Good building blocks do not come from a component library maintained in isolation. They come from a designer who saw the whole thing first. I cannot extract a good Star component without having designed a page where the Star had to work, where I saw how it related to the typography around it, how it felt in context, and what it communicated.
> The design system is a distilled finding. Designing the whole page is where the finding happened and hence not redundant.
This is not a small distinction. If we treat the library as the starting point rather than the outcome of a creative process, we end up with something structurally correct and visually indistinct, optimised for assembly. This is what we've lately seen with Tailwind-based designs, and is the reason most vibe-coded interfaces look so generic. Fast to build, consistent, entirely interchangeable. Perfectly fine for shipping quickly, I use Tailwind a lot for exploration. Not fine if you want a visual language that is actually yours. Different things entirely!
https://christinevallaure.substack.com/p/agentic-ai-design-systems-and-figma