A design-token pipeline that survives handoff
Design tokens die at handoff more often than anywhere else in the pipeline. Here is the version that keeps them alive.
Every design system I’ve inherited had a beautiful token file the day it was created and a stale one within two sprints. The gap is almost never technical — it’s that nobody owns the sync step, so it quietly stops happening the first time someone is in a hurry.
The fix that has actually held up across a few builds: generate the CSS custom properties straight from the source of truth in CI, fail the build if they drift, and never let a developer hand-edit the generated file. Boring, but boring is the point.
Full pipeline write-up coming soon.
Full-stack developer and WordPress architect writing about headless CMS, Next.js and AI-assisted builds.
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