Design systems need evals
You've taught agents your design system. You still don't know whether they're following it.
Murphy Trueman
Writing about design, systems, and the organisations that build them.
Latest posts
Your design system's newest author is an agent
Authored change has outpaced the review model, and that breaks more than it looks.
What Figma made visible
And whether the next generation of practitioners will get the same thing.
The parts of your system you never wrote down
Reopening every decision you left implicit, and settling it without you
We know how to build design systems, but we don't know how to operate them
The practices exist. The discipline hasn't caught up
Your design system is fragmenting into agent files
AGENTS.md, SKILL.md, DESIGN.md, and where each one fits
Every component in your design system is a promise
How the promises your system makes became the thing agents read first.
When frequency isn't signal
The rule design systems use to promote patterns stops working the moment AI is generating the instances.
The job nobody assigned
Design system teams are governing AI-generated output – a mandate nobody assigned them. Here's what that work actually involves, and how to make it visible to your organisation.
Design system archaeology
Reading a system you didn't build, and why the first 90 days look nothing like building
Agents are the most honest reviewers your design system will ever have
The most useful feedback your system has ever produced is on a thirty-day timer
What your components look like as data
Why every layer name, variant, and token reference is an architectural decision
The prompt you never wrote
How your design system vocabulary becomes AI context
The design system just became middleware
The gap between what your system says and what it does used to be a minor annoyance. Now it's a structural fault.
In the open: What the modal reveals
Four open-source systems. One component. What the implementation choices actually say.