Designer reads the brief, studies the live site and decides variants & merges by hand.
H
All human
Draws every variant, binds every token and writes each doc page by hand.
PHASE 2AI — current
H+AI
Mostly human
Claude scrapes the live sites, pulls the spec and measures each breakpoint — designer makes the calls.
AI
Mostly AI
Skills & flows build the variants, tokens, responsive sizing and docs; designer edits & eyeballs.
PHASE 3AI — future
AI
Minimal human
An agent reads the spec, cross-checks live + past decisions and proposes the variant / merge / authoring model.
AI+H
Mostly AI
A design agent builds the component + docs end-to-end; human checks the output.
What are we designing?
100% Human
60% Human
40% AI
10%
90% AI
Actually building it
100% Human
20%
80% AI
10%
90% AI
The learnings
What the shift to designing with AI has taught us on the TA Design System.
01
Decisions move upstream
Design's value is deciding merges, variants and breakpoints before Figma. A wrong merge caught on a spec page is free; caught after a 40-variant set is built, it's a re-cut.
02
Live production is the truth
Measure the DOM for numbers, screenshot for layout. The live site wins any conflict with spec, Figma or code.
03
AI does rigor, humans do judgment
Tokens, variants, migration and docs go to AI. Taste, reading terse client feedback and final sign-off stay with the designer.
04
Verify, don't trust
AI's failure modes are subtle — overflow hidden by a centred layout, opacity vs visibility, doc-template leftovers. Catch them with metadata + screenshots, not assumptions.
05
Write decisions down once
A decision / memory log stops the same merge and grid arguments being re-run on every component.
06
Systematise for change
Tokens plus theme, brand, language and device modes mean one change flows everywhere — the design-system value AI can't decide for you.