Design Tokens Are a Contract, Not a Palette
Design Systems
Tokens only pay off when design and code cannot disagree. That is a process decision long before it is a tooling one.
Name by role, not by value
A token called green-600 tells you nothing about where it belongs. One called surface-inverted survives a rebrand, because the name describes the job rather than the current answer.
One source, generated outward
Tokens should be authored once and generated into every target, CSS variables, the design tool, native. The moment a value is typed twice, the two copies begin to drift and neither is authoritative.
Cover the states you actually ship
Most token sets describe a calm, light, left-to-right product. Real ones need dark, right-to-left, focus, disabled and error. Whatever the set does not name, somebody will hard-code.
The test is deletion
A design system is working when removing a component from the codebase breaks a build rather than quietly leaving a page looking wrong. If nothing breaks, nothing was really shared.
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