Design systems that survive handover

A design system fails the moment someone needs a colour that is not in it and hardcodes a hex value. The fix is coverage plus naming that explains intent.

We define semantic tokens — surface, foreground, accent, border — rather than literal colour names, so themes can change without touching a single component.

Variants live in code with the component, documented by usage examples rather than prose, which means the next team learns the system by reading the codebase.