I open-sourced a UI kit — then went looking for everything I got wrong about it

There's no shortage of React UI kits on npm. Search for one right now, and you'll get hundreds of results, most with the same seven button variants and a Storybook someone abandoned halfway through. So when I open-sourced brightframe — pulled out of a real coworking site I built, LAN — I didn't really want to write the usual "here's our 70 components, look how many there are" post. Component count isn't interesting. Anyone can list props and screenshot a button in five colors.

What actually took time, and what I think is worth writing about, is the part that happens after the README makes a claim. "Tree-shakeable." "Server Components-safe." "Accessible." Those are three words I typed pretty confidently early on, and then, more recently, I sat down and tried to prove myself wrong on each one. This post is what that turned up.

"Tree-shakeable per component" — okay, but how much, actually?

Every component ships as its own entry point:

import "brightframe/tokens.css";