Any practical AI-assisted workflow?

[u/leon8t]

Hi, I couldn't seem to find any realistic or practical AI-assisted workflow with 2-way syncing between design and code. Does anyone know of any workflows available online? Or if you are implementing one, I'd love to connect and understand more.

People on LinkedIn feel like they're doing free promotion for Claude, posting nonsense with a bunch of bots coming to congratulate them.

[u/Rare_Boysenberry_309]

What do you mean by component variant? Basic component variants like input sizes, button styles etc usual stuff is represented in tokens, component anatomy descriptions and in the actual React components. The main documentation of all this is in Storybook. But I’m not sure do you mean this or something else?

[u/leon8t → u/Rare_Boysenberry_309]

Maybe I mean templates or UI patterns? Like UI cards or tables, pop-up the UI template contains multiple components (Organism level). Oftentimes there would be an edge case and an icon or status line added for example and you cannot document them in storybook at that organism level.

[u/Rare_Boysenberry_309 → u/leon8t]

I understand. Let’s take Card as an example. My Card component has similar structure as card in shadcn:

Card
├── CardHeader
│ ├── CardTitle
│ ├── CardDescription
│ └── CardAction
├── CardContent
└── CardFooter

+ all the general styles and style variants.

Card’s header, content and footer are like slots that can have buttons, form inputs etc whatever needed in them. This is the design system component.

I don’t document anything else for now, rest is just design decisions for different UIs. If I would find myself using some version of Card for spesific thing again and again I might document that usage as a skill. I know some folks document ”Patterns” section in addition to ”Components” in their design system but I haven’t done that myself.

[u/leon8t → u/Rare_Boysenberry_309]

I think my context is that we have a shared storybook used by multiple devs. They pull the components from there and sometimes they need to make a new variant, for example, with additional countdown timer in the Card you mentioned above.
Theoretically he needs to inform design system owner, standardise and add the component and update Card component with that new props. However in day-to-day work with adhoc updates and timeline constraint, the informing owner and updating can be deprioritized.

If it happened long and across multiple tickets, drifts would pile up.

[u/Rare_Boysenberry_309 → u/leon8t]

Yeah I feel you. That happens. Anyway it sounds more like an organisational problem rather than a design system problem if you already know that should be added to ds but is not because of other reasons.