Design System Office Hours

Are designers working in code, or directing agents that write it for them? Davy and PJ dig into the shifting role of Figma, the skills designers need to guide AI-assisted work, and why changing one color token can turn into an afternoon of CI, docs, and downstream consequences.

We discuss, you guess it, whatever ai-native means in the world of design systems, including that start of a new phase of PJ and Davy's design system spec that originated from this episode!

Davy and PJ debate how automation, visible chaos, and human judgment can help teams move fast without turning the design system into an expensive junk drawer.

Davy returns from Config with a backpack full of new Figma features. Also our annual discussion of were these releases for us?

From the comical wizard prompts of 2024 to the heavy-lifting reality of Figma MCP, Davy and PJ chart the compressed timeline of design system and canvas automation.

Why do we build in public when corporate nature tells us to hoard our work? Davy and PJ break down the unglamorous reality of sharing open-source tools, micro-contributions, and why 90s music is a hill worth dying on.

We hit the Centennial! In our 100th episode, Davy and PJ look back on 4 years of our design systems chatter, before diving deep into the future of design systems: a community-driven, machine-readable schema that moves us past the "Figma-as-Source-of-Truth" era.

Davy talks about trading a week of manual Figma updates for a "code-to-canvas" workflow that gets us "close enough" while PJ talks about running multiple worker-based agents to do production and qa work in tandem. Are these burner tasks?

Davy and PJ dive into the Zeroheight's 2026 Design Systems Survey to figure out why 61% of teams are drowning in work while a third of them still have "no plans" to automate—plus, Davy forces PJ to listen to some truly questionable AI-generated design jokes.

Davy and PJ dive into the future of design tokens , exploring how to "tokenize everything" from complex color transformations (OKLCH) to utility tokens for motion and content strings.

Davy and PJ discuss why the future of design workflow isn't just better handoff—it’s starting with the code itself.

Davy and PJ discuss the "liability" of stale documentation and why AI still needs human oversight. They explore using Figma’s API to automate visual updates and kill the "pain in the butt" of manual maintenance.

Building vs. Inheriting: Davy and PJ discuss the performance cost of design system dependencies. Learn how to choose the right framework without bloating your system or losing control of your architecture.

Davy and PJ celebrate four years of Design System Office Hours by looking ahead at the shifting landscape of 2026. They explore how interoperability, open-source tooling, and AI-driven documentation being major themes to uplevel design system practices.

Davy and PJ tackle the notorious difficulty of naming in design systems, advocating for human-readable, descriptive language over "cute" metaphors and discussing how AI is making file cleanliness more critical than ever.

Davy and PJ discuss a potential trend of major design systems going from public to internal only, stressing that public documentation is the ultimate forcing function for quality and a huge win for the community.

Davy and PJ talk about the term "craft," emphasizing that high-quality design work requires designers to understand engineering constraints and that a good design system needs to provide education, not just components and prototypes.

Davy talks to PJ about his trip to see Figma's slots conference, formerly known as Schema. We talk about the releases and rejoice on a focus on the main editor again.

Davy talks to friend of the program, Ben Callahan from Sparkbox about his series The Question, which brings together design system designers bi-weekly to share and learn collaboratively in a 60-min workshop.

Davy and PJ talk about how amongst many good engineering traits, the rigor, and ways they work should be more adopted by product designers and specially us, maintainers. If we can track, version, and test our work as rigorously as engineers, we would be in a higher quality bar.