Every design system is an exercise in compression. You take contextual reasoning—why this spacing, why this type scale—and flatten it into tokens and components that can ship without the backstory.
the reason that your line height is set to 1.1 is because your application is, or was at one point, very data-intensive and thus you needed to optimize for information density. Because one time someone complained about not being able to see a very important row in a table and that mistake cost so much money that you were hired to redesign the whole system. But that’s a mouthful. You can’t throw that over the wall. An engineer can’t implement that. So we make little boxes with all batteries included.
All of that reasoning gets flattened into line-height: 1.1. The token ships. The reasoning doesn’t. Every design system makes this trade-off: you lose the why to gain portability.
Cianfrani argues we don’t have to accept that trade-off anymore:
LLMs give us the ability to ship our exact train of thought, uncompressed, a little bit lossy but still significantly useful. Full context that is instantly digestable. Instead of shipping
<Boxes>, ship a factory.
Design systems were never the end goal. They were the best compression format we had. Components and tokens became the shipping containers because the full reasoning was too unwieldy to hand off. That constraint is loosening. In spec-driven development, that factory looks like a structured document: design intent expressed in plain language that AI agents build against directly. The spec is the reasoning, uncompressed.
Even if the AI bet doesn’t pay off:
And if this whole AI thing turns out to burst, at least you’ve improved the one skill that some of the best designers I’ve ever worked with had in common—the ability to communicate their design decisions into words.
The compression problem was always worth solving, with or without LLMs.
