One good design token can save you from shipping 50mb of javascript slop. open.substack.com/pub/markacia...

Using LLMs to Dogfood Your Design Tokens

or the case for ending component libraries

open.substack.com

I just one person at my company to tell me about what new css stuff I can use and let me have the joy of ripping out abomination. What job title is that? Keeper of knowledge?

what if the Figma MCP wasn't actually useless and let you write to your Figma files? (its easy) cianfrani.dev/posts/a-bett...

A Better Figma MCP or How To Let Claude Design

The one where we give Claude access to the Figma API

cianfrani.dev

I am so sick of reading AI-generated content. cianfrani.dev/posts/geneti...

Genetic Diversity

Tired of reading AI-generated

cianfrani.dev

I actually hate CSS.

Literally, just let designers design and then throw an LLM to pattern match what colors actually get used and smooth any inconsistency.

New global design system just dropped. If I see one more <SlopCard> I’m gonna lose it.

after having The Thing explain to me what “orthogonal” means like I’m six years old, I think I finally get it and the design token resolver spec is kind of cool, tho unnecessarily gate kept by jargon.

AI context is just a black and white mead composition book cianfrani.dev/posts/buildi...

Building an AI Agent with Typescript

The one where I build an AI agent in typescript

cianfrani.dev

Documenting every single permutation of every component always felt redundant. If you have an input component, you can easily guess what the textarea will look like. Future of DS/AI is patterns. No need to waste context.

Who said we shouldn’t put jokes in our code? Or was that the joke

Idk if I were a manager id give everyone like a week to do their own project, prototype something, let em pick the tech, not have to use react, sing the songs they want want to sing and then never talk about it.

Need to make my own component library so I can name it cianfranui

Current status: trying to scale Playwright with LLMs

Controlling Browsers with LLMs

The one where I look at how the playwright MCP works

cianfrani.dev

Playwright just dropped a super useful “ref” option that will add an aria-ref attr. Allows MCP to interact entirely with the aria snapshot instead of the whole DOM/images

Take advantage of the AI hype to sell accessibility. Tools like playwright use chromes accessibility tree as a much leaner way for LLMs to “see” the page. Having 500k divs is about to get real expensive github.com/microsoft/pl...

GitHub - microsoft/playwright-mcp: Playwright MCP server

Playwright MCP server. Contribute to microsoft/playwright-mcp development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

> The flight engineer’s intense focus on systems problems often distracted one or both of the pilots, sometimes resulting in no one “flying the airplane.” Planes used to have a 3rd crew member until automation made them so bored they became a liability to safety.

First-Hand:Evolution of the 2-Person Crew Jet Transport Flight Deck

ethw.org

People are adverse to CSS because the word “cascade” is often not a good thing en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade... see also: disaster

Cascade effect - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

> Ebbatson surveyed commercial pilots, asking them whether “they felt their manual flying ability had been influenced by the experience of operating a highly automated aircraft.” Fully 77 percent reported that “their skills had deteriorated”; just 7 percent felt their skills had improved

An MCP server for your design system, except it intentionally gaslights the LLM to make more API requests ($$$) if it detects the user is using Tailwind

that time when Christopher Alexander + co designed a beautiful building and had it butchered after they passed it off to get drawn cianfrani.dev/cards/source...

> Another common mistake is being seduced by the availability of a rich color palette. The first instinct of a child presented with a big box of crayons is to try them all. www.designmatrix.com/pl/cyberpl/c... Color ramps are an anti pattern.

Users don't fully understand what the design system is (neither do I sometimes). For many, it's a product requirement. That's a bad combo that creates fear and incentivizes a "hand held" expectation which no maintainer/s can live up to.

I've been having a ton of fun building my own personal note taking MCP server. Overkill? Probably cianfrani.dev/posts/implic...

Implicit Prompting Through MCP Tools

You can implicitly run prompts via MCP Tools via required inputs

cianfrani.dev

Love this—gov.uk tried something. Tested it. It had accessibility issues. So they didn’t do it. And it helped inform future iterations. technology.blog.gov.uk/2018/05/21/s...

Sticky elements: functionality and accessibility testing

In GOV.UK's Modelling Services team we looked at the possibility of using sticky functionality as part of our work with step by step navigation elements. Here’s what we found. Sticky or fixed elements...

technology.blog.gov.uk

It’s actually pretty trivial to change 1 thing in 20 different places now and a lot of best practices were built on top of that being a hard thing to do. Idk

the case for read-only radio buttons and why you might need them. I'm writing way outside of my comfort zone and would love to be fact checked by any accessibility experts on this one: cianfrani.dev/posts/where-...

Where are all the read-only radio buttons?

Why aren't read-only radio buttons more common?

cianfrani.dev

Your design system is not a tree. We/I spend too much time trying to put things into boxes. Is this a component? A pattern? A token? Instead, start with the problem. A disabled button, for example, exists in so many different contexts and patterns. blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu/i103su12/fil...

2024 and I still know nothing. Accessibility is by far the hardest topic and I failed (many) an interview because I didn't know aria-disabled vs. disabled. cianfrani.dev/posts/design...

Design System Wisdom 2024

Some additional wisdom I've learned working with design systems

cianfrani.dev

Christmas lights—but they respect the user’s prefers-reduced-motion preference