The Design-to-Development Gap
Every product team knows this dance: Design creates beautiful components in Figma. Engineering builds them in React. Then something breaks. The button in production doesn't quite match the button in Figma. Someone updated the design. Someone else updated the code. Nobody updated both. The documentation is definitely not up to date either.
We tell ourselves this is inevitable. Design tools and code are fundamentally different beasts. The best we can hope for is "close enough" and good documentation.
I think we've been solving this backwards.
This is the first in a series about building design systems that actually work. Figma doesn't have to be just pretty pictures for engineers to interpret. It can be a structured system that directly informs code generation. Design and engineering don't have to be two sources of truth struggling to stay in sync. They can be a single system with design tools as one interface and code as another.
