Using LLMs to Dogfood Your Design Tokens or the case for ending component libraries

One good design token can save you from shipping 50mb of javascript slop.

open.substack.com/pub/markacia...

Does this just all work out of the box bc html?

I just one person at my company to tell me about what new css stuff I can use and let me have the joy of ripping out abomination. What job title is that? Keeper of knowledge?

Genetic Diversity Tired of reading AI-generated

cianfrani.dev/posts/geneti... obligatory

Ten
Billion
Percent!!!!

I feel exactly the same way so. Lmk if I lost you at any point and I’ll add more deets. I 1. couldn’t tell if this would be useful to anyone other than myself 2. Assumed there was some other thing I wasn’t using that everyone else was

I’m still waiting for approval to try that extension but ask the dingus if it can execute JavaScript and if it can, it should totally work. I reallllly wish you didn’t need to use the terminal for this. The Claude code UI in the app is real good now tho

Phew I was afraid I glazed over the details a bit. Can’t wait to see what you do with this

A Better Figma MCP or How To Let Claude Design The one where we give Claude access to the Figma API

what if the Figma MCP wasn't actually useless and let you write to your Figma files? (its easy)

cianfrani.dev/posts/a-bett...

MCP UI. UI is largely dead. I haven’t logged into Jira all year. I’m not clicking your 4 page form anymore. Time to invent new maths

Genetic Diversity Tired of reading AI-generated

I am so sick of reading AI-generated content. cianfrani.dev/posts/geneti...

A book icon next to some text that wraps, misaligned

I actually hate CSS.

Claude code asking about semantic intent wrt color usage

Literally, just let designers design and then throw an LLM to pattern match what colors actually get used and smooth any inconsistency.

a man in a suit and tie is waving his hand in the audience . Alt: Seinfeld in a suit and tie is waving his hand in the audience .

I can’t….I’ve actually never seen that before in my life. This tech is so wild.

Big time! Or curating your own pattern language. I also think most big companies prior art is actually a net negative so independent has a crazy advantage here in some respect

I don’t have a good practical answer though. I literally just slap its hand over and over until the codebase reaches critical mass and can give enough prior art that it usually stops doing the thing. If it’s really bad I’ll bake it into a /review command

Does it know that 🤔? Im definitely guilty of not following best practices when prototyping and abuse globalThis. Just kidding, that’s giving Claude too much credit.

how big is the repo/project?

Keep playing with this and you’ll see how 20 good tokens and some well crafted MCP will steamroll all these component libraries everyone built last year. Jk. AI bad.

Tools like CC will now send up an accepts text/markdown header jawn that you can respect and just send markdown down the wire. Other clients like opencode will just say fuck it and convert every webfetch to markdown.

Storybook is embarrassing and their first MCP was actually a joke I think.

Nuxt isn’t React but 10/10

For real. Love the space ghost. I thought it was just gonna be like a zoom call

I’ve never been more sold to. Also holy shit the production on this is 🤌

An AI generated card component with a left border width that’s also rounded.

New global design system just dropped. If I see one more <SlopCard> I’m gonna lose it.

Would love to know the postmortem. Is it still getting used? what’s more popular tokens or components?

Copy the tokens and give it a link to the spec and be like “what’re the parts that are useful for us and then explain to me what any of this shit means”

But I am genuinely grateful for The Spec and very happy to finally breathe.

And. I just read a thing where Atlassian said they were, until v recently, just copy and pasting json into figma and auditing tokens that way? So like none of this shit really matters.

I still think just having a bunch of json files is fine. “Combotoriallaial explosion” isn’t in my vocabulary.

Like you have Brand A and Brand B jawns (modifiers? Idk) but you also want to have a fixed typography jawn and a fluid typography jawn.