Every atomic-CSS system eventually hits the same wall: the built-in breakpoints and pseudo-classes are great — until the day you need something they never shipped with. A brand-specific selector. A retina-display query. A tablet breakpoint that doesn't match any of the defaults. Most tools force you to crack open one central config file, edit it, and hope you don't step on a teammate's PR.
traceless-style solves this differently with tl.extend — and the way it solves it is the most interesting part.
What tl.extend actually does
tl.extend registers custom variants. The key detail: both the runtime and the compiler discover them automatically. At build time, a first pass scans every file in the project for tl.extend({ variants: {...} }) calls and merges everything it finds into a single map. A second pass then uses that merged map whenever it transforms a tl.create call.
The practical result: there is no central registry file to maintain. You can define a custom variant in the same component file where you use it, in a shared theme.ts, or scattered across a dozen files — the compiler finds all of them and treats them as one unified vocabulary.
