what if the Figma MCP wasn't actually useless and let you write to your Figma files? (its easy) cianfrani.dev/posts/a-bett...

I am so sick of reading AI-generated content. cianfrani.dev/posts/geneti...

I actually hate CSS.

Literally, just let designers design and then throw an LLM to pattern match what colors actually get used and smooth any inconsistency.

New global design system just dropped. If I see one more <SlopCard> I’m gonna lose it.

after having The Thing explain to me what “orthogonal” means like I’m six years old, I think I finally get it and the design token resolver spec is kind of cool, tho unnecessarily gate kept by jargon.

AI context is just a black and white mead composition book cianfrani.dev/posts/buildi...

Documenting every single permutation of every component always felt redundant. If you have an input component, you can easily guess what the textarea will look like. Future of DS/AI is patterns. No need to waste context.

Who said we shouldn’t put jokes in our code? Or was that the joke

Idk if I were a manager id give everyone like a week to do their own project, prototype something, let em pick the tech, not have to use react, sing the songs they want want to sing and then never talk about it.

Need to make my own component library so I can name it cianfranui

Current status: trying to scale Playwright with LLMs

Playwright just dropped a super useful “ref” option that will add an aria-ref attr. Allows MCP to interact entirely with the aria snapshot instead of the whole DOM/images

Take advantage of the AI hype to sell accessibility. Tools like playwright use chromes accessibility tree as a much leaner way for LLMs to “see” the page. Having 500k divs is about to get real expensive github.com/microsoft/pl...

> The flight engineer’s intense focus on systems problems often distracted one or both of the pilots, sometimes resulting in no one “flying the airplane.” Planes used to have a 3rd crew member until automation made them so bored they became a liability to safety.

People are adverse to CSS because the word “cascade” is often not a good thing en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade... see also: disaster

> Ebbatson surveyed commercial pilots, asking them whether “they felt their manual flying ability had been influenced by the experience of operating a highly automated aircraft.” Fully 77 percent reported that “their skills had deteriorated”; just 7 percent felt their skills had improved

An MCP server for your design system, except it intentionally gaslights the LLM to make more API requests ($$$) if it detects the user is using Tailwind

that time when Christopher Alexander + co designed a beautiful building and had it butchered after they passed it off to get drawn cianfrani.dev/cards/source...

> Another common mistake is being seduced by the availability of a rich color palette. The first instinct of a child presented with a big box of crayons is to try them all. www.designmatrix.com/pl/cyberpl/c... Color ramps are an anti pattern.

Users don't fully understand what the design system is (neither do I sometimes). For many, it's a product requirement. That's a bad combo that creates fear and incentivizes a "hand held" expectation which no maintainer/s can live up to.

I've been having a ton of fun building my own personal note taking MCP server. Overkill? Probably cianfrani.dev/posts/implic...

Love this—gov.uk tried something. Tested it. It had accessibility issues. So they didn’t do it. And it helped inform future iterations. technology.blog.gov.uk/2018/05/21/s...

It’s actually pretty trivial to change 1 thing in 20 different places now and a lot of best practices were built on top of that being a hard thing to do. Idk

the case for read-only radio buttons and why you might need them. I'm writing way outside of my comfort zone and would love to be fact checked by any accessibility experts on this one: cianfrani.dev/posts/where-...

Your design system is not a tree. We/I spend too much time trying to put things into boxes. Is this a component? A pattern? A token? Instead, start with the problem. A disabled button, for example, exists in so many different contexts and patterns. blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu/i103su12/fil...

2024 and I still know nothing. Accessibility is by far the hardest topic and I failed (many) an interview because I didn't know aria-disabled vs. disabled. cianfrani.dev/posts/design...

Christmas lights—but they respect the user’s prefers-reduced-motion preference

Cannot wrap my head around why radios cannot be read only? Use case: submit a form, but need to lock resubmissions. Disabled hides it completely

Is there a better way to get metrics on (your) users that aren't using the browser default 16px font size? POV: youre trying to advocate for testing how your UI scales when 1rem isnt 16px. Send window.getComputedStyle(document.body).fontSize to analytics (assuming body is always 1rem)?

Build more tiny little web apps for loved ones.

I hate how genuinely useful this would be.

How to break 99 websites. It's a shame because base 24px font size looks so much better in nearly every scenario that doesn't need excel-level information density.

I was fully expecting this to open some new AI clippy feature and was pleasantly surprised when all it did was change the UI a little.

This is a good component. I love this thing so much. There’s something really satisfying about tiny boxes that do one thing well that scratches some itch in my brain. Knob-Driven Development: make every prop matter.

Thinking about how much of my job would be irrelevant if browser defaults looked even 1% better.

messing with a set of web components to find the nearest token that you can hopefully drop into your docs or storybook. anyone have any w3c spec files they can donate to the cause?

For every issue I open in our design system, there are 10 more I skip because the context switch is too exhausting. I'm less likely if I can fix the problem myself and keep working. Toying around with the idea of using CSS shadow parts as a signal to maintainers, kind of like a Detach Instance

“Come Wander With Me” is the best episode of The Twilight Zone.