A foundation the team builds from now, and agents next.

The team had a real component library, but it had drifted out of active use. A lot of what design handed to development was no longer connected to it: tokens were not aligned, the documentation no longer worked as the living source of truth, and what left the design space was only partly systemised. Some of it was true reusable components. The rest was interpreted, rebuilt, or redrawn in code, depending on who was working on it.

That works as long as the right people carry the context. It does not scale to a shared system, and it definitely does not scale to an LLM, which would do exactly what a new person does where the system is unclear: start guessing.

I led the foundation phase as freelance design systems lead, working solo. The brief was the first move: get the foundation back on track. I set the token architecture, paired the components between Figma and React one by one, stood up the living docs site, and built the custom plugin that keeps Figma and the repo on the same tokens.

I also put the rails in place: the repo as the source of truth, Code Connect linking design to code, and automated audits that flag drift instead of letting it hide. Not a big transformation programme, a sequence of small connected moves the team can build on.

Unica builds smart buildings, where nothing works unless everyone can see what connects to what. The same is now true inside a product team. When intent is vague, patterns live in heads, and design drifts from code, you do not get acceleration. You get noise. So it is Unica's own logic, reflected back into how they build product.

Phase 1 made the system explicit. Tokens became named decisions instead of hex scattered across files, so design can change a value, a theme, or a brand decision without a developer ticket. Each component is paired one to one between Figma and React. A living docs site made the system explorable in the browser. And a custom plugin keeps Figma and the repo on the same tokens, with the repo holding the truth.

An LLM does not remove ambiguity. It runs into it faster. Get the foundation reliable first, and then the team builds from it now, and agents can build from it next.

The foundation phase is done. The system is reconnected: design tokens for light and dark, more than forty components with live React docs being paired one by one between Figma and code, a custom Figma-to-repo sync plugin, and automated audits that surface every mismatch instead of hiding it. Around a hundred small ones are logged for cleanup, not buried. The team builds from one source now, instead of memory and interpretation.

A design system needs ongoing care, whatever the team or product size, and that upkeep is not owned by design or development yet. The phases ahead, making the patterns explorable and bringing AI into the team's way of working, are where this is heading. We are in talks to continue, in a more agile way, toward that agent-ready point. The foundation is reliable enough to build the rest on.