Kaelig

What does it take to make a design system useful to AI agents? @kaelig.fr joins me to explore his State of AI and Design Systems project (https://state-of-ai-in-design-systems.netlify.app/) and put our Eddie design system through a live audit.

🛬 landing in sfo for figma #Config26 and excited to hang out with all of you nerds hit me up for @designtokens.org stickers

Our May meetup is coming up tomorrow night! Swing by Just The Tap to learn about: - Design tokens for scaling styling systems, from design tokens W3C CG co-chair @kaelig.fr - Surviving the AIpocalypse as a dev, from Jordan Bain We'll also be raffling a @cascadiajs.com ticket! 🎟️ RSVP 👇

Gathering some interesting data for this episode with @kaelig.fr! One of the questions: "As AI agents and automation tools produce more content, design, and code at scale, what are your biggest #designsystem concerns?" Answer today to join us tomorrow at Noon E → bit.ly/answerTheQue...

Design system friends: answer The Question (takes 2 min)! Your responses will help shape the episode's discussions. Thank you 🙏

And just yesterday @kaelig.fr joined the show to speak about his process behind engineering a high-quality component without writing a single line of code. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lror...

a week ago, i wrote about how taste & judgement fit in design system agentic workflows since then, top design system and ui infra teams reached out 🤯 we’re exploring roles mixing AI + craft + scale + design + engineering 🚀 dm me if you're building something similar! www.kaelig.fr/design-syste...

I didn't want to share this yet because it's still so rough, but given new specs are starting to show up, I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring: designsystemdocspec.org I'm working on a standard schema for design system documentation. I've been using it for my own work. It doesn't suck.

I built an agentic pipeline that takes a Figma file and hands back a production-ready React component in a couple of hours. Output is design-system-team-grade. In a few spots I think the pipeline made better calls than I would have! www.kaelig.fr/design-syste...

Now that the @designtokens.org format specification has reached its first, *stable* version, I decided to have a look back at my own journey of getting involved in the DTCG and contributing to that spec... cirrus.twiddles.com/blog/2025/10... #DesignTokens #DesignSystems #standards

A few years ago I designed the original logo for @designtokens.org. Recently they asked me to refresh it: simpler, more versatile, and blue (the original color of links). The new logo builds on the old one, keeping the connected core while refining it for any size or use.

Happening today with @bradfrost.com, @samiamdesigns.bsky.social, and @kaelig.fr. #designtokens infa.ai/events/desig...

Storybook 9 is here! ▶️ Interaction tests ♿ Accessibility tests 👁️ Visual tests 🛡️ Coverage reports 🚥 Test widget 🪶 48% Leaner ✍️ Story generation 🏷️ Tag-based organization 🌐 Story globals 🏗️ Major updates for Svelte, Next.js, React Native, and more! Let’s dive in!

Slack's down and I don't have a job to make the most out of the outage... 😞

Unemployment is keeping me busy! Last week I attended my first @seattlejs.com event and TC39 workshop. This week: @conveyux.bsky.social, starting with Heidi Adkinson's talk about PKM for designers.

Heading to my first @seattlejs.com meetup — can't wait to learn about Java and Scripting. Maybe it'll take off one day?!

Hope everyone’s new year is off to a good start! 🧵 A thread of some recent DTCG news:

I love design systems, but phew, design tokens used to *really* intimidate me. They vary by team and get complex fast! But after two years of working closely with engineers, I now see them as one of the best tools we have for bridging the gap between design & code and bringing teams together. 🎨🧑‍💻

The team at @getdx.bsky.social is looking for a senior/staff design engineer: getdx.com/careers/desi... Do not pass on this opportunity if you're passionate about developer productivity and happiness 👩🏻‍💻

Follow up! Just over a week ago I asked you all what the title #DesignEngineer meant to you, and *a lot* of you responded. I took some time to collate these thoughts, chew on them and provide some resources y'all kindly shared:

📝 New post about design tokens daverupert.com/2024/12/ever...

📣 BIG ANNOUNCEMENT! I'm excited to announce that we're launching a new online course called Subatomic: The Complete Guide To Design Tokens: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOD2... This deep-dive course will teach you all you need to master design tokens. Learn more and preorder here: designtokenscourse.com

Join the discussion on Hacker News: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4244...

NEW POST Design tokens are fundamental design decisions represented as data. Andreas Kutschmann explains how they work and how to organize them to balance scalability, maintainability and developer experience. martinfowler.com/articles/des...

Love this post from @davidhoang.com on “small teams” We had a team of 4 when we took Webflow Apps from 0 to 1. Of course we added a ton of people to help successfully launch but it wouldn’t have ever seen the light of day without the initial small team! www.proofofconcept.pub/p/small-team...

Some fun with the overflow:clip CSS property! @ishadeed.com always has the best “deep dive into a CSS” tutorials. He explores the CSS overflow property, explains the issues with overflow-hidden, and where you can use overflow:clip for nice “out of the box” effects. ishadeed.com/article/over...

You are: - in the Seattle area - working on design systems? - free tomorrow night? Come over, @jina.social and I are hosting a dinner at mine! 🏙️ Kirkland (near Juanita Beach) 🕰️ 6-9pm Spots limited, RSVP at kaelig@deloumeau.fr or on the Design Systems Slack.

I've been using AI to accelerate frontend tasks I'm an expert on, and it's going so well that I've grown over confident in AI's coding capabilities. When I then used AI to solve a problem I'm very unfamiliar with, the code I submitted for review was embarrassingly sloppy 😓 Sorry, reviewers 😕

Over the last few days, we've released a three-part guide on advanced caching for e-commerce sites, building on @astro.build's Storefront template, and adding a @tur.so database. This video shows the end result and introduces how all the pieces fit together. youtu.be/MZsOPzQ7is8?...

Deploying is hard. Fixing failed deploys doesn’t have to be. @taylorbar.net breaks it down:

Lately I’ve been dropping JavaScript files onto ChatGPT and asking her to explain what the file does and how that gets rendered into the UI. Game changer for me.

Cuban jazz in New York City, with a Manhattan... ❤️🎶

Are you team light mode or dark mode?

I love when gorgeous design details serendipitously emerge as we're getting close to shipping! (we've got some exciting updates coming to app.netlify.com soon)

youtu.be/93fCvFkY1Lg

OH This unvirtualized React list is a DOMster fire 🔥

In France we don’t use « rubber duck debugging » but « Sophie the giraffe debugging »

PMs are using v0 (and similar) more and more to prototype entire features. This trend will deeply impact relationships & processes across design, product, and engineering. Fellow designers and engineers: try these tools, push their boundaries, and be the one who shapes how your role evolves.

Did you know? There are more design tokens than atoms in the universe.