To keep the AI from breaking my design, it only writes JSON. I built that out for real, and the JSON turned into code

While mass-producing web tools with an AI, I've changed how I lock the design in three stages. The previous post I wrote about that got this comment:

"I'd like to see the JSON approach and the design-system approach side by side."

Taken at face value, I should just put the two side by side. But first, let me add a short preface. I don't want to frame this as "the JSON approach versus the design-system approach." When I called the JSON approach a "failure" in that post, I didn't mean the method is inferior; I meant it didn't suit my particular set of tools.

A page made with the JSON approach does look thin. But where that thinness comes from is easily misread. Whether the design drifts and whether it looks rich are decided separately. What stops the drift is locking the design; whether it looks rich is how much you build out. What locking with JSON removes is drift in the items you specified in the schema. Whether the screen becomes rich, on the other hand, is determined by how much you've built out the machinery that turns that JSON into a screen. So it isn't that locking with JSON is what made it look like a spreadsheet. In the previous post, too, I wrote that fattening the schema and the renderer does increase the expression itself. But that came with a caveat: past a point, it heads toward rebuilding HTML and CSS by hand.