The situation
Nobody decides to have four different buttons. It happens gradually: someone needs one in a hurry, copies the nearest one and changes a detail. After a while there are four things called “button,” a blue that isn't the blue, and new screens that take days because decisions already made have to be made again. Same with kitchen drawers or office folders – nobody chooses the mess, it piles up.
What was built
We built a component library published as a package and used by every application in the repository. Color, type and spacing are declared once, and everything else takes them from there. The documentation lives next to the code, so it gets read before a new component is written, not after.
What came out
A new screen is assembled from pieces that already exist and are already accessible. Consistency stops depending on someone remembering. I think that's the part people underestimate most: the order that lasts isn't the kind someone polices, it's the kind built in from the start.
In a small business the same thing tends to happen with the price list: several copies of the same Excel file, each with a different price. That's why we tidy it up during the audit, before the AI reads it, and everything we build is documented and yours.
Master's coursework, done together with Red Rivera, on the public specifications of an OpenAI design system. The code is public. The code is on GitHub (opens in a new tab).