All I want to do is work on my car 😩😩😩

What I stole from API documentation Patterns from Stripe, GitHub, and Twilio that fixed my component architecture

New post!

blog.murphytrueman.com/p/what-i-sto...

Accessibility For Everyone by Laura Kalbag Read the book online for free.

My book, Accessibility For Everyone, is now free and online as a website.

accessibilityforeveryone.site

The book was first published by A Book Apart in 2017 but it holds up! It covers web accessibility for designers, developers, content folks, and really everyone who works in tech.

I haven’t been able to find my kindle since we moved and it’s INCREDIBLY frustrating.

Drawing explaining and depicting MCP, going into the purpose, host, protocol, and server.

✍️ Just finished another code drawing in my AI series, this one's about MCP in practice. Enjoy!

Your design system has opinions. They're just not being enforced Why validation is the missing layer between documentation and adoption

Your design system has opinions. They’re just not being enforced.

Backend teams don’t scale API quality with docs and good intentions, they scale it with validation.

UI still leans on trust: guidance, reviews, and tribal knowledge.

open.substack.com/pub/murphytr...

Thanks so much @donnavitan.bsky.social! I'm glad you enjoyed it!

You're right, it can happen in a number of different ways. The two you've mentioned above are some of the most challenging to add guardrails against.

In the case of the article, I focused on those more specific examples. But can definitely look at expanding in future!

Thanks for catching that; I've updated that URL now.

And thank you for sharing! I'll bookmark that link and give it a read through over my morning coffee ☕

It’s wild that some people consider using precise punctuation a "red flag" for AI content.

We’ve reached a truly bizarre era of literacy.