A design system
that remembers why.
Most design systems ship components. Ours also ships an institutional memory — a versioned vault of decisions, rules, and patterns that humans and AI agents read before touching a single pixel. Everything on this page is wired to the real vault.
One brain, two renderings
Every decision is written once — then rendered twice. As prose for people. As law for machines. Neither copy drifts, because both are generated from the same moment of agreement.
Prose with a point of view. Wiki-links that let a designer wander from a token question to the decision that created it. Maps of content instead of folder archaeology.
two renderings
Tables, numbered rules, severity flags. Deterministic filenames, a dispatcher, registries an agent can grep. No mood. No ambiguity. No "it depends".
Why a brain exists
Docs that rot get ignored
Stale documentation is worse than none — a new contributor following it re-introduces bugs the team already fixed. The documentation contract makes updating the docs mandatory at visual sign-off: four surfaces move together, or the diff is rejected.
Decisions re-argued every quarter
Without memory, every hard call comes back — same debate, new wave. The append-only decisions log records what was decided, when, by whom, and why. Settled means settled; the log is the receipt.
Months → minutes
A newcomer — human or AI — doesn't read the corpus. The dispatcher tells them exactly which files their task requires, in order, and nothing more. Day one starts with a reading list, not a scavenger hunt.
Load less, know more
loading the full corpus is non-conformant — the dispatcher resolves the MINIMUM file set per task
How a task flows
Two words at the end of any session. Claude diffs everything learned, decided, or built in the conversation against the vault — and edits the right files directly. What the session knew, the system now knows. Forever.
17 sections, one spine
From entry points to machine canon — every document lives in exactly one section. Doc counts below are computed live from the manifest, not typed by hand.
The vault, as a graph
Every document is a node. Every wiki-link is an edge. Drag nodes, scroll to zoom, hover to trace a neighborhood, click to read the actual document.
The whole vault, readable
All 378 documents, organized exactly as the brain organizes them. Markdown is lazy-loaded per section the first time you open a document from it.
The system remembers
Decisions are appended, never rewritten. Rules are numbered, never vibes. A sample of what the log holds:
The registries
Approved escapes
Every exception to the rules is signed and dated. Breaking a rule without an entry here isn't a deviation — it's a defect.
Legacy aliases with removal criteria
Nothing is deleted until a consumer-grep returns zero. Each bridge carries the exact condition of its own death.
Silent-regression patterns
Every way the system has quietly broken before — each one recorded with the grep that catches it next time.
Outcome contracts, signed by the Design Lead
Rules verify how something is built; a page spec verifies what got built. A build that passes every rule but fails a single spec bullet still fails — SPEC-NOT-SIGNED-OFF is a verdict, not a warning.
Nothing ships unverified
Earn your way up
Prototype code isn't held to production law — but it doesn't get to pretend it's production either. Four tiers, explicit promotion triggers, no silent graduation.
Story-local
Lives inside the .stories.tsx file. Inline styles OK. Deletable tomorrow with zero ceremony — velocity is the whole point.
Promotion candidate
JSDoc-marked. Still story-local, but the brain knows it's escalating — a named candidate with a watcher on it.
Molecule / organism
Full 8-file contract: types, vars.css, module.css, TOKEN-DOC, stories with TokenMapping, barrel export. A real citizen with a token surface and docs.
Brain-documented pattern
A named P-entry in the pattern catalog, referenced by page specs. The design system now teaches it to every future build.
The pattern catalog
Deletion is a feature
Anti-velocity
- Premature extraction. Promoting on first use. Wait for the second consumer — most one-offs stay one-offs.
- Dead tokens. A token surface nobody themes is maintenance debt wearing a costume.
- 10-layer prompts. If the build plan needs ten layers, the scope is wrong — not the plan.